Film: Repetition & Grouping

The subject of my final image is a spider plant on my kitchen table. It is next to a window where the sun reflects off of the snow. To take all of the pictures I used my Pentax K1000 film camera. Then I processed the film using the chemicals in the dark room, developer, stop and fix, I took my developed film and cut it up into strips of five pictures and sleeved it. I took the sleeved negatives and made a segmented test strip for my contact print. To do this I used the enlarger, paper and print chemicals in the dark room. Once I had the right amount of time I made a full sheet contact print and picked a picture to enlarge. To make the final print I went through the same process and used the same chemicals as I did for my contact print. I chose the picture of the spider plant because I like the lighting in it and there is a range of value. You can see the leaves texture and they have defined edges which gives them shape.

I took this roll of film for repetition and grouping so the leaves of the spider plant represent repetition and grouping. They are also a great example of leading lines because they point in a direction. The leaves only take up part of the frame so rule of thirds is shown. In the background there are out of focus christmas lights and the leaves in the foreground are very crisp this is selective focus. To get to my final print I made two different segmented test strips, one in segments of five seconds and the other in segments of eight seconds, I then looked at the two and chose twenty seconds from the five strip and twenty-four from the eight strip and averaged out to twenty-five seconds. I made a test strip for twenty-five and it came out perfectly.

Every morning I eat breakfast next to this spider plant and it is cool looking because the leaves go out in all directions. This particular morning there was a lot of sun coming in the window and I wanted to capture the unique lighting. The pictures in my contact print relate to my life because I took them with my camera of events in my life and then I processed the film and made the contact print and final print. I really like how the final picture came out, the borders are neat and balanced. The bottom right hand corner is very light and if I were to print this picture again I would try to make it less bleached, unless it's part of the picture. To do this I would make a test strip of that area and maybe use ghosting to expose that corner more.