Darkroom!

One of my favourite rooms in my high school is the darkroom. It's old equipment, chemicals, and enlargers. It's dealing with emulsion, light, paper, and negatives. The first photo I started working on was a shot of a Converse All Star, one of my favorite.
My first test strip was over exposed by far. (The blue numbers indicate seconds of exposure) The second one turned out not too bad. I decided that half-second increments were the way to go and it turned out that one second to one and a half-seconds had just what I wanted: a good contrast between light and dark.

My school is supplied with (as Mrs. H puts it) "middle-of-the-road-average-all-around-paper" which gives a lot of midtones and not much else (low contrast between light and dark). So with a little photoshop I got the final product to look a little nicer.

My second photo, as you can see, I started by one second increments and moved down to half-second increments and finally settled on a 1.5 second exposure.

Here's what I brought out of the darkroom today.

Here is my final product.

Silkscreening!

This week is silkscreening!
It's pretty fun and it goes a little like this:

We start with our designs

and burn them onto a screen. using this:

and then it looks like this!

The final product!

I had issues with the black text. Turns out, I was using too much ink and too much pressure. After a few hundred tries I gained enough confidence to try it on my shirt. It looks great!