Black & White Wednesday: The Finale

The black and white photo lab I've been doing wrapped up last week. I didn't shoot as many rolls of film as I would have liked to, but that about seems par for the course. I've never been much of a film shooter before, let alone developing my own film and making prints, so this was all new to me. My cameras of choice were the Diana (modeled after the 1960s classic medium-format plastic cameras), and some old cameras picked up at thrift stores and flea markets. They're pretty much basic point-and-shoots with minimal (if any) exposure and aperture settings, and result in soft lo-fi images with light leaks and edge vignetting.

Troy, who headed up the lab, worked with a guy who’s parents own a local wine shop. They offered up the wall in their shop to host our very own exhibit. So, we've spent these last few weeks making prints that we could hang at the show. I didn’t really have a lot of images to choose from, and ended up choosing some images from a roll that I shot out in the yard.

I didn't realize I had the number of exposures set for “16” rather than “12”, and I ended up with this funky overlapping on all of my images.

Troy convinced me that this was a feature, not a defect, and making it work to my advantage, I printed two images as diptychs showing the overlap.

My other print was just a normal cropped image.

Saturday night was our “Opening Reception” (photo courtesy of Troy Freund). The shop normally has a wine-tasting on the second Saturday of each month, so we already had a gathering for the show. Each of us were asked to give a little talk about out images, which I wasn't exactly thrilled about doing, but Denis said I did alright. We have an interesting assortment of subjects including a Civil War reenactment, nature shots, rainy night-time shots, barns, and Dia de los Muertos.

I think we’re all pleased with the the work that we have on display, and they’ll be there for at least the next month. Pretty good for a finale.