How would you tackle (darkroom) printing this?

snusmumriken

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I'm not a beginner by quite a long chalk, but neither am I a confident printer when faced with a photo that seems to be all similar mid-tones. I'd be interested to know how you folk would tackle printing this image so as to emphasise the two figures without them looking un-naturally isolated.

This is a scan from the negative, of course.

 
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AnselMortensen

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My interpretation would be to burn in the sky a bit, and subtly burn in the bottom corners and sides to make a subtle vignette to bring the focus to the people.
 

Sirius Glass

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Use split grade filtering. The magenta will separate the tones in the lower half of the scene: people and ground. The yellow will bring out the clouds better. Then burn in as suggested by @AnselMortensen.
 

Pieter12

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All of the above. During split grade printing, you could also dodge the people slightly to give them more definition. And burn the foreground to draw the eye to the middle.
 

MattKing

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Here is a digitally created suggestion - mostly cropping and contrast:
 

Don_ih

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I agree with @MattKing (I'm sure he's shocked). I'd probably want to crop more - and maybe burn in the edges a bit - and rotate.

I'd end up with this:



probably.....
 

jeffreyg

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I agree with the others and will go out on a limb and really crop On the left as viewed the plateau and on the right the same. That is if the subject is the people. A square format can work. The background is not that interesting so it won’t really add to the image Just a thought. If you make two “L” shaped pieces of mat board you can test amounts of cropping on a full frame test print to see what works for you.
 
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snusmumriken

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Interesting and helpful ideas, thanks. I should probably have said at the outset that both partial and 100% cropping are options I don’t want to consider! So actually the first few suggestions are what I needed to hear.

The fact that several of you suggested cropping illustrates the problem: that unless I can emphasise it by printing you will miss the point. This was taken at the highest point in Brittany (France), a site used by the occupying German army in WW2 as a radio station. It’s a wide, desolate landscape, much cut about by man - not at all the kind of thing I had expected to see in Brittany. These two guys could have been war historians or pilgrims or lepidopterists for all I know, but they had chosen to turn their backs on the little chapel, the disconcerting gun emplacements and the other tourists, and instead to sit apart looking out over this barely-covered rockscape and overcast sky.

If the point is lost, this photo is for the bin. But I still need to learn to deal with those overly-uniform tones, because this is a problem I face too often. This will do as an learning-piece. I will try split-grade along the lines suggested and see what I can achieve.
 

pentaxuser

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Jonathan, I'd be curious to see if the suggested alterations can be achieved by simply increasing the grade of the print without the use of split grade and then what the difference( improvement) is by using the split grade method without any dodging and burning, then finally by split grade and dodging the people slightly

What I wonder about is whether the dodging of the two people can be achieved without any hint of a halo or a darkening of what they are sitting on and the area of grass between them at least to the extent of avoiding a halo. The smallest hint of the grass beíng darkened may not matter if it was a small difference.

You may have gathered that I wonder if in this case split grade printing results in achieving what you cannot achieve with the right single grade and exposure but I'd love to see if it can be done

pentaxuser
 

Alex Benjamin

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This photo has a lot of potential, but we're talking many days work. Main difficulty is that because of your high vantage point, we can't feel the sense of depth. We can tell, in other words, is how far (or how close), the different parts of the landscape are to them. Feeling how far things are—how far they are looking—is, in my mind, essential to the feeling of isolation you want to convey.

The project, therefore, would be to see if it's possible to somehow give this a sense of depth. No one magic tric. I would work on this in stage. First would be to isolate and separate the different major pieces of the landscape. For that, I would follow both their gaze and what seems like a natural design that moves from center to right.

I would experiment to find the general printing time for each that would give me a sense of depth and distance.



Next step would be to localise different larger elements. Most important one, as Patrick Robert James pointed out, is the promontory on which they are sitting. It needs to be separated from the landscape in order to show they are sitting atop of it. I would also work at that point on the trees (right) and the darker line in the back. The trees on the right are especially important since they are the only objects that give a sense of scale. In order to see how far they are, they need to look like trees, not like bushes.



