Final Project!

Finally. Finals week. It's my week to relax. It was great this year because I only had one final, and that was on Monday in French. My final critique wasn't until Thursday evening so I had all that time to finish and print my prints. I actually got sleep this week. It was wonderful.

My final was to use a Hawkeye Model C Kodak camera that I found over the summer at an antique store. I wanted to see what the focal distance was and what ISO I should shoot. I used a target to focus so that I could see about how far the subject had to be in order to be in focus...it turned out to be about 15 feet to infinity. So I decided to shoot architecture because in general they are farther away from the camea. I thought it would be interesting to shoot older architecture (perfect because I was in Annapolis for the shoot!) and then contrast it with newer commoddities like motor vehicles and tee-shirt shops all in the same pictures. It was difficult to actually shoot with the camera because it only has about a 1/30 sec shutter speed which is too slow to use handheld. So I had to carry a tri-pod, and tape the camera to the top of that. Plus, there is no viewfinder, so I had to guess roughly were the subject was going to lie. It was quite the feat. I printed them black and white to go along with the antique theme.

In critique, my teacher commented that the only thing that actually made the pictures look old was the fact that they were very dull. Apparently there was not enough contrast in them. The TA also made a comment about how it didn't look any different than a 35mm photograph and he asked me why I went through the extra effort. So I explained to him that there was no way that I could actually look through anything and compose an image...I wanted to learn how to use the older camera. It's a part of our history at RIT, and I think it's something I should have at last one project's worth experience working with.