Mask for Composite Printing

Video Transcript

"So, this is something me and a friend made in here. And, it's pretty creative. These are actually negatives, so they're big. They're five by seven negatives. And, what we did is we made what was called a Mask. Meaning, that we got some acetate and we measured it out. And, these are pictures of a highway in Texas. And, what we did is we sleeved them just perfectly and we made this little design of a star and a shamrock on them. And, we just laid it down on top of the paper and then we exposed our film exactly the way we wanted it. So, in a really interesting way this lay predates digital composition. Just means that you can lay out things in a certain way and you can do them. One thing that I liked, was that you can sort of write on this type of stuff. And, some of my work I actually take acetate and I lay it over the contact sheet and I either have writing or maybe I'll run a piece of acetate through a typewriter. This is one of the ways being in a darkroom and you can still be really creative, while still being pretty traditional about doing stuff. And, it just lets you know if you can think it up you can probably do it in here."