Where You Are · Dave Batt

During my second year at university, I took a class that by todays standards might be considered as ‘an introduction to Adobe Photoshop’. The 18 student in my class were each issued a Sony Mavica FD200 digital camera, one memory stick, and as many 1.4″ floppy discs as they could carry.

The brief was to take a series of photos within the area you were currently living, and create an ‘interesting’ composition using the techniques learnt from the class. Te Aro had a decent amount of indigenous fauna competing with the surrounding streets and buildings. I choose to focus on natures constant struggle to gain a foothold within the inner city.

The other half of the assignment taught us about Lambda printing, which is a chromogenic print made by exposing a digital file onto photographic paper using a laser exposure system. This process creates a continuous-tone print with vibrant colours, deep blacks, and smooth gradations, as the image is exposed chemically rather than through an inkjet system.

Unlike previous print assessments where we were taught to compensate for the colour shift in CMYK digital printing, we were now encouraged to explore compositions using richer depths of tone, sharp blacks, and crisper detail overall.