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Black & White photography, 1993

Sam Cogley

Sam Cogley

Last of the Time Lords
Subscriber
Here are a few shots I did in a summer photography class 16 years ago. I've always been fond of these, even though they are imperfect.

http://picasaweb.google.com/reedsb/BW#

The rows of triangles is my favorite of the bunch. I need to find the negatives and make a bigger print.
 
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Feel free to pick them apart. :p Besides being stuff that I did in high school, they are also some of my first (and only) work at developing and printing my own photographs - which introduced some of the problems.
 
Do you remember any details about the examples you posted, i.e., film used, developer, paper, contrast grade, etc?

And based what I see on my monitor are the examples indicative of the way you printed them?
 
pioneervato said:
Do you remember any details about the examples you posted, i.e., film used, developer, paper, contrast grade, etc?

And based what I see on my monitor are the examples indicative of the way you printed them?
Click to expand...

I don't remember any details, that was 16 years ago.

The scans (minus the watermarks I inserted) are good representations of the prints.

The two grainy and scratched shots were done that way on purpose - I was aiming for a look similar to a well-worn movie reel.
 
cool shots, only thing i would say is that you need a lot more contrast in them. I did the same thing when i first started printing
 
julian_photo said:
cool shots, only thing i would say is that you need a lot more contrast in them. I did the same thing when i first started printing
Click to expand...

Something I noticed when looking at the prints again is that they have more contrast than the scans. I'm not sure what happened, but I'll try scanning them again.
 
If your scans are indicative of what I see on my monitor I would then say that the first and last image suffered from what appears to be underexposure (film) as there appears to be a lack of shadow detail and image contrast. Curious, were all the images made with the same film camera?

Photos 2-5 are a bit busy. Try isolating your subject(s) more so that whatever it is you are photographing stands out more and grabs the viewer's attention. Photo 5 could be improved with some selective cropping. What you exclude is just as important as what you include in your photographs.

Photo #6 is a nice abstract that would really pop out with some more contrast.

I think with some simple modifications you have the makings of some good photographs. If you have the original negatives and a film scanner it would be interesting to see how your images would look after some minor changes.

Thanks for sharing your images, Sam. Now dust off your old film camera and go capture some more light.
 
Same camera, same roll of film. It was a Pentax P3 that has died in the intervening years. I have my dad's AE-1 as a replacement, he went fully digital a while back, and the AE-1 has more lenses with it than the old Pentax.

2 and 3 were just me playing around with light and shadow, trying for some abstract patterns. 4 and 5 were simply weird-looking trees that I liked. They could easily be cropped down to focus more on the tree in question - same goes for the light patterns in 2 and 3.

6 was a serious exposure mistake, I don't remember how it happened. Then I scratched the negative when developing it. The final effect reminded me of a beat-up print of 20s low-budget silent movie.

1 (and to a degree, 6) are confusing - the prints have more contrast. My scanner usually does a better job than that.

The negatives exist, I just have to figure out where they are. There are quite a few more images on the negatives, these were the only ones that I printed for an exhibition for the class.

Side note - the theatre in 1 still exists, and after 16 years of slow restoration work was re-opened for movies and plays in 2006: http://www.gillioz.org/home.html
 
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