La Señora Del Lago

Making her first and I'm sure not last entry is Karla.
This image was taken by the lakes at the University of Essex in my third year of study. We went to the Law Society barbeque and had a whole lot of fun. Karla was chatting away to another Mexican girl, Angelica. I took a few photos of them which mostly came out pretty staid and uninteresting. This one however just catches a great moment. I don't particularly remember Karla pulling faces such as these but I am sure that, just like the rest of us, when you look at the faces people do make during conversation it can be quite odd.
The hand is particularly good here and could probably tell you the look on the face without even seeing it.
I suppose in general this photo looks good not just because it is well composed but also due to the tonality. The blacks are nice and deep without being overpowering and the highlights maintain enough power to cut through the darkness.
I really like dark photos. When in the darkroom I always obsess about getting the image as dark as possible hopefully without spoiling the highlights. It's a real shame that film photgraphy is so expensive. It's great fun fiddling round with all those chemicals and lamps while nodding along to Sonic Youth or The Rolling Stones. The darkroom that I used to produce this print was rather lacking in mod cons. I had never done any processing before. I found out that the university had a darkroom and a photgraphic society. I contacted the society about use of the facilities. The society seemed to be rather non-existent or at least just a chairman. He told me that the darkroom was available anytime, to collect the key from the security desk. I did this and received instructions from the securtiy guard as to it's location. The university of Essex's corridors are at the best of times a series of warren like pathways. But in the end I found it. I turned the key in the lock expecting to enter into a small room with suitably drab walls and sinks and loads of photographic looking equipment. The reality was about the size of a broom cupboard, photographic stuff fortunately present but mostly strewn across the floor and walls. Here insert that scene from 'Snow White' where everything gets tidied away by small furry creatures. Annoyingly there were no instructions. Funny that. So I enlisted the help of Karla (see above left) to help me out. She had used many'a darkroom but some time ago. We managed to cobble together and dilute all the necessary chemicals and enlarger lamps and paper and such. Just one ingredient was missing. So when we turn out the lights, how do we see? "The red light" "oh you mean that light that doesn't work". So we must have spent 2 hours in this darkroom experimenting with trying to get the light sensitive paper in the right place to be shone on by the lamp producing the image on the paper. The paper would then be fumbled into the tray and, as there was no way of seeing clocks, time counted outloud for the amount of time in each chemical. The whole farce was like having to discover the whole process without a hundred years of expertise to back us up. Just the vague rememberances of a Mexican girl sitting in the dark. We got there in the end of course and that's the story of how my revision for third year exams went to pot. Not the best time to discover a secret room with artistic capabilities.
These posts are getting far too long. Just expect "this was of a tree" tomorrow. Where's that tree photo gone?