Enlarging without dodging.

[Keith Tapscott.]

A short article about expressive printing in the darkroom.

Expressive printing.

Scanning and inverting is not enough.

masterprinter.substack.com

 

[pentaxuser]

Thanks Keith. Well there are enough aspects in that article and what Andrew Sanderson says to keep us going for months. I kept on seeing in advance what comments and by whom will be made.

Not sure what "Student Quality paper" is nor who makes it Presumably Andrew has a specific paper or papers in mind but it would have been helpful to say what these are for the sake of those wishing to avoid such paper


pentaxuser

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

The first pons asinorum in the paper is the advice to find the "minimum time for maximum black" and then setting the highlight/white point using contrast filters. This isn't an optimum approach, and in some cases will lead to frustration.

The approach advocated in the paper only works when making normal to high contrast prints from normal to low contrast negatives where the black point is found with a #2 filter and the white point is set by manipulating the contrast by selecting a #2 - #3 1/2 filter (grades #4 - #5 take a bit of head scratching what with the 1 stop speed bump). To be fair, VC papers work best at grades #2 1/2 and above and so low(ish) contrast negatives are prefered.

In actuality, for low contrast prints from high contrast negatives the procedure has to be reversed - find the white point with a #2 filter and then select the appropriate #00 - #2 filter to get to a black in the lowest density part of the negative.

Finding the right filter can be a bit of a PITA, and if using this technique then split grade printing may be the better solution. However, again, the technique has to be modified for low and high contrast negatives. For low contrast negatives make the #5 black point test strip first and then using this exposure make #00 white point strip. For high contrast negatives find the #00 white point test strip first and using this exposure then make the #5 black point test strip(1). For normal negatives that print best at #2 or #2 1/2 grade it doesn't matter much what order is used, but then why bother with split grade?

With the better behaved MGV paper a white point first approach will work well well up to #3 filtration. #3 1/2 will need some tweeking and #4 - #5 should be black point first (2).

The second pons asinorum to cross is dodging V. burning.

Obviously, identical prints can be made with all burning or all dodging. For the burning approach set the base exposure for the part of the print you want to be the lightest and then burn in everything else. For a dodging approach set the base exposure to the part of the print you want to be darkest and then dodge back everything else.

The idea of "burning" a print while holding a dodger is a pons all to itself.

A more rational approach is the set the base exposure so that it is correct for the majority of the print and then burn what needs burning and dodge what needs dodging. If one finds oneself doing a whole lot of dodging then it may be simpler to make a lighter print and instead burn in the dark bits. If there is an excess of burning then the same effect may be effected with a few dodges.

* * *​

Anyone who claims to have found The Answer is suspect. There are many problems, and any one problem has many answers. In the real world 2 + 2 = 3 is a legitamate solution for sufficiently small values of 2 and sufficiently large values of 3 - ask any lumber yard.

--------------
(1) http://www.darkroomautomation.com/support/appnotesgmeasured.pdf
(2) http://www.darkroomautomation.com/support/mgvrchd.jpg

 

[Carnie Bob]

His examples were quite terrible, obvious with no subtle workmanship. So poor in fact I could not really read the article , but if he is saying dodging is not required but rather employ burning I would say he does not have a clue about printing. The dodging tool is IMO the weapon of mass destruction ( good) excessive burning a bad thing.

 

[koraks]

His examples were quite terrible, obvious with no subtle workmanship.

I kind of felt bad for pointing this out, so I hesitated, but apparently I'm not the only one to have been bothered by this. I'm OK with any degree of processing, personally, but the heavy-handed application and the strong halos in the examples don't do much for the images in my opinion.

 

[retina_restoration]

I own two of Andrew Sanderson's prints, and I can say without hesitation that they are beautiful, magical prints. I have no doubt that he knows what he's doing in the darkroom.

 

[Don_ih]

I own two of Andrew Sanderson's prints, and I can say without hesitation that they are beautiful, magical prints. I have no doubt that he knows what he's doing in the darkroom.

