Total Hours: 8.5
Perpich, Rebecca Bullen, 5 hours
Today, Rebecca and I started by demonstrating contact printing to the Darkroom class. All of the students had a roll of film shot, and Rebecca and I showed them how to cut the negatives, put them in holders, and make a contact sheet.
I set up the darkroom chemicals and we got started. We showed students how to do a test strip to get the exposure right on the contact sheet print. We did this by cutting a small piece of gelatin silver black and white paper into a thin strip, and using a notebook to block the light, we made a gradient of exposure times using the enlarger timer.
After we determined our exposure, which was around 10 seconds at f/11, the students made their contact sheets and put them through the developer, stop, and fixer. The best part was taking them out of the darkroom to see how the prints really looked, because they always look a bit different in the dark, so seeing them in the light is really special.
Everybody made a successful contact sheet by the end of class. I broke down the darkroom, and Rebecca and I moved on to the afternoon filmmaking class.
In narrative class, we watched Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson. It’s a wonderful movie and I particularly enjoyed seeing it again. Rebecca had arranged for a screenwriter to come in this whole week and workshop the screenwriting process. So, when we watched the movie, we were watching with a particularly critical eye.
The goal was to see how Wes Anderson followed traditional script structure. He stopped the movie in different sections to point out what act the movie was in, where it transitioned from act I to II, and the significance of the midpoint scene and climax, and where they fit in a script.
He did a wonderful job talking about screenwriting, and it reminded me a lot of the filmmaking classes I’ve taken at MCAD. I’m excited to see what the students will come up with for their scripts, as they are such talented artists!
Paul Sinkler, MCTC, 3.5 Hours
Today in class we reviewed the images that we shot as a class last week. Paul pulled them up on the projector and we got to compare the files from the Phase One medium format digital camera, a Nikon D810, and a Canon 5D Mark IV. The Phase One, the $15,000 camera, performed only a little better than the other two much cheaper options.
We had a little hiccup with this exercise in class though—since the Canon 5D Mark IV camera is so new, some of the versions of Adobe Photoshop on the lab computers hadn’t been updated, so they couldn’t process the RAW files from the Canon. We had to abandon the assignment entirely until next week so the computers can be updated.
Instead, we started the next assignment early. Paul gave a Powerpoint on different kinds of Raw file processors. We mainly compared two programs: Adobe Camera Raw through Photoshop and Lightroom, and another program called Capture One. I had personally never used Capture One, but it is Adobe’s biggest competitor for image editing software in the Photo industry.
While Paul gave the walkthroughs of the programs, I walked around and was giving help to students. Since I know Lightroom and Photoshop very well, I was able to give pretty good explanations on how things work. I work a lot with these programs for my practice, so I have memorized a lot of where things are when using the application. Even though I had never used Capture One, I was able to use my knowledge of similar programs to help the students with the interface of the program.
We went over techniques like: making a catalog in Lightroom, default Raw file image processing, sharpening, and lens profile corrections.
After that, we compared the differences between the two programs, and how they processed the photographs differently. It was a fun day and I really enjoyed talking to the students and getting to know them more.