rayograms and contact printing

I was really impressed at the turnout of yesterday's demos, especially the rayograms. I didn't think that the objects would appear that "crisp" on the film stock (and some of them didn't). My favorite effect was from the iridescent marbles. Because the light only reflected down through some parts of the marble it made a swirly almost tie-dye effect which was awesome. The Aquafina label looked pretty cool too.

I'm trying to think of what kinds of objects I would like to bring. I think I am going to crush up some uncooked pasta into little pieces and bring that in, or perhaps some sand or salt spread out in a pattern might look interesting. Since I liked the look of the marbles I want to try and bring something kind of like them. I was thinking of some smaller, dangly earrings that I have might work. I have some other earrings in interesting shapes that could work as well. I was also thinking of cutting up some pieces of straw and standing them up to make some sort of circular pattern. Who knows..the options are endless!

I wasn't as big of a fan of the contact printing. It just didn't grab my attention as a technique that I would be real interested in using. Perhaps next week once we work with the technique some more I will get a better feel for what I could do with it. Copying film images from one strip to another just doesn't seem as "creative" to me. Maybe I misunderstood the capabilities of the technique, so we'll have to see what happens next class.