I was going to say, his examples in that article are on the heavy-handed side and not representative of his actual work. You're lucky to have a couple of his prints.

He may have selected those photos because the effect he's talking about is pretty obvious in them.

 

[DREW WILEY]

"Without dodging"? Why take away one of the simplest tools conceivable to use, and replace it with something dicey? And burning, yet not a dodging option? That's just plain silly.

Oh well, no harm, no foul. If it works for him, fine. But I'm not going to waste any time with it.

 

[Carnie Bob]

I own two of Andrew Sanderson's prints, and I can say without hesitation that they are beautiful, magical prints. I have no doubt that he knows what he's doing in the darkroom.

I am sure he is a good printer , but the samples are heavy handed to the point of painful to look out on an article about silver printing. Kind of reminds me of the sample prints Fred Picker sent out, absolutely brutal.

 

[Milpool]

It’s kind of the same thing anyway. I mean, if you’re burning something you’re dodging something else and vice versa.

The thing about printing is when it comes to the standard tools - ie local exposure adjustments, contrast, there are different routes to potentially the same result and it comes down to whatever you find most intuitive / comfortable etc. People can be right or wrong about what’s actually happening, but it doesn’t matter as long as you’re using your eyes.

"Without dodging"? Why take away one of the simplest tools conceivable to use, and replace it with something dicey? And burning, yet not a dodging option? That's just plain silly.

Oh well, no harm, no foul. If it works for him, fine. But I'm not going to waste any time with it.

 

[albireo]

the samples are heavy handed to the point of painful to look out on an article about silver printing.

Surely the article/images linked above must be ironic? Someone having a go at the work of 'master printers'? Or AI generated content?

I refuse to believe this is someone's real work.

 

[koraks]

I refuse to believe this is someone's real work.

Oh, I don't doubt it is. For me, the examples aren't very compelling and perhaps they're just not representative of the man's overall work. Perhaps, as @Don_ih suggested, the examples are purposefully chosen to exhibit very obvious signs of rather heavy-handed burning.

Then again, the article is probably just lost on me. The message seems to be "thy shalt burn & dodge." That's fine. I think most darkroom printers realized that somewhere along their journey, and the message seems to be directed at those who are not at that point, and who do not have perfectly valid reasons to avoid that point altogether.

What's more problematic IMO is the way he kind of haphazardly generalizes a couple of things. He doesn't see much signs of people using selective emphasis in their prints. I wonder whose prints he's been looking at. To me it's obvious that most competent amateur & pro printers do this. It doesn't always show as clearly as in his examples, but as said, that's not necessarily a recommendation for his own examples...It can, and usually is, done more subtly. Fortunately! Likewise, his assessment of 'Photoshop' is equally blunt. He doesn't like the results. Which suggests that he believes that the tool somehow dictates the outcome. It's like somebody saying "I don't like novels that were written in Microsoft Word." To me, it says something different: "I choose not to like images made that way and therefore reject them." Let's call a spade, a spade.

But I guess I'm just not the target audience. The way he seems to approach subjects just doesn't mesh with me. He has an article about AI imagery. It's not about AI imagery. It doesn't acknowledge the potential of any AI-assisted means of image making. I suspect he doesn't realize that potential in the first place. He just rejects it and instead axiomatically argues it's not what people will want in the future. His crystal ball must be of a distinctly clearer variety than mine.

 

[pentaxuser]

But I guess I'm just not the target audience.

Yes it seemed to me that your above sentence actually covers most of the replies we have. Has he successfully targeted the audience he has in mind in the best way possible in terms of what he wants them to appreciate about improving their darkroom prints is quite another matter

We may need the experience of those who are in the darkroom printing "instruction game" involving that level of students who may be in a better position to know

pentaxuser

 

[cliveh]

I dodge or burn probably less than 5% of my prints. If you make the correct negative exposure and correct development of the negative for the type of enlarger you use to print, followed by the correct print exposure, without any contrast control, then it is rarely nessesary.

