Wrecking Film - Mine

Here are my photographs from my Wrecking Film. The ones on the right are the photographs before I wrecked then, and the ones on the left are after I stepped on the negatives.
 

 

Wrecking Film - Reticulation

     Wrecking film seemed like fun at first for me; scratching it, purposely developing it wrong, etc. I was honestly excited to wreck my film! And yes I know that sounds a little bad. For my photographs, I went into the local grave yard and took photographs of tombstones. The wrecking film effect that I was going to try was reticulation, which is 'the formation of a network of cracks or wrinkles in a photographic emulsion'. Or, in other words, I make the emulsion of my film crack during developing.

     What you have to do to get reticulation is heat up the film, and then flash "freeze" it all while the film is developing. What I did was bathe my film in hot water for a few minutes to expand my film, develop the film normally, then I put 5 ice cubes in the container to make ice cold stop, fix, and rinse to make the film cool down rapidly and shrink, which should make the film crack.


     When I finished rinsing my film, and I was able to look at it under light, I saw disappointingly that I was not successful in getting reticulation. So I went to plan B; scan my film, then scratch the hell out of it by stepping on it in gravel. Now, I'm very glad I scanned my film before I went and stepped on it because I didn't realize how much of the photograph I was actually going to scratch of; let's just say I was dying inside as I was stepping on it, and saw it afterward.

Here are some samples of what reticulation is supposed to look like.

 Notice how all the photographs have a "pattern" of cracks? That's reticulation.

MicroMacro - Plants

These are pictures I took of plants using that 'micro macro' technique I was told about. Keep in mind that it's hard to keep still when you're using a slower shutter speed and have to move to focus rather than using the focal ring, so a couple of these pictures are a bit blurry. Can you guess what these pictures are of?

This Year in Pictures - News

(From Reuters)



     This is a picture of Prince Harry falling off his horse during a game of Polo. The reason this is one of my favorite 2010 'news' pictures is not because the prince is falling of his horse, but because of the people's facial expressions in the background. I really like how some people are laughing at the prince as his falling off his horse, and how a couple of them are actually taking pictures of him, like the photographer who this picture. This picture tells the story perfectly, but the only problem is that you can only tell that it's someone falling off a horse, not a prince. I think that the contrast between the repetition of standing people against the 1 falling person helps draw your eyes to the subject immediately, as well as the fact that the falling man is in the close to far left corner of the frame.

Cairo, Egypt Riot Photos

Here's a link to The New York Times' page of photographs from the Cairo riot. They're being updated daily for sure, and potentially hourly. I find it very interesting that there's photographs being uploaded seeing as Egypt has now shut off their internet, but people are still finding a way around it!
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/egypt/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/world/middleeast/201101-egypt-protest-gallery/