Eight Minutes Old

… has a special meaning for me, because it was on the first black and white film I have ever developed on my own. It shows my bathroom which I afterwards turned into a darkroom. I quickly filled a short test-film (I think it was a 12-picture roll of ORWO 400 or something) as I did not want to loose important pictures on the first try. Much to my surprise there were no problems and until today I never ruined a film during development (except for one early occassion where I did not fill in enough fixing agent, resulting in an uneven apperance of the pictures).

The reason I am writing about this and why I show a test-picture is that over at leumund.ch (German) there is a blog-parade, asking other bloggers to show one picture which has a special meaning to you. This is quite a good idea in times where we are overwhelmed by the amount of pictures around, most of which only exist as digital data on harddisks or flickr.

Tags: ORWO 400, Test, 50mm f/1.9, black and white, Blog Parade, Blog Specific, Darkroom, Film Photography, Ricoh KR-10

After my first exhibition with the topic “Idyll” last year, I now had the opportunity to participate in another one. This time, the exhibition is organized by the “Studio für Kunsterziehung” (roughly speaking “studio for fine arts”) of the University of Bonn. I’ll present a series of five touristscopes and two pairs of other photos. The opening/vernissage is tomorrow, Wednesday, 3rd of December, at 6 pm. It takes place at the studio next to the main building of the university of Bonn (Am Hof 7).

Tomorrow also is the university’s “Dies”, an open day with lots of talks on many different topics. So if you are there, feel free to come to the opening. I’m not sure what will happen there, but I’m sure I’ll be there ;-).

The pictures you see in this post are one of those pairs, they show “portraits” of sculptures that I found in the cellar where they are for restoration, I suppose. I took them with my new 17-40mm Canon lens, on the wide end. The distortion of the extreme wide angle, combined with the short distance to the subjects, gives the sculpture-portraits an even more spooky feeling.

Of cause my photographies are all black and white prints. Actually, they are even completely analoge: no scanning, no digital editing, no manipulations involved. Like people did in the old days I printed them on 18×24 cm black and white PE paper, in a classical darkroom of the university. That’s fun. But it also takes much more time per picture. But the results show that it is worth it.

There is also a double-series of three shots each by the author of Blog.Foreignlight, which are absolutely amazing. You can find a preview of those black and white portraits here. Furthermore some other forms of art will be present, which I had no possibility to judge yet, as they had not finished hanging the works when I was there yesterday.

Tags: Fomapan 100, Rodinal, black and white, Bonn, Darkroom, EF L 17-40mm f/4.0, Exhibition, Film Photography, Germany, Open House, University of Bonn