Offset darkroom film

I worked part time in 1973 in a print shop darkroom - knowing my way around a regular black-and-white film darkroom gave me transferable skills to develop film for the offset printing process current at the time.   The film I shot and processed at the print shop was used by a "stripper" who laid out paper sheets that were used to make aluminum plates used to print on paper.   This dark room process undoubtedly is done digitally now.

This gave me a chance to experiment with the print shop film I was using, extremely contrasty stuff that had only black and whites, no grays.   I took relatively small pictures I'd printed in my regular darkroom at home and photographed them using the camera at the print shop.  After developing the film, I took them home and printed them.  I scanned these negatives now for the sake of this blog.   Most of these were shot while I was a student at Midland Lutheran College in Fremont, Nebraska (now Midland University), the bulk of them fellow students.

Looking at the pictures I selected, it's pretty obvious I was a single guy - my favorite subjects were pretty young women.  By taking out information - all the shades of gray - what is left really sticks out.

I used a 24 mm wide angle lens on my 35 mm camera to distort this picture.

My 200 mm telephoto lens gives an entirely different look.

I'd had fun in the past taking black-and-white pictures through snow and thought this would be interesting.   And note there are actually males in this shot.

This is another picture of a girl, in dress typical of that time.

1973 was during the time of protest and the psychedelic -  this was about as close as I got to being "with it".  Although most details are obscured, I was in my darkroom in the basement.

This is a clearer picture of  me in the darkroom.   Part of the film I developed in the print shop darkroom were "halftones", film where I shot pictures through a screen to produce the dot vital to printing pictures on paper.

I had taken this picture of my younger sister earlier, in 1967.   In painting art class in 1973, I blew up a piece of a screened negative like this onto a three by five foot canvas, making each dot an inch or so across.   The canvas had to be viewed at a distance - across the street or so - for the mind to form a coherent image.

I'm back to attractive young women, in this case at a ticket booth at a Midland sporting event.

I found this photographic experimentation interesting, even arresting at times.   However, coupled with a great deal of additional experimentation, I've come back to prefer pictures with the full range of visual information - I miss the grays that are so critical to black-and-white photography.