Both of my photo classes were SO thrilled by my assignment to do something experimental, I gave them another. Here’s both assignments.
Experimental
This assignment can be accomplished in several ways. Please chose one and produce your weekly four images for critique.
A) Make a double exposure with your camera. Please be aware that you may need to slightly underexpose one of your exposures.
B) Use high contrast film, infrared film, or some other non-typical film.
C) Sandwich two (or more) negatives when making a print.
D) Multiple print using two (or more) enlargers.
E) Make a high contrast sheet film (8×10 Kodalith) to be used for contact printing. Two or more of these sandwiched pieces of sheet film can be contact printed.
F) Scanned negatives can be used to produce a transparency (using a copy machine) to be contact printed.
G) Photograms or other non-negative prints can be made.
H) Normally printed prints can be cut up, collaged, montaged, or otherwise manipulated by drawing, painting, or cutting. Collaged or montaged materials can be just about anything.
I) Have I forgotten anything???
Needless to say, they came running into my office, “Oh, look professor! Look at this! This is awesome! This is so much fun!”
Four Random Words
This week I changed the assignment to the following: Each student was asked to write four words on a sheet of paper. These words were, two different emotions and two subjects or objects. Of course, they understood that they would be illustrating photographically the words they chose. However, what they didn’t realized until I walked into the dept. office next door and returned with a bucket, that they would be photographing the four words that another student wrote, randomly picked out of the bucket. We laughed so much because some people thought they would get something really difficult to photograph. Untrue. Although one girl shook her fist at the boy that wrote “drunk” on his list that she got. We all had a good laugh about it.
Try it if you like. Use a novel or book of poetry to chose your words. Open the book. Close your eyes and point. There’s your word. Pick four in that fashion. I have a ton of papers to grade but I’ll do mine this week too! I hope I don’t fail… 🙁