As with many foundation programs, the first year at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a tossed salad of photography topics. Freshman majors are expected to tackle traditional black-and-white photography, color processes, and studio lighting, alongside state-of-the-art techniques using Photoshop and digital technology.
"A big part of the first year is trying to figure out links," says RIT Professor Elaine O'Neil of her mission to bring a sense of cohesion to the experience. "Is there a way to link topics together so that as you work in digital you find out something about color?"
O'Neil's solution—and this issue's TeachingPhoto.com downloadable assignment—is "Constructing Color," a way of building bridges between different fundamental topics. For this project, students are first asked to make traditional color separations using simple black-and-white techniques, and then combine different negatives into a full-color image using a scanner and Photoshop software.
The lesson is a multifaceted mixture of essential photographic ideas for O'Neil's Applied Photography I students. But its simple techniques and easy-to-follow steps make it workable for both beginning and advanced classes.
"I wrapped this assignment around concepts of color and manipulating color," O'Neil says. "It works out very well in terms of understanding basic color theory—what's happening in the darkroom, how is color paper made. It's the idea of constructing the photograph, instead of just taking it and printing it."
The primary steps of the assignment are:
1.
Photograph a scene three times using three different color correcting filters to create red, green, and blue color separations.
2.
Scan the negatives into Photoshop.
3.
Perform some simple manipulation in Photoshop to convert the separations to cyan, magenta, and yellow color layers. Then cut and paste to create one full-color image.
On-camera Filters
O'Neil says she uses Roscolux filters for this assignment. "Each student paid $2 for the filter materials, and then had to fashion a filter holder for their camera," she says. Her filter recommendations are:
Roscolux Filters:
Medium RED, #27
Dark Yellow GREEN, #90
Night BLUE, #74
Lee Filters:
Bright RED, #26
Dark Yellow GREEN, #90
Tokyo BLUE, #71
The most interesting results come from scenes in which something moves in between the separate exposures, according to O'Neil. In the example here, several of the chickens wandered around between exposures and thus show up in only one color layer—except for the pair of chickens in the foreground that remained inexplicably still for all three shots.
"The boring pictures are the ones where nothing moved. It looks exactly like a straight color photograph," she says. "On the one hand, that's very good; here's exactly how your color photographs are made or exactly how they print color in a magazine. But in terms of interesting images, you get some odd things happening with a little movement or some shift."
And while the assignment may require students to purchase extra filters for their cameras, it is not a frivolous expense. "A number of the students bought the screw-in filters, because those can also be used with black-and-white photography. The red works for skies and the green for trees, for instance," O'Neil says. "So it's not that they are three completely useless filters, which I think is important."
Enrollment: 900 students total, includes film, video, and animation, plus still photography.
Degrees offered: Bachelor of Science in medical photography, photographic engineering, and scientific photography; Bachelor of Fine Arts, with concentration in advertising, photojournalism, and fine art.
