Have you ever felt like everything you know was turned upside down?
That’s how I felt the first time I set foot in a dark room to print a photo. Growing up in the digital age, I had no experience printing or developing film — but all of that changed in my spring 2014 school semester.
I took a film photography class at Phoenix College and learned about shooting in black and white, developing each roll of film and making prints all by myself. In the class I’m taking this semester, I returned to the negatives I shot while living in ASU’s Taylor Place dormitories last year. I accidentally double-exposed a piece of RC paper, and it inspired me to make a print just like this image.
With the negative in the enlarger and a sheet of RC paper in an 8×10 holder, I exposed the first horizon for about 15 seconds. After the light turned off on the enlarger, I carefully removed the paper and turned it around, turning the enlarger on for another 15 seconds to print the second horizon. Both exposures had contrast set at about 2.5 to increase the blacks in the print.
But that was some time ago. This image was created in Photoshop. I scanned my negative, cleaned it up a little bit, then created a two-layer file with the top layer at 50 percent opacity. I flattened the image, increased the blacks, and voilá — a relatively perfect reflection of my original darkroom print.
Contact the columnist at Courtney.Pedroza@asu.edu. Contact the photographer at alacasse@asu.edu.
