The Prairie Expedition Exhibition opened at Metropolitan Community College last week and features photographs created by students during a field trip to the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie.
Instructors Kally Malcolm and Adam Dienst-Scott each had a class that took photos of the prairie. Malcolm says her class used large format cameras for their pictures.
She says this means her students used one single sheet of film per shot and had to continuously reload for each photograph.
Dienst-Scott’s Experimental Photography class used historic photographic processes…
"What we did is we used handmade emulsions and coated our own paper. Then we took camera-less photographs of some of the grass specimens out there which means we just laid the grass down onto hand-coated paper and exposed it to the sun.”
Dienst-Scott says in some cases, his students were able to go down to the Republican River and develop the prints right there without the use of a darkroom. The Prairie Expedition Exhibitionis on view at Metro’s Fort Omaha Campus through September 10th.