Keith Carter gallery vs National Geographic

MurrayMinchin said:

Sounds interesting. Went to your Photrio profile page and noticed you don't have any 'media' or images in the gallery...do you have a link where I could see some?

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I just saw your images, looks great, Is it all film? What about the color photos?

Pieter12 said:

You should read Weston's Daybooks.

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Just downloaded copy of this book. Did Weston/Ansel ever use masking to make their prints?

Murray - I took down my website quite awhile ago. It was quite good for its era, one of former low web speeds, that is. But now like then, the web is an utterly miserable medium for presenting either color nuance or scale. And web surfers are an entirely different species than actual print collectors. I do strictly film and real darkroom, including color, though my darkroom is rather highly equipped and large for a personal setup. Too crowded with all that gear in there for teaching purposes, however.

It's been a long time since the last significant exhibition. I've been shooting and printing all along, with certain large display installations. But family and property responsibilities, along with an intense day job, left me no time for keeping up with any exhibition sideline. Like traveling, best to do that when you're younger and unencumbered. The costs have also skyrocketed. I always mounted and framed my own work - considered it part of the overall composition, and didn't want anyone else tampering with that. I bought most things like plexiglass, museum and mounting board, and frame mouldings wholesale in volume. Have my own frame shop setup. But doing an item here and there piecemeal is pretty expensive these days, especially for large prints, though it's fun to still shape and finish my own frames in the woodshop.

Masking? - Adams might have mentioned it once or twice, but wasn't set up to do it, even though he was surrounded by dye transfer printers in Carmel who understood it well. Edward Weston was even less equipped. I overlapped with some of the next generation, including local dye transfer gurus, and heard some insider stories. I don't know if Cole Weston ever did his own dye transfer printing, or farmed it out; but he did do excellent Cibachrome printing himself. I was told in Maggie Weston's gallery that
the big interneg C-print versions of Cole's classic color images were commercially done.

I was personally doing strictly Ciba at the time, and not even black and white printing, though I had necessarily become good at b&w sheet film development for masking purposes - not bad for bouncing back and forth between a carpeted bedroom with the enlarger in it, and a spare bathroom with the processing drums. Gosh - what a primitive beginning compared to my deluxe darkroom digs soon after that! But it was good enough to land me a series of well-received exhibitions.

kfed1984 said:

I just saw your images, looks great, Is it all film? What about the color photos?

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Thanks. Yes, the older ones are Tri-X and the 'newer' ones are HP5, with both the prints and HP5 negatives developed in 12/15 developer...that's the Ansco 120-ish + Glycin developer I concocted which is listed in the "Resources" tab on my profile page. All are from 4x5 negatives.

I haven't uploaded any colour photographs to the gallery.

Current hand coated hybrid prints aren't at a point where I'd want to share them...yet.

kfed1984 said:

Just downloaded copy of this book. Did Weston/Ansel ever use masking to make their prints?

The Daybooks of Edward Weston; Two Volumes in One: I. Mexico, II. California - PDF Drive

www.pdfdrive.com

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I don't know about AA, but Weston's prints were pretty straightforward contact prints, some dodging and burning.

DREW WILEY said:

Murray - I took down my website quite awhile ago. It was quite good for its era, one of former low web speeds, that is. But now like then, the web is an utterly miserable medium for presenting either color nuance or scale. And web surfers are an entirely different species than actual print collectors. I do strictly film and real darkroom, including color, though my darkroom is rather highly equipped and large for a personal setup. Too crowded with all that gear in there for teaching purposes, however.

It's been a long time since the last significant exhibition. I've been shooting and printing all along, with certain large display installations. But family and property responsibilities, along with an intense day job, left me no time for keeping up with any exhibition sideline. Like traveling, best to do that when you're younger and unencumbered.

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Yup, the Internet is a hot mess at times, and a fresh out-of-the-box computer screen compared to a calibrated one is eye opening to say the least.

Too bad about not being able to see some of your images though, as a hint of someones work is better than nothing. Having said that, I've had a domain name for over a decade and have never done anything with it. The images here were from a very short flurry of uploads over a decade ago.

My wife & I adventured while young, before real jobs, mortgage, child, or other commitments and is highly recommended to any 'youngsters' out there!!!!

