My Harshest Critic (Me)

Dad in San Pedro, in front of the
Korean Friendship Bell - Christmas, 2010

It has come to my attention that I am a bit rusty with taking pictures. The fact that it took over a month to finish the roll I started in North Carolina (early November 2010) and ended with Dad's vacation in LA proves that. But I still printed two pictures because I as on vacation and I didn't know when I would be able to again. Since some people are wondering how I actually take my pictures, this will give me a change to show you what I do and some of the mistakes I made this time around.

The first picture, above, is of Dad in San Pedro. He is standing in front of the Korean Friendship Bell. The picture was taken on Ilford Delta 100 speed film. Film speed is one of the factors that determines how much light you need. 100 is a slow-speed film. This means that it will take plenty of light, but the picture will be very sharp and crisp. Likewise, a fast film will need much less light, but will be more grainy. I prefer to shoot with slow film.

With plenty of light from the sun, I was able to use a small aperture. In other words, the hole of the lens was very small (the pinhole effect). This allows me to keep subjects that are close and far all in focus. As you can see, the exposure is very good. My two big mistakes where the easiest to avoid. First, I did not clean the lens. This caused there to be a lot of small white dots when I eventually printed the picture. This really ruins many of my pictures, and I must get better at it.

The second mistake I made was not using a flash. As you can see from the picture, the sun was on my left, illuminating Dad's camera-left side. The other side is dark, naturally. Had I used a flash, it would have lit the other side of his face and would have revealed all of Dad's facial features. Amateur mistake.

Portrait of Nimuae Carmona
November 2010 - Black Mountain, NC

The picture above is of my niece Nimuae. She was the only one of the kids willing to have her picture taken by me. This turned out to be a wonderful portrait. Same film stock as before, but I used a long lens instead. This blurs out the background and draws more attention to the subject. Once again, I didn't keep the lens clean, so I had tons of spots. The other problems were more difficult to solve.

When I made the actual print in my darkroom, I did get good exposure and contrast on Nim's face by using a filter (this adds more contrast). However, despite printing the paper for almost a minute, and putting another forty seconds of light on the background (this is called burning), I could not get the background to the right of Nim's face to show up. I could have made another print, but I had already made a few bad ones and I was too aggravated.

I used spot toning to get rid of some of the biggest white spots. This is a really annoying process; it involves using a tiny paint brush and black ink to fill them in one at a time. These pictures had hundreds of them, so I was only willing to do it on the worst of them. I'm really not very good at it, but I did a much better job on the picture of Nim.

Now that it is scanned, I will use Adobe PhotoShop to fix everything. Soon it will be perfect, and next time I will do better.