Tuesday 21st March 2023
Mentor/Mentee
Before the afternoon session there was a meeting in room MK045 to discuss with a few people a new mentoring scheme for social media accounts. It’s where you can go to offer to become a mentor for other students who wish to use social media in a more professional manner, or become a mentee that picks up a mentor and learns as they go.
They will pay us in Amazon vouchers apparently, I didn’t know this going into it but it’s a bit of a bonus, might buy me some films or chemistry..
Photoshop Mastery
The afternoon saw a photoshop tutorial for the Product photography assignment with Sam. He gave us an image he’d created in the product studio a day or two before and ran us through the process of making it look a bit better.
We did a little about making a perfume bottle symmetrical and then used paths to create areas of the photo that could be selected. From these paths we created the selections that let us adjust colours and tones of different areas of the bottle.
Friday 24th March
This week we were scheduled to have a progress Progress Review but Alice is off so it will be moved to week 10. I could use the time instead to do some prints.
I arrived earlier than usual and sat in the foyer enjoying the warmth of the sun, before it was time to go and pick up the kit I was taking out of the media stores for the morning.
The 120 and 35mm Contact Printers, a focus finder and a medium format kit for the colour enlarger was given to me by Dan and I set off to the Colour Darkrooms to create a contact sheet for a 120 film and the other 35mm colour films that I’d used.
In the darkroom I got on with what I needed to and the only hiccup was when three full 10×8 prints got stuck in the Colenta machine. These were fished out and washed before being dried and taken home later. I quite enjoy the marks around the edges of the prints and the strange shadowy nature of the subjects in the prints.
The other prints I got out after the contact sheets were ok and came out of the 35mm Cinestill 800T film I’d shot in Leeds City Centre in February.
Riso Time
Time was up and at 13:45 hours precisely I took the kit back to the media stores so I could head up to the Print Support Hub with Jim and work on getting some RISO prints done of my Leeds Uni campus shots.
I’d sent the link to Jim and shared the folder in the OneDrive but he thought that they looked a bit murky on my little mock up. He thought it best to alter the duotone slightly to allow for more contrast between what would be printed in gold and also in black. Jim has been doing this long enough that he is an expert so I followed his guidance and after he tweaked the Duotones a bit it did look better.
He set about printing them on A3 in the different colours and by the time they were done it was the end of the hour session so I stashed them in my folder, thanked Jim for his help and then set off to the car.
Whilst it wasn’t a massively productive afternoon, in that the Riso prints weren’t created, it didn’t matter. I would rather them come out of the Riso looking good (or OK) compared to them just coming out all messed up because of my poor duotone choices. I’ve booked next Tuesday afternoon to work with Jim for an hour to get the prints done.
I know a bit more now how to make the Riso’s look more suitable, the images need some white in them, if it’s all black or grey on both the colours chosen it will appear murky, but the bit of paper that isn’t painted should help balance it out a little. We’ll see on Tuesday!!
Comments are closed.