City: Pastiche of Lee Friedlander's "Albuquerque, New Mexico"

For my pastiche, i chose to try and immiate this image by Lee Friedlander. The image shows an almost abandoned cross section, with a dog that looks like it is waiting to cross.

The image was shot on a Leica 35mm camera. For my image, i attempted to try and get the same camera. Unfortunatly due to time constraints, the only camera i had available to me was a Bronica 6x6, so i had to crop my final image in the dark room. Trying to find a location that was similar to this was very difficult. I eventually setteled on a junction in Rochester for the shot.

As this was the only image i needed to take, i didnt make a contact sheet from the film (only 3 of the images came out, 2 of which were full of cars driving past. I tried to catch a break in the traffic, but it was hard as it was on a main road. i started off making a test strip for the image, working at 5 second intivals.

From this, i worked out that that i would need an exposure longer than 20 seconds, so i made another test strip at 20 seconds on Grade 3:

This seemed like a good starting point from which to start working with the grades and creating the high contrast found in Friedlanders image. My next step was to add some Grade 5 to the image to darken the shadows. I realised that in order to get this high contrast look, i would need to drop some of the mid tones in the image, and so made this exposure:

I had dropped alot of the midtones, but there still wasnt enough contrast. I decided to change the first exposure from grade 3 to grade 2 to see what effect it had on the image, and this was the result:

As i was running out of time in the darkroom, i decided to go all out on the image and make an exposure that was guarenteed to increase the contrast: I started by exposing the image at grade 2 for 13seconds, followed by another 22 seconds at grade 5, and this was my final result.

I was happy with this exposure. I realised whilst making this image, that to achieve the same exposure as Friedlander, i would have had to return at a different time of day when the sun was setting and the lighting would have cast more shadows.