Any historical reference for darkroom based 'focus stacking'?

[Luckless]

I have read about methodologies for all kinds of photographic or motion picture effects that were achieved in a pre-digital world, many of which relied on very careful merging elements of multiple source images.

However I can't recall ever coming across references to anyone attempting to manually produce something like a focus stacked image with a purely analogue methodology in a darkroom.

Have I just not yet come across references to people manually masking out of focus elements from a stack of negatives, or is the fact that I'm even considering maybe attempting this at some point reason enough to question my sanity?

 

[DREW WILEY]

You'd need some kind of pin-register carrier system in the enlarger, and preferably in-camera too, to keep the successive exposures aligned. Of course, you could punch the film over a light box after the shot, but that's hard to do manually unless it involves large sheet film. It you just want to experiment for fun, you could try using pin-register 35mm or 6x7 slides mounts and a matching punch, like Gepe once made.

 

[jim10219]

Usually this is done in camera using multiple exposures with slivers of collminated light to only illumate the area of focus in a dark room. Usually the camera remains stable and the work is pulled through the sliver of light, step by step.

To do at the print stage would probably require numerous enlargers, each with its own pre-registered negative and lots of masking. Even then, the edges between exposures would be hard to keep sharp.

Focus stacking is something that was rarely done before the ability to digitally manipulate photos due to the cost of equipment and difficulty to pull off well. In the old film days, you usually just used a very large format camera and a very small aperture to maximize depth of field without having to worry too much about diffraction.

 

[removed account4]

I wish I could remember his name, but back in the 1980s who used to do a focus stacking technique for his commercial work. Im not sure of the technical back end
but from what I remember from a printer friend of mine who told me about this guy .. he ended up with an armful of 8x10 negatives that he somehow printed together to fabricate 1 image. Kind of Uelsmannesque-Head-Trippy Surrealism + Lazlo Maholy Nagy meets 1980s advertising glitz.
It probably wouldn't be hard to do this in the dark. If you can find a book or "camera and darkroom" poke around for articles on combination printing... you can also probably
do something similar by double and triple and quadruple exposing NEGATIVES in camera with different focal points and stack your exposures that way too.

Have fun !
John

 

[ic-racer]

The darkroom techniques date to back to Rejlander. No special camera or lighting setup is needed. Print the individual elements and cut them free from their backgrounds. Paste them to a new background. Then use media to touch it up, colorize it, and blend it together at the seams and shoot the final artwork with a process camera.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I don't think what is being referred to here as focus stacking has anything to do with composite paste-ups, but if it did, no re-photograhed paste-up comes close to the nearly seamless tonality of what Uelsman did.