Experimentation

 Solarisation

Solarisation is an effect whereby the tones are partially reversed, dark areas appear light and light areas appear dark. I have previously done solarisations and really like the effect it creates and thought it would be really interesting to see what it would look like on foods.I created this effect by choosing an image with high contrast. The first step I did was expose the image for the correct exposure time, in my case it was 12 seconds, I then placed it in the develop until the image started to appear. I then quickly took it over to an enlarger with a aperture of 8 and exposed my print to the light for 2 seconds. I then placed it back into the develop tray until I was happy with the outcome. I then moved it into the stop then into the fix and lastly wash. It was quite hard to judge whether it had worked well in the darkroom, so after I had made the print I took it outside into the light to see if it had worked well. 

I particularly like the way it reacts with the fish. As the fish is quite oily it picks up on the small details of the oil,scales and pattern of the flesh. The pomegranate is also one of my favourite prints as the seeds look like maggots inside the fruit. This is what I was hoping it would look like as this is what I wanted to achieve when I was taking the photographs. I don't think the solarisation has worked well on the liver image as it has only solarised the outline of the liver instead of the liver itself, this is due to it not being exposed for long enough the second time for it to solarise. Images with high contrast tend to work better as they really show up the light and dark areas in reverse. 

Reversals

Reversals is also an experiment that I have done before in my previous work. It is a simple way to create a different effect. I placed the black and white print face down on the photographic paper and exposed it to the light for 50 seconds on aperture 16 with a filter of 5. I didn't place a piece of glass on top to hold the paper down as I wanted it to have a blurry edge to give it more a focus point on the centre of the image. The reversal of the fish worked best because of the high contrast in the original image. The liver did not work as well due to the print mainly being dark coloured.