Seeing The World Through A Lens PART 3

This time there’s no series of photos like on my earlier posts, but one particular photo which I love even it’s not perfect one. I was looking through my vitrines drawers and found a bunch of old drafts of one certain photo as well as negatives of the photos I had took.

These are the negatives and the negatives printed on paper:

As you can see, many of them are either overexposed or underexposed – I didn’t know how to photograph at all back then...

However, I managed to find one good photo out of them which I have printed on a glossy photographic paper. First off I made a test strip to determine how long to expose the photo to the light.
I tested the exposure time by making a sheet of paper and exposing it to light for different times with each test and the negative focused on it.

Then I printed the final photograph on a glossy photographic paper.

I do know the photograph is underexposed but somehow I love it so much. Maybe it was because – if I remember correctly – it was the first time I was given a proper camera with film inside of it and I got inside a darkroom developing photographs for the first time. Or if not for the very first time but at least after it. And I remember walking around the roads and places trying to find something beautiful to photograph and to make the limited film count. I just didn’t understand the shutter speeds, exposure times and everything related to photographing at the time – I had used digital cameras so far where you can see the photos right after taking them and deleting them making the memory card feel limitless. I was at art school back then and they taught us those cameras and they gave us “old” cameras with film inside of them and I was just way too excited about being able to take photos of anything I wanted that I didn’t realized to observe the light exposure indicator to see whether my photos were overexposed or underexposed for there were no screen on the camera to see the final photos.

To be honest, I miss photographing with the cameras such as I used back then – you put a film inside and just go photographing without seeing the final photographs. When you have to know what to do. And then go into a darkroom with your negatives and develop the photos all by yourself in the chemicals and not just put an USB wire to your digital camera and download all the photos to the computer – I’m looking for the instructions to develop photos in a darkroom right at this moment... I just need a camera and a darkroom!