Lighting (part I) P1/Q1: Diary Entry

First we shot some images of two fellow students in soft light, then another in hard light, without knowing too much about what we were doing. This turned out will though, because we learned by experience, and through using the equipment what to do, and what not to do. My contact sheet turned out with a little bit of both, so I was able to see the effect of both kinds of lighting.

I got on well with the hard lighting prints for portraits and still life. Using the new type of paper, I determined that lowering the exposure time and keeping the print in the developer for a longer time helps to make the black bits a richer black, though not at the expense of clouding the white parts. This helped for both of these images. I was excited for the print of my mom's jewelery desk thing. I thought that it would turn out pretty cool, because the sun was shining quite horizontally in through the window onto the glass jars and things on the desk, which created neat shadows and highlights in person. I am pleased with how the final turned out. Gnarly.

For the soft lighting portrait, I chose one that appeared to be soft lighting on the contact sheet, but turned out to be hard lighting. I only discovered this once I ended up with a harsh, hardly lit final print. The supposed change from sort to hard light was due to the fact that the contact sheet was too cloudy, so it looked like soft light, yet when the negative was printed properly, it turned out to be hard light. I did learn a bit about how what to look for in dark skin. Only when I developed the subject with dark skin properly did I see the light reflecting off of the cheekbones and forehead and casting shadows across the face. Then I noticed that it was hard lighting, and that the light on Alex only seemed to be soft light because he was slightly out of focus. So at this point, I had an extra hard light portrait...

And then all the images that I shot for landscape (hard and soft light) and for still life (soft) got lost because my camera went crazy on my and cut the negatives straight down the middle when it was rewinding. I hope that I can remember some of those shots, since I wanted to see how those turned out too. But this was quite annoying.

That's all up until this point, I will reshoot and see what comes of it.