ABSTRACT FEAR Assignment : Scratching Negatives

Today we took old negatives that we didn't want anymore and scratched into them with pins to create interesting effects. We learnt that scratching the shiny side of a negative creates a black line, while scratching the emulsion side of the negative creates a white line. We learnt through experimentation that you need to try and be really intricate when scratching into negatives because they are so small, anything looks quite big in relation to the image. We had to look carefully at what the negative was of and scratch certain areas to create the desired effect.

Here is the negative that I decided to use for my print. It is a shot looking through a window at other windows. I thought that it would be interesting to scratch out the opposite windows on both the shiny side to create a black line and the emulsion side to create a white line. I thought this would link to my abstract fear project as it might make the windows appear to be haunted. I think it looks really interesting as a negative. 

This was another negative I scratched into of some shadows on the pavement. I thought this would look really interesting if I made one of the outlines black and one of the outlines white. I didn't have the time or materials to print this but I think if I could it would look really interesting and abstract. It could link to my abstract fear project as it looks slightly like two ghosts. However, I think the negative makes the shadows look more like ghosts than they would if I printed the image because on the negative the silhouettes are white whereas if I printed it they would be black. If I was to print this image, to create this effect I could make a contact photograph to get the inverse effect.

Here is another example of a negative I scratches into of some trees. When we had scratched into a few negatives, we took them into the dark room chose one to print, started to focus them and get them to the correct size. Once that was done, we created a test strip to see how much we would need to expose them. Here I used F11 and exposed the test trip at 2 seconds, then 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 seconds.

Looking at my finished test strip I realised that 10 seconds was the correct exposure time and so I exposed my final print for 10 seconds. To create this test trip I covered my light sensitive paper with a black piece of card so that only a small section of it was getting exposed. I then moved the black piece of card along the light sensitive paper whilst I exposed it for 2 second intervals.

Here is my final image. From this print I realised that my scratches that I made on the negative were too neat and controlled. They look to ordered and similar in each window. It doesn't give the impression of haunted windows, however I do like the effect of changing an image directly from the negative as I have never thought of this or seen this before. I have also realised from my print that the black lines on the shiny side of the negative show up a lot more than the white lines on the emulsion side and so next time I will use this knowledge in creating the effect I want.