I’ve always been really drawn to high contrast images. In my first photography class, I took some photographs of my friends gathered around a campfire in Big Basin and some of those images are still favorites of mine to this day. A couple of years ago some friends helped me recreate the firelight scene in their backyard. I’ll have to scan the negatives to get most of the images up, but I actually used a couple of the images for one of my drawing classes. I wanted to see how well I could replicate the images by hand. Here are the results.

The first one is Dar, this image was from the original Big Basin campfire shoot. After some advice from my drawing teacher at the time, I attempted to get the high contrast effect using only graphite. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I pressed, I couldn’t get the graphite in past the teeth of the paper. Also the graphite is super shiny, which can be cool too, but it’s very hard to photograph. In certain light it looks metallic, but I’d really prefer the darks to be dark with these high contrast images so on my next attempt I used charcoal.

The second one is Nick, he was one of the lovely people kind enough to help me recreate the light situation and pose for me as I stuck my camera in their faces. I really like this image since he looks so relaxed and has his eyes closed. Charcoal was definitely the way to go, don’t you think?