Summer School

I'm a full-time faculty member at a community college. One of the perks of that job is that I can take classes at the college tuition-free. I have taken so many classes at my college that I actually earned an associate's degree in general studies last year!

This past year, the college hired a new photography faculty member, Hannah Price, who has a passion for film photography, and she is trying to revitalize the film photography course offerings which have dwindled over the years. To that end, ARTD160, Fundamentals of Black and White Photography, is being offered this summer, and she invited me to register for the course, so I did. It is six weeks long, and it is intense! The class is held for six hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the days on a campus that is an hour's drive away from my home through brutal rush-hour traffic. But it's totally worth it!

Taking the course means having access to a working photography professional (Prof. Price has her own business in addition to her teaching) and having access to a real, working darkroom, not just my "guerilla darkroom" under the stairs (more about that in another post).

The course has us developing our own film, creating contact sheets, and making prints in the darkroom. The instructor has us shooting entirely in manual mode so that we learn how our cameras work and better understand the basic principle of the exposure triangle. Of course, I'm using my trusty Yashica FX-7 35mm SLR for the class, and it is entirely mechanical other than its battery-powered light meter. Keeping it simple!

I'm taking the extra step of scanning my film to digital so I can share some of my work online and make inkjet prints of some of it as well. Here are a few images from the first week of class.

Daylilies

Rock retaining wall

Peace pole