The Big Print

It was time for me to do the exhibition quality print, I was confident that the photo I had chosen was going to work well for this.

This was what I had produced. As you can see it's a pretty horrific print to say the least. I had gotten a bit exited about finally getting to print and while I had done countless amounts of test strips it was only on the lower end of the print.

By doing this the entire top half of the print looks overexposed when it really shouldn't by looking at the negative. I was to hard to get a contrast on the print by just shoving a 4 filter in rather than checking what the overall print needed. If it even needed one.



As well as the bad filtering there was also so many dust spots on the negative, but agin this could be resolved. And finally I don't even know what the borders were doing! I checked what the settings were on and they were all the same so they could be that wonky unless I had moved the paper and that obviously didn't happen . . . . .

So by trying to fix all these problems I took the filter out, checked the borders and got a blower to get rid of the dust. As I was determined to make this the best print I had ever done so was really trying to get every bit of dust off. By doing so I slipped and scratched the negative from one side to the other with with the blower. I was not happy.

This made it that I didn't have a negative to use for my final print, unless I was to use one that I had already used for one of he smaller prints. I thought that this was not an option as the majority of the class was handing in 4 different images and there was no reason that I couldn't I just had to taken one more photo. Photo 21. From all the stress and nose bleeds the project had caused so far I found it really hard to get my mind into gear of going back out with the camera. But I finally convinced myself it's just one photo it wont take long at all. And if I got a tutor to help me focus then it will be okay.

I got my subjects to together, found the spot the I was going to focus on and asked a tutor to see if I was focusing right and I got the thumbs up. I then wen't and developed the film but before I got the developer changed for some fresh stuff so I could reduce to chance of messing it up. I developed the film for 8 minutes at 20 degrees. It had developed well until I had a closer look, the people were out of focus. I had, had enough.  

These are just a couple of test strips that I had done for this attempted print. The lightest one was using a number 4 filter straight away. The Darker one on the left was better and this was the one I had done just before I had scratched the negative. For this one I had done about 15 seconds two stops from the lowest with no filter and then put a number 5 in and turned the brightness of the bulb two stops down from the brightest.