Cut and cover.

I took a photography class in my last year of high school. The medium of choice for my teacher was black-and-white film, which we were taught to process and develop in class. I remember spending a couple of very late nights in the campus darkroom towards the end of the course, trying to meet the final portfolio deadline while compensating for some very poorly-exposed negatives. Fortunately, I was hardly alone in doing so.

Developing a proper print is an involved process; the paper has to be exposed to light filtered through the negative for just the right amount of time, then washed thoroughly in a number of chemical baths. To keep bad exposure time guesses from blowing whole prints, we ran preliminary takes on test strips that were left over after cutting our large sheets of photo paper into more manageable cards. Many of the strips were simply thrown away, although a sizable bulletin board in the classroom was papered over with leftovers from years before. Mine I kept and threw on a scanner three years later, and this is the result.

I’m not one for nostalgia, but monochrome almost makes me want to be.

Composed of shots taken throughout September and October 2007.