 

[koraks]

then it is rarely nessesary.

'Necessity' is of course rather subjective in this context. Looking at the gallery of B&W images on your website, I personally would have applied burning and/or dodging to about 95% if I were to print them for presentation. That doesn't mean it's "necessary". Just that I think they could look even better that way. I have a feeling that the man who wrote this blog we're commenting on would have made the same argument.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

One thing that absolutely infuriates me in blogging — and you see it a lot with certain types of photo bloggers — is when the writer does a preemptive strike on anybody who might disagree with them. To me, when you write things like "At the risk of kicking off a storm of protest from pedants, I need to say something", you lose all credibility. I have no patience with this "I'm right and you can only be a [insert derogatory comment here] if you disagree with me" attitude.

Especially if you are reinventing a wheel that has been perfected quite a while ago. I mean, it's not like printing has been invented 10 years ago and we're still lacking sources that tells us how to do it...

I have no problem with him telling us how he prints. On the contrary, I find learning how people do this interesting, especially if they do it in a way totally different than mine. Inviting others to try it is fine. But going from there and implying that only through burning can you get an "expressive" print — whatever that means — is absurd.

 

[cliveh]

'Necessity' is of course rather subjective in this context. Looking at the gallery of B&W images on your website, I personally would have applied burning and/or dodging to about 95% if I were to print them for presentation. That doesn't mean it's "necessary". Just that I think they could look even better that way. I have a feeling that the man who wrote this blog we're commenting on would have made the same argument.

Koraks, as you didn't take any of the images on my B&W gallery and you weren't there at the time and don't know what I was trying to communicate in my print, your statement is ridiculous.

 

[koraks]

Oops, urine in the breakfast cereals.

Look, we can all shoot from the hip. The fact that those are your images is exactly the point. Were they mine, I would have printed them differently than you did. That means that the notion of 'necessity' is problematic to apply to the decision to burn & dodge. We choose differently based on a variety of reasons. There's no objective standard by which we can determine necessity here. Had I known your exact intentions and emotions, and due to some freak constellation of celestial bodies I would have ended up printing your negatives, odds are I would still have burned & dodged 95% of them. But you can untwist your underwear now. I'll not touch your images. Breathe out, breathe in.

 

[DREW WILEY]

If some of you want a really doctrinaire rigid condemnation of dodging and burning, go back to PH Emerson, who considered "sundowning" downright unethical. And it was the sun being used back then for contact printing.

 

[Vaughn]

I dodge or burn probably less than 5% of my prints. If you make the correct negative exposure and correct development of the negative for the type of enlarger you use to print, followed by the correct print exposure, without any contrast control, then it is rarely nessesary.

I do much less dodging/burning. I would say the necessity of burning/dodging is driven by the photographer and their image, rather than 'proper' exposure and development. I just tend to push most my editing work up to the front end (during image creation) rather than in post-processing. Saves on film and darkroom time.

Koraks -- you are way out of line...I suggest getting your own panties untwisted first before posting. Your mention that you would someone else's prints differently is meaningless and as mentioned earlier -- ridiculous.

But back to the subject...when I was making silver gelatin prints, for my redwood images I usually printed light and did a lot of burning in to bring out the light I wanted. I tended towards this method due to the subject I was cutting my first photographic teeth on. Shadow areas (branches, under ferns, etc) were often too small and too many to treat separately by dodging. I found I could better treat the shadow areas by printing light and bringing down values where I wanted to by burning. And in the case of the image below, a little flashing in the upper left.

 

[MattKing]

FWIW, I took @koraks initial point not to be saying that there are rules about whether @cliveh should dodge and burn, but rather about there being a difference between what @cliveh and what @koraks would do - i.e. the decision about the issue is one that is personal to the preferences and vision of the photographer/printer.
I've had a bit of experience printing for others. Perhaps the most interesting challenge involved in that is gaining an understanding about the vision or expectations of the person one is printing for.

