Photo Test

These were among the images I took on our Sunday morning trip to photograph Portland:

On our Thursday evening trip to downtown Portland, I made these photographs:

The most exciting part of Thursday's field trip was the opportunity to shoot human forms. Note that I say 'human forms' and not humans. We lingered in front of a shop window filled with mannequins. I lingered much longer than the rest of the class and was left behind. I don't care. I'm pleased with the images I made by taking my time:

After viewing the images I created with the mannequins, I decided to try my hand with real, living human beings. Kris and I had dinner with Cari and Chris (and Kaden and Emma) on Saturday, and the children obliged me and my camera.
I learned a valuable lesson: if your composition is good, if you're getting closer, if you're using lots of film -- none of it matters if your light is wrong.
Because it was dark and I wasn't using tungsten balanced film, I decided to use my camera's flash for once. This was a bad move, as these photos indicate:

I would have been better served by making due with the room's incandescent light.
As my relationship with Canby's Quickstop Photo develops, they're learning as much as I am. They ran some tests for me using the various color filters in their processing equipment, and Tom (the fellow who helps me) found the results as interesting as I did. I recently discovered that most photolabs aren't able to make prints from the entire negative frame; in landscape view, some information at the top and bottom of the frame is lost while making the print. I have two photographs that I'd like if they weren't clipped at the top, and a quick check of the negatives revealed that the framing of these photos does allow for a margin in the image. I challenged Tom to produce prints for me that didn't feature clipped ends, and though it was difficult (and expensive), he succeeded. The old images are on the left, the new images are on the right: