Scanner as Camera

"The Negative" reading response

I thought they had just forgotten to quote De la Roche and the author got all prose-y on me. Also I’m still not totally thrilled he (or is it a she? I don’t actually know) is writing in the first person, but I will live, I suppose. It feels too chummy, and I don’t want to be friends with my textbook. It just feels odd.

Hey it’s Boyle! That guy’s important in (non-art related) science!

It makes me sad that none of the prints from Davy are still around. Also shouldn't the textbook know definitively whether or not they exist, or at the very least if it is unknown?

Poor Talbot, doing all the work and getting way less credit than he deserves. It’s pretty crazy how he came up with that process though.

Wait so is guncotton explosive? I mean I imagine it is but the author never explicitly states that, he just says it’s “ironic” how guncotton is used to treat explosives.

Wow Archer had it even worse off than Talbot, he’s like the Tesla of photography (in that he ended up poor and in hardship).

Adding contrast to a darkroom photo is a good thing to know. I kind of knew how to do it before, but I never really was sure of exactly why it worked.

I think I can develop my own prints, so that info is (mostly) irrelevant. And always do high resolution when scanning. You can always dumb down the image, but you can’t ever raise the quality.

Hey Cliché-verre is what we’re doing in class!

This gets super technical towards the end, that was a rough read.

"Paper" reading response

It is immensely frustrating to me that the author of this book is writing in the first person and I have no idea why.

There is way more history of paper than I thought there would be, but it’s pretty interesting so I’m ok with it. It kind of surprises me how important paper was to people back then when it’s so ubiquitous and under appreciated now.

There are a lot of words and phrases in here that have little meaning to me other than I know they are specific technique in alternate printing. Hopefully we go over some of these in class. I also have a feeling it will make a lot more sense once I start getting my hands dirty (hopefully not literally) and using some of these techniques.

I know what Jell-O is! Even if we aren't supposed to use it, I know what it is!

I think I’m now more confused after reading about sizing than I was when I started this. I need to be shown what this person is trying to tell me, because I’m not getting a clear visualization of the process form what this author is saying.

Wow I think everything we will be using is deadly in some way. Every stage of this process is prefixed with “and this toxic, deadly death chemical will kill you dead.”

So now he explains what some of the terms actually are, like Formalin. Also I totally know what formaldehyde is and I have no idea how I so butchered the pronunciation in my head that I couldn't even recognize it.

Are we going to be doing this part of the process, with the dual respirators and needing to be outside with Formalin? It doesn't seem like we are (mainly due to the lack of dual respirators) but if we are I just want to go on the record as saying this is a little crazy.

“Think about it, what type of cookie is the first one an infant gets to gnaw on with its gums? That’s right -- arrowroot cookies.” …What? *edit: Just looked up what arrowroot cookies are. I did not know that they made a specific brand of cookie for babies and that these cookies would be in any way related to photography. The more you know.

Homework #1 Part B

1.

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

6. 

7. 

8. 

9. 

10. 

11. 

Homework #1, Part A

This is a photo depicting my Halloween costume from last year. As a child growing up, with basically every member of my family being a photographer, there were way more moments that I wish weren't photographed than I wish were. In this instance, however, I put a lot of effort into this costume, and I never got a picture with it. I later lost part of the costume so I can never actually get a full photo of it.