Little Apple Dolls - Scratch Experiment

I decided to experiment with creating scratch textures in the darkroom - using plastic wallets with various different scratches and placing them over the photo paper during the exposure. I got this idea after reading about how Joel-Peter Witkin places glass on top of his prints and paints over it with coffee and various other things - i want to try this aswell at some point - but doing scratches this way saves doing it directly onto your negatives and possibly ruining them. These are all shot with a Kodak No.2 Autographic Brownie, using a light tent cube and two continuous lights with 5500k daylight bulbs - same as the previous post i made with the digital images.

This is the straight print.

These scratches were done by scratching into the plastic using just scissors - i think these are far too noticeable and distract away from the actual picture.

This was done using sandpaper, the plastic i used for this had a slight texture too, i like texture this makes overall - although they dont look like 'natural' scratches.

This was done using a mixture of both of the above - clear plastic this time with sandpaper, and a few scissor scratches. This is better but i feel i would like it more if it was a bit more subtle still.

This is my favorite of the bunch - i accidentally over-sandpapered a sheet of plastic and it all ripped in the middle. I had a go to see what it'd look like anyway and i love the 'crack' effect it makes. Happy accidents are great!

I think i need to figure out a way to get more subtle scratches, i think i went a little over the top, but for a first try i think they turned out pretty good!

5x4 negative

Here is a scan of the 5x4 negative i produced in the first darkroom lesson, i bought a new scanner so i thought it would be a good idea to scan this, it has been inverted in photoshop. We used a Cambo Monorail Camera, Ambient light from above with a fluorescent tube to the side and Ilford Orthochromatic Large format film. There is a slight blur to it as it was accidentaly double exposed - although this doesn't matter too much since the aim of the lesson was to successfully produce a negative! 

contact printing

Here is a contact sheet from the 120 film i shot the other week of the little apple dolls, i used a Kodak No.2 Folding Autographic Brownie. This first contact sheet was made to determine how long of an exposure i needed - here are the times i used:

• 5 seconds for the whole image
• 5 seconds for 1/4 image (covering up the other 3/4)
• 10 seconds for 1/2 image
• 10 seconds for 3/4 image

This is my final contact sheet, i decided to use a 40 second exposure. Contact sheets are used as previews and to evaluate prints without wasting paper.