 

[Vaughn]

FWIW, I took @koraks initial point not to be saying that there are rules about whether @cliveh should dodge and burn, but rather about there being a difference between what @cliveh and what @koraks would do - i.e. the decision about the issue is one that is personal to the preferences and vision of the photographer/printer.
...

But what koraks wrote has No meaning in context to the discussion at hand. Of course he would make different images if he was standing there next to cliveh.

koraks:

...Looking at the gallery of B&W images on your website, I personally would have applied burning and/or dodging to about 95% if I were to print them for presentation. That doesn't mean it's "necessary". Just that I think they could look even better that way....

koraks is judging cliveh's work based on how he would print them himself. As well as meaningless, that's not nice to begin with, and against forum policies to give unwanted critiques -- if he meant no criticism by his words, he needs to be more careful. Because he basically said that he could print cliveh's negative better than cliveh.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Basic premise of the blogger's argument is quite debatable. When he writes:

Light creates mood, but lighting everything kills it. Light must be used to reveal or accentuate something, and to do that there must be other areas that are dark, the dark areas work by revealing their information only when the image is studied. So the thing that you want your viewers to notice in your print should be lit in some way, and the other areas should be darkened down.

I understand that's what works for him — what constitutes "mood," contrary to what he seems to believe, is a very subjective matter — but you can't make it a universal rule.

Sometimes everything is lit, and that's when the good photo is. Contrary to the cliché, there's no rule that says you can't take photos between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. or even full noon — sometimes, that's when the good photo is —, and there's no rule that says light must "reveal" or "accentuate" something, or, to put it differently, that somethings must be hidden. Sometimes, the good photo is when all is seen, sometimes, the good photo is when you want your viewer to notice everything and you make that happen.

I'll add that it's totally fine if there is no black is a photo — if that weren't the case, 85% of Robert Adams' photographs would have to be thrown away. To tell people to "Look for the first appearance of black on the test strip and then check what the highlights look like at that exposure" is most absurd if everything in your photo goes from zone IV or V and up.

 

[MattKing]

But what koraks wrote has No meaning in context to the discussion at hand. Of course he would make different images if he was standing there next to cliveh.

koraks:

koraks is judging cliveh's work based on how he would print them himself. As well as meaningless, that's not nice to begin with, and against forum policies to give unwanted critiques -- if he meant no criticism by his words, he needs to be more careful. Because he basically said that he could print cliveh's negative better than cliveh.

With respect - he isn't judging.
He never says "better".
He only highlights "different".
Which is the context at hand - that decisions about dodging and burning are difficult/impossible to express in terms of clear rules or absolute standards.
And by the way, we definitely aren't talking about the camera exposure stage in this thread - it is a thread about printing.
A few years ago, several people on APUG (as it then was) participated in an exchange where a few sets of negatives were made as identical duplicates, and then one of each was distributed amongst the participants. Each printer was tasked with making their own decisions about how to interpret the negative they received.
The results were both fun and interesting.
And in each case, they reflected the printer as much as they reflected the original negative - because there truly is no one best way to print something.
Here is the APUG/Photrio Gallery where some of the results were shared: https://www.photrio.com/forum/media/categories/lets-all-print-one-negative.15/
It was a difficult and awkward exchange to set up and administer, so it didn't get repeated. Which was too bad, because the experience was a very interesting one.

 

[pbromaghin]

We may need the experience of those who are in the darkroom printing "instruction game" involving that level of students who may be in a better position to know
pentaxuser

Well, that sounds like me, having only recently begun working in my own (or any) darkroom. As of yet, I have attempted very little dodging and burning, with varying lack of success. The article did not impress me, mainly because of the poor examples he gave - clumsy and obvious. But it also wasn't really anything new, because of all the instructional photography books I have inhaled - very good books written over the past 75 years or more. It isn't an article I would want to reread if I were trying to solve a problem or make something wonderful happen.