Commission: Colour Photogramming Workshop

Today I participated in a Colour Photogram workshop, I had already done photogramming before at A level and for my year 13 final exam piece I photogrammed people so I was a bit worried that I would find this session boring. However I had not experimented with colour photograms before, due to the filters I found out that you could make some interesting tones.

As it was to do with our commission unit subject of waste I collected a few items of litter off the streets which included a McDonalds drink cup, a cigarette packet, pieces of discarded plastic & packaging and a carlsberg bottle. After doing a test strip including all of these items I found that the most interesting item was the bottle which having not been cleaned out made unusual patterns on the paper. Therefore I decided to make simple prints of the bottle alone, and by changing the levels of Magenta & Yellow I was able to drastically change the resulting colours & tones of the originally green bottle.

I found the results very pop arty, like Andy Warhol's multi-coloured screen prints of Campbell's Tomato Soup cans or of famous people like Marilyn Monroe; here are my results (badly photographed):

 After not being able to achieve any blue tones I decided to put both the magenta and yellow right up to 200 to see what result this gave me; this intrigued me greatly as the background and bottle's tones became entirely blue much more like a screen print. However I really wanted the background to stay black so I turned both M & Y down to 110 and although the background was still a green I really liked the result. Vein like lines seem as if they are being emitted from the bottle, simply light being reflected from the bottle's surface but they are still fascinating.

Although the subject matter isn't particularly related to my theme of waste I really liked experimenting again with similar techniques to that of Adam Fuss. I would quite like to experiment myself a little with some of my own clothes such as my christening dress to see what sort of results I can create.
I also liked discovering for myself the way that light in itself can create black voids which is quite curious. The surrounding darkness makes the bottle look as if it is weightless, floating half translucent which gives the subject an added sense of fragility. The bottle almost looks as if it is dissolving & disappearing being wasted away, a similar result to the one I wish to create with my final images.