As some of you know I’ve been gettign photography in a big way in the last six months or so (those whom I have ‘forced’ to sit for portraits for me would know it even more so). While this was largely sparked by the purchase of a digital SLR (a Canon EOS300D) back in early 2004, I’ve now gone back to film – black and white and high colour slide film (especially Fuji Velvia) in particular. This suits Tegan and I quite well, as she prefers to use our digital camera, and I enjoy using our film cameras themselves a lot more than the 300D.

To further this interest, I have finally taken a course in black and white photography, which really means in darkroom skills, at Photoaccess in Manuka. And it’s great!

Last night I printed my first ever contact sheet, which was a whole lot of fun:

In contrast, Tegan had a day off work yesterday to attend a one day course on post processing photos using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Ironically, these are basically “digital darkroom” skills. Tegan found the course fantastically useful and interesting and also picked up some good tips on how to take better-looking digital photos. At first she was a bit intimidated – she was the only amateur there – all the others were either professional photographers or graphic designers. Still, it sounds as though she held her own and (certainly by the end of the day) knew just as much about post-processing as any of the others.

So between the two of us we now (or will soon) have both old school and new fangled darkroom skills pretty well covered.