Photography by First Principles

Photography teacher Paul Tzanetopoulos and his students collaborated on a unique project in honor of Strub Hall’s centennial—taking a photo of our 100-year-old building with a 100-year-old camera. (See the photo on page 36.) We asked Mr. T to walk us through the process.

What was the general idea behind the project?

The lesson basically was to use photo logic and figure out how we could take this picture. It made sense, but I hadn’t ever tried it.

Did you have to buy 100-year-old film?

We had to make film. The negative film is what doesn’t exist anymore, but you can still buy paper sheet film. So we took the negatives with a paper negative, one for the sky and one for the building, and then we reversed these digitally in Photoshop and combined them.

Can you explain the process?

It was a little bit of a mental exercise for the girls to figure, okay, everything in photography is about reversal. So if we take a snap, what are we going to end up with? Of course it was going to be a negative, but the negative was going to be on paper and not transparent film.

How did the girls feel about this grand experiment?

They were very jazzed to see the finished thing. Everybody had a hand in this. I tried not to do too much ahead of the class so I could stay honest to the process—I tested just enough stuff so it wasn’t leading them into failure. It was about a bunch of experimenting.