I’m a sophomore Film, Photo and Visual Arts student at Ithaca College. As a freshman, I took and Introduction to Photography class which required a DSLR camera and photo paper. This class is required for all film students, but with my specific major, I have to take more than one photo class.
I loved Intro to Photo because I had a great professor who taught me more about photoshop and editing than I had known before. However, now I’m in Intermediate Photography and it’s a lot more difficult. It can be grueling and draining because of the steps it takes just to produce an image. It’s also horribly frustrating because you don’t know how the photo looks until after you develop it. The issue with this is that: 1) you may not have captured anything in the photo and you won’t know it; 2) the image could be either underexposed or overexposed, therefore may not be visible; and 3) something could go wrong in the development process in which you ruin a good image.
Even though this whole process can be annoying at times, it’s also very rewarding. It gives an appreciation for the history of photography and how great photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston used to take photos before the ease of digital photography. An appreciation is gained for the hard work and effort that used to go into making such beautiful images. And if these photographers messed up their images, they would have to go through the whole process over again.
The images produced are also much more raw. It’s not as easy to touch up and image on film unless it’s in color, but classic black and white film photos are more vulnerable and personal in a way. There’s also a huge accomplishment in the fact that if you do everything perfectly and don’t mess up an image, then the hard work was all completely worth it.
Lastly, it’s cool! It’s amazing that after your done taking photos, you rewind the film, take it out of the back of the camera and then load it onto a reel (which actually really difficult at first). Then you basically go through an hour long process of mixing chemicals, such as developer and fixer, with the roll of film to make the images appear. The aspect of printing the photos is also fascinating. You put a negative under an enlarger, which shows the negative much bigger so you can see it better and how you want to print it. Then you set a timer for a certain amount of time to shine the photo onto a piece of paper and when you place the paper in the developer, a photo appears. So although it’s a difficult process, it’s definitely worth it to understand how it works.