Next step would be to work on local contrast. That's the point at which I would (or might) use a different grade. That part is probably the longest. I've outlined some parts I would probably work on, but I might throw out the results and try different parts. The difficulty would be, if I were indeed able to figure out the depth problem, to harmonize the smaller parts with the whole.




That small piece of landscape in front on the trees I mentioned before is also important. That, as well as the trees, is what they seem to be looking at. I say "seem" because that's what's interesting about this picture. The ambiguity as to their relationship with the landscape. Impossible to tell if they are talking to each other (therefore not involved with the landscape), it the man on the left is talking while the other is listening, if they are both lost in thought, if they are both contemplating something specific about the landscape on the right, etc...

It's a good photo, but it's a though negative.
 

MattKing

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snusmumriken said:
The fact that several of you suggested cropping illustrates the problem: that unless I can emphasise it by printing you will miss the point.
Click to expand...

That is why the only cropping I suggested was some of the sky - the wider aspect ratio then adds to the feeling of "expanse".
 

Don_ih

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snusmumriken said:
The fact that several of you suggested cropping illustrates the problem: that unless I can emphasise it by printing you will miss the point.
Click to expand...

If the point is the barren landscape, then the figures don't need to be emphasized. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with an uncropped version, but you will not get any real emphasis on the people unless it is cropped. They're incidental, according to your story, so they don't need emphasis. But the print needs more contrast and probably a burning of the sky.

Unlike Alex, I think a more important element of the image is the set of steps up to where they sit - which is why I dodged it in my suggestion (and why I levelled the photo based on it). I see it as the gateway to what's happening - but I genuinely didn't (and would never, really) care about where they were. And I don't see the "point" of a photo being anything other than what you can glean from looking at it. If it relies on extraneous information, it doesn't much matter how it's printed.
 

MattKing

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Don_ih said:
And I don't see the "point" of a photo being anything other than what you can glean from looking at it. If it relies on extraneous information, it doesn't much matter how it's printed.
Click to expand...

Sometimes, the "point" of a photo is that it helps illustrate or reinforce the extraneous. In other cases, a photo is intended to stand on its own, but becoming aware of the extraneous helps add to our appreciation of it.
All of which means - it depends .
 

albada

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I think adding haze to the distant hills will make them look distant, giving the photo a stronger sense of depth. No sample here because I don't know how to do that in Gimp, but under the enlarger, you can put some hazy material such as vellum above the paper, as if you were dodging.
And then boosting the contrast (grade) some would help the foreground.

Mark
 

Alex Benjamin

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Forgot to add. I would/might do a slight rotation to make the horizon line straight. Still debating... It does help give a sense of distance and depth.

 
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snusmumriken

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Alex Benjamin said:
Forgot to add. I would/might do a slight rotation to make the horizon line straight. Still debating... It does help give a sense of distance and depth.
Click to expand...
Definitely that! All the rest I will try. Have sent to Ilford seeking further supplies of paper. As you say, it could take some time to crack this one. If both characters had worn dark clothes it might have been easier.
 

Don_ih

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Yeah, actually, I changed my mind about what I said. Well, no so much about what I said but how I phrased it. I didn't mean to imply that the point of the photo gets completely lost if the additional information is unavailable - more that the particular context of the photo is significant but not mentioned in the original post. (That's why I said I didn't care where they were sitting - as in, the location was not a consideration).

Taking into consideration the location, I think no cropping is better, but would still rotate - like Alex's image, above.
 

Sharktooth

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I think the grey windswept desolation works well as is. It just needs a caption to set the right tone.

 

grain elevator

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Apart from higher contrast for the foreground (maybe not the far hills, to emphasise depth, as has been mentioned), IMHO it needs a little bit of dodging around to the left of the dark clad person, then the people stand out enough.
I don't really see what you mean by all similar mid-tones, the scan you posted is just very low contrast. The spatial distribution of tones is good and has a rhythm to it.
 
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