The Selfies - Reflexion (Reflection 2)

I consider the pinhole assignment to be more of a challenge than a traditional assignment.  I Think it was a fun exercise to do but in all honesty, I doubt I would use the concept to grade students  in a classroom because of its lack of preciseness . I believe pin hole photography requires a lot of practice and unless you are an experiment vintage photographer that uses that process, chances are the results will be mediocre.  I find the whole process is based on guesses and luck.

I would do that type of activity in an after school program , simply for pleasure. I’m not going to lie, we were pretty happy when we saw our first images appearing on the paper.

Our group decided to focus on the Instagram culture of “Selfies” . We chose that topic because it is a mode of self-portraiture that is relevant to teenagers, it is definitely part of their today’s youth’ culture.

As mentioned in my blog about working as a team, we began the project by creating multiple pinhole cameras to shoot multiple at a time.  We also wanted to try out different model so we find what works best in terms of shapes and sizes to capture our subject. Honestly, we had a hard time to take decent photographs. We tried different approaches : we used a chart to determine the exposure time, we used an application  (lightmeter) on the Iphone, we guessed exposures based on the amount of clouds and we did ultra long exposures inside.  It took multiple times before obtaining ANYTHING on our paper. As soon as we notice a shape, ( or was it a dot?)on the paper, we began to determine the exposure times based on the previous image results. 

We developed the images that seemed to be the sharpest. We did tests like we previously did in the photogram assignment to evaluate the proper exposure times. We obtained a decent amount of gray tones, black and white in our two final photographs.  The technical process was extremely lengthy .

Developing the lesson plan as a group was  great, it allowed us to divide the tasks and to take charge of a particular part instead of the whole document.

I think this project would be difficult to execute in the school setting because rare are the schools equipped with a darkroom. Overall, I find working in the darkroom interesting for older students but I believe it can be quite complicated for younger students and demanding since that experience as been quite difficult for us to accomplish and we are university students. Also,  using the darkroom demands the students to buy photographic paper and equipment that can be expensive. I am not sure I would feel comfortable asking the student (or their parents) to buy expensive photographic paper, especially for a project that often offers mediocre results.

I also feel the need to mention that winter is not the best season to do pin hole photography. We only has a very limited amount of sunshine per day, adding additional anxiety.

Even if I found this assignment a bit frustrating, I found that doing that assignment in groups  was definitely  a good idea. It was also interesting to see how it is possible to create with a simple box as a camera and the first results are quite memorable.