Waiting

I apologize for the scanning quality. :( The spots shouldn't be there!

This is one of the last prints I created in my senior year of high school. It is also one of my favorite photos because it came out basically exactly how I had envisioned it. I love playing with shadows and patterns, especially because in black and white photography shadows and light, along with contrast, create tones which all have huge effects on the mood of the photograph ("Black and White..."). Shadows can develop very different and interesting views of a subject. And when you think about it, all lighting patterns are defined by the shadows, not the light; if there were no shadows, there would be no patterns and all lighting would be the same (Garrison).

When working with prints that have shadows and lights, the photographer needs to remember to do something different when developing in the darkroom. When I say "do something different" I mean using contrast filters or other techniques to give pictures more highlights and darklights in order to really create a beautiful and clean looking print with noticeable whites and blacks. When they don't do something different, the whites can come out gray and the darks can come out dull. Keeping in mind, a highlight is the brightest area in a photo in which one can still see detail; same for a true shadow being defined as the darkest area of a photo in which you can still see detail (Garrison). For my photograph, there is not a lot of detail to see in the darks, but that is because most of the details for the entire picture are her facial features. I tried to use the dark shadows to highlight those details.

I was with my friend at a train station (which is why I named this piece Waiting, in essence of the idea of waiting for a train) and this shadow caught my attention all the way from the other side of the hall because of the pattern it was creating on the floor. Conveniently, our photography project assignment was shadows. I thought about what I could do to really bring out the pattern and lines and I remembered a picture I had seen. the subject was a person's face with some kind of shadow against it. That's originally where I got the idea of using my friend in it. I really like how it catches the attention of the viewer and I think it's really interesting looking at how the pattern falls on her face.

This is a good example of really finding ways to make something simple, interesting. I could have simply just taken a picture of the shadow on the ground at a slightly off-angle. That might be kind of interesting, but probably not enough to get a double take or even five seconds of a viewer's attention. Using something that already has dimensions and angles, like a person's face, can give a shadow a completely different look.


References
"Black and White Photography Shadows and Light." The Secret of Tonality. Nature Photography Central, 2007-2009. Web. 29 Jan. 2012
Garrison, Tedric. "Shadows and Highlights: The Mark of Excellence." PictureCorrect. Picture Correct, n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2012.