Photography

I figure that, after the Critical Thinking post, you deserve something a bit lighter and more visually entertaining.  As I’ve mentioned several times in posts, I’m easing my way back into photography after over a decade away from it.  Unfortunately I’m in an environment that does not facilitate taking photographs (just as I was in Baghdad), but hopefully that will change with my next position.  But I’ve been doing what I can do.  Most significantly that means trying to learn the tools of the trade, which are much different now than when I’d gone through this process before.

Back in the early-mid 1980’s I was working at Virginia Tech as the staff photographer for the college of architecture.  At some point in 1984-85 I started to get very serious about the technical aspects of black and white processing and dove into Ansel Adams’ technical classics The Negative and The Print.  With a bit (well, quite a bit actually) of diligence and focused work, my negatives and prints became exponentially better.  The negative part was fairly easy (once I realized the college actually had a densitometer).  Printing was another matter - only so much could really be done with multi-grade RC paper.  At one point I saw an opportunity - in the form of a photography contest - and I approached Dean Steger (now President Steger) to request a grant for me to use top quality photo paper and chemicals (to the tune of $650) so I could create a portfolio of 12 images.  He agreed to meet me half way and thus my adventure of learning to print on graded fiber paper, using a range of different chemicals to get intermediate grades, and toning to accentuate the images, began.  

If I recall correctly, I spent well over 100 hours in the darkroom to get those 12 prints.  There was one day when, after 9 hours of struggling, I wound up without a usable image.  I later reviewed my printing notes, evaluated the prints I had made of the image, and identified where I had made decision-making errors in the printing process and thought my way through to what it would take to get a successful final image.  That effort paid off the next time in the darkroom - I was in and out in just a few hours with a beautiful print.  

No, my portfolio of protestors/supporters from several executions in Richmond, Va did not win the competition; it didn’t even get an honorable mention.  But that focused effort raised the level of my printing in a way that slowly slogging away on a limited budget would never have allowed.

Now I’m in the world of digital and Lightroom 4 is now my darkroom.  I’m not even thinking about printing (yet) and have gotten to the point that I really need to think about calibrating my monitor so that I can get readily reproducible results.  My guide this time is not the Ansel Adams series, but the multi-hour Luminous Landscape video series. 

As the LL guys walk their way through Lightroom and do their demonstrations on thinks like vibrance vs. saturation sliders, sharpening, and split-toning, I have Lightroom open on my computer (thank goodness for multiple monitors) and I experiment on my own images.  Fortunately for me, those guys are old like me and they continually refer to different darkroom techniques that I am familiar with.  It eases the transition somewhat.

I figure I might as well share what I did the other day.  I started out watching video 7 (of 50) and worked my way through Hue-Saturation-Luminance, split-toning in B&W and in color, sharpening and noise reduction.

One of the great things about digital is that, even when you’re in black and white mode, you can change the tonal value of particular “colors” in the B&W image.  In the old days you could use different filters to change particular tonal values, but you always had values that were lightened and those that were darkened by a filter (complementary colors) and you were stuck with that relationship once the negative was exposed.  Digital is different.  Anyway, I decided to use the same image for all my experiments that day and searched through my Stonetown Zanzibar images to find something suitable.  The first image I made worked on black and white techniques along with B&W split toning.  This is what I got.

Enlarged on a monitor, it has a richness and depth that escapes a smaller sized image (the proper size of an image was also a very real issue in the analog days as well) and, most importantly, looks worlds better than a straight color to B&W looked.  I wound up using the split-tone settings used in the videos because, quite frankly, I had no ideas about how I want to approach the technique - I’ve got lots of playing around to do to see what tones I prefer (i.e. the same amount of effort that led me to conclude I like my prints with 4:30 in selenium toner . . . in the old days).  This image made me realize that I have much to learn, but there are a lot of techniques that will allow me to replicate the quality I used to be able to achieve.

As the video worked through some color techniques, I reaproached the image using color.  To be honest, it was a huge surprise.  First of all, looking at the enlarged image carefully on a large monitor, I began to see things I didn’t see when it was small, or in black and what.  What in a thumbnail looked like a pretty boring image came to life in the details - whether it was colors, textures, or wall patterns - when enlarged.  It possessed a spatial quality that I hadn’t noticed at first.  And made me realize what it was that made me raise the camera in the first place and to take the time to make that image from just that position.

It also made me realize that to bring that effect out, the image needs to be printed fairly large.  With that would come the texture of the window grill, the painterly brush stroke-like patterns on the walls and the impact of the red door.

Working with the image in color has given me some hope that I am progressing in my photographic eye.  Slowly but surely.

The last image was for fun.  In fact, I actually thought about it several hours after I watched the videos.  Although I’m not one for photographic gimmicks, it dawned on me that I need to play a bit more and, at the least, I need to know the tools and techniques of the digital craft.  So I went back to the original image to play with desaturation techniques, so that I’d have an idea of what I’m doing if I ever want to use the technique.

Here’s the result of that experiment:

The amazing thing to me is that, if I were to calibrate my monitor and calibrate a printing system, I could produce a print of any of the above in a matter of minutes instead of hours (then again, in the old days I could never do the color myself, and would have to hand-tint the desaturated image).  I can make dozens of changes in a matter of minutes, seeing the results instantaneously (instead of having to wait several minutes between each decision).  All from the comfort of my computer desk.  Digital is a brave new world and has the advantage of not locking me into a darkroom full of noxious fumes.

I have no doubts that, as it was before, the difference between decent, good and great prints is a knowledge of the tools at hand and the ability to make the right decisions at every step of the way.  So I need to keep developing those technical skills.  And I need to keep shooting so that I have images that are worth printing.  What an enjoyable journey!