Just a Thought...

Starting in July, I’m starting a new project to help sharpen my skills and maintain a consistent production. The basic principles are as follows:

• Every month I take a new picture
• That picture is then manipulated and prepared to the best of my ability
• The final result is a matted print

The goals are to fine tune my process, try new techniques, and increase my proficiency. The reason for dealing with a print is is for the work to reach its full potential.

Why every month, and not every week or every day? Mainly because I want to have an attainable goal. Something that is reasonable for me to do, yet will push me. Due to my schedule between work and church, I have far less time than I really want in the darkroom. I’m trying to make better use of my time in the darkroom. Additionally, the goal of one print a month allows me to really dig deep into a print and experiment with ways to make it better through dodging, burning, toning, or more creative approaches.

Scanners have issues with dense negatives, and it turns out I had an overexposed negative that was worth doing something with. When I scanned the negative directly, I only got the detail that was in the picture to the right. You’ll note that the house in the background doesn’t have a lot of detail, and the grassy area in front of it has almost no detail. There’s plenty of detail in the negative but you can’t do anything with it if the scanner can’t bring it in properly. That’s OK, because there’s things you can do with high contrast negatives like this. It’s called making wet prints, or optical prints. Using an enlarger, I can make the picture as large as I want, and play with the amount of light hitting the paper. For all you who only use Photoshop and the like, the darkroom is where dodging and burning came from. However, in the darkroom you can bring out detail you couldn’t see before while in the digital world, you can’t bring out what simply isn’t there.

First, I attempted to get a print with all the delicate tones and smooth the image out a bit. The scan has some blown highlights where there is still detail in the negative, so I wanted to make that work a bit better. You’ll find that the print is very similar to the negative, except with a little less contrast overall. It’s a straight print, with no dodging and burning.

One of the cool things about working with variable contrast paper is that you can burn and dodge at different contrasts. This picture needs better tones, otherwise it is just too stark. I chose to do all the burning using a #00 filter (lowest contrast and smoothest tones). The print is primarily exposed for the plow, with the adjustments made to the rest of the image. As you can see by the straight print I made, the bush in the top left kind of dominates the picture, which is not what I want. I chose to dodge it a full stop, so it isn’t as heavy and doesn’t draw the eye away from the plow. The edges needed attention, and there was a whole area that was lacking detail that needed it. The two sides and the bottom I burned in for 1/3 stop. The top area where the grass was, I burned in for a full stop. It’s now that you can appreciate the detail still in the negative that the scanner just couldn’t handle.

This particular print I did change the base exposure for the print unwittingly, so the plow is darker than I like. However, that is easily corrected. When I get a new print of this, I’ll fix that problem.