This is probably the hardest picture I worked with in the dark room. Considering the negative I had to work with to get this photo, this is pretty well developed. My negative for this picture was underexposed. This means it was not exposed to light long enough which made the picture come out dark. Overexposed negatives have been exposed to light too long which makes a picture come out light. When either of these happens, it makes a negative difficult to develop nicely in the dark room.
This gets a little tricky to explain in depth, but I'm going to try. When a negative is underexposed, the image on the negative appears light; when working with that light negative in the enlarger, the image will appear dark. This is because it is easy for light to pass through a light negative so the paper is exposed to more light per second. When a negative is overexposed, the image on the negative appears dark since the picture is actually really bright.
What made this picture so difficult was that the dark background was underexposed (received too little light making the picture dark) and the lighter parts in the front like the bed comforter and the baby's skin were overexposed (received too much light making the picture light). So my darks were extremely dark and my lights were extremely light. So how did I even the tone out?
There are two techniques called dodging and burning. Dodging is when you block part of the photo paper for a few seconds while it is being exposed so it isn't exposed as long as the other part. Burning is the exact opposite; you would only expose part of the picture that you wanted to be darker for a few seconds. In this case, I dodged the darks of the image while I burned the lights so the darks would be lighter and the lights would be darker. Hopefully you can follow that...
I must have gone through at least five or six tries before I got a decent image. Although it was tricky, it was still fun to use the different techniques and keep trying different things. I also love this image because I just like the composition. I feel like I captured the moment well, or at least for how I was envisioning it. The baby in the picture is my little cousin, Nicholas. This picture is almost two years old now, but he's still the funniest, most amusing little boy I've ever met. :)
Your experiences as a photographer are shining through here. I thought the blurriness was an artistic spin on the photograph; now I learn from reading this blog that it was a mixture of underexposure and your attempt to correct it. Fascinating, and great photo!
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