Friday, February 24, 2006

Dark Room

Now I shall take a very short break from my tellings of the mission trip to tell you all about my scarring experience today in the 'Dark Room'. I am taking a class called "Introduction to Graphics Communications". This class covers the use of Photoshop, Pagemaker...probably a few other computer programs we havent used yet, and Photography. Right now we are in the Photography unit, I was excited because this was one of the main things that drew me to this class. We spent a few days going out in groups of two and taking pictures.

Now we are at the point of the photography process that we are starting the development. Sarah Laurash is working as my partner. Today we worked in the Dark Room putting our film in a canister so that we can put processing liquids in it. So Sarah and I practiced how to put the film in the canister correctly, which is a difficult process in the light, let alone in the dark, or with our eyes closed like we practiced. When we got into the room we set out the parts of the canister and prepared to see nothing.

Now for this story to be effective I should explain what the Dark Room looks like, You walk in through the door and are in a tiny 'room' there is a bunch of random stuff that Sarah and I ignored as we turned left and went through a doorway, which has no actual door on it, but we didnt realize this until afterwards. Then you are in this slightly bigger room where you actually work.

When the lights were turned off and the door was shut we started to work, Sarah spoke aloud every process as she did it, which was very funny so we were sort of laughing at that, and there was a glow-in-the-dark clock that caught our attention. After a few minutes of being in complete darkness I started seeing little specks of light. now of course none of this light was really there, because this was the Dark Room, so it was very weird seeing it.

When we finished putting the film in the canister we put on the lid and then we had to leave. The only problem with this was that after being in the Dark Room for about five minutes, we had lost all of our sense of where we were adn how to get out, we stumbled around the room bumping into things screaming and then laughing, The people waiting outside the room must have thought we were crazy because we kept on screaming so much. After abou 1-2 minutes of searching Sarah found the doorknob and we exited the room, and went to give Mr. O the canister, we were followed with the confused looks of everyone that heard us screaming. We told them that we got lost in the Dark Room and the looks they were giving us became stranger. LOL, so yes, that is my Dark Room story



Luv ya all!

4 comments:

Lexi Elizabeth said...

sounds fun. i've never been in a dark room.

Anonymous said...

Forgive me... but every dark room I've been in so far (2) has red spectrum lighting that you can turn on and pretty well see everything... while this isn't the best light to work in, you can definately see the doorknobs... (and red is in the part of the light spectrum that doesn't damage film)...

Did you try to find a "light switch"?

:-D

Tim Parenti said...

Yeah, really. Most darkrooms aren't 100% dark.

Laurel said...

At this stage of development, we were not allowed to have a red light on. So it really was 100% dark...Well maybe 99% if u count the glow-in-the-dark clock..but since that didn't help anything at all I don't count that! lol
Luv ya all!