I retired 5 years early when I turned 60. Going to fill my memory banks as opposed to a money bank

MurrayMinchin said:

Thanks. Yes, the older ones are Tri-X and the 'newer' ones are HP5, with both the prints and HP5 negatives developed in 12/15 developer...that's the Ansco 120-ish + Glycin developer I concocted which is listed in the "Resources" tab on my profile page.

I haven't uploaded any colour photographs to the gallery.

Current hand coated hybrid prints aren't at point where I'd want to share them...yet.

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never mind about the color, saw someone else's picture.

So to print something like this, do you need masking? Looks very Ansel-like.

The purpose of masking is to bring out local contrast? Lets say to separate the shades in the shadows. But this will flatten the overall contrast right?

kfed1984 said:

never mind about the color, it was another picture.

So to print something like this, do you need masking? Looks very Ansel-like.
View attachment 331671

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I believe that one was printed before I started masking. I would leave that one as is...the dark areas retain enough detail, but are dark enough for the fungi to 'float'.

As I recall, the fungi were nowhere near white, but were a milky light yellow. The exposure was long (more than 5 minutes?) so I placed the shadows were I wanted them, saw the fungi fell around somewhere around Zone VI, then developed the negative normally instead of adjusting development for reciprocity law failure.

This was something I often did in deep, dark, rainforest scenes because it sort of resulted in normal development for the dark areas, and because there was nothing even close to white in the scenes, all the tones around Zone V and VI effectively got something like + development.

That's what lifted and separated the high tones in the fungi in this print.

kfed1984 said:

The purpose of masking is to bring out local contrast? Lets say to separate the shades in the shadows. But this will flatten the overall contrast right?

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No way to answer that without writing a book. I used Lynn Radeka's masking kit & techniques:

https://www.radekaphotography.com

https://www.radekaphotography.com/masking.htm

https://www.maskingkits.com/maskingexamples.htm

MurrayMinchin said:

No way to answer that without writing a book...

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Sorry...salt print sensitizer had dried and was ready for contact printing, so cut my answer short.

Usually, I would choose a paper grade that was best for local contrast in the most important area of the print, then start masking to balance things out.

Condit's leftover stock and name was bought out by Jens at Durst Pro. I don't know what happened to any of that after his death. Seemingly nobody knows. Heiland currently offers custom film punch and register gear, but I have no idea of the pricing or lead time. Any good machinist could make their own. That's how Eliot Porter began, then later switched to early Condit products.

The Radeka and Inglis offerings were very basic, but probably suitable for black and white use. The Alan's Ross method is not really in the same category at all, but informative in terms of an optional or supplemental technique set.

For really large film sizes, one can use pre-press punch and register gear from Olec-Stoesser and Ternes-Burton. That kind of thing can often be found used at very reasonable pricing, but in the Industrial rather than Photographic section of Fleabay.

I was asked to write about masking for Photo & Darkroom Techniques way back when, but declined. Bob Pace's videos are a slice out of time from a past expert. But films and print media themselves have changed so much that the specifics in those old articles and flicks in mostly outdated. Howard Bond once wrote a few basic articles about b&w masking. I've seen some of his resultant prints in person.

Masking strategy is quite different going from DT to Ciba to color neg printing to b&w printing. Fortunately, the punch and register equipment is itself the same.

kfed - masking is capable doing all kinds of things : lowering contrast, raising contrast, selective contrast, accentuating edge effect and microtonality, automatic dodging and burning; selectively favoring one hue category over another in color printing. Like I earlier stated, it's a whole big tool box of its own, potentially doing many different things, and not just a single tool.

DREW WILEY said:

You want a malleable film that is capable of relatively high contrast, but with a curve that doesn't get bent out of shape doing that.

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Speaking about Kodachrome again: if I have some Kodachrome slides, how could I go about printing it on RA4 paper? I imagine it would take more than just making negatives from original slides by contact method and enlarging them on color paper. How would the colors come out?

Making good color internegatives is relatively simple in principle, but can be downright hell in practice unless you're willing to go through a rather tediously fussy learning curve first. You also need some precision equipment to do it well. 35mm slides are so small to begin with, that the contact method is not ideal if you plan to make serious enlargements. You'd have to enlarge the masked original Kodachome itself, onto the Porta 160 color neg dupe sheet film. But the contact frame method is certainly simpler. You'd need to have a good handle on masking technique too. But yes, once you've reasonably mastered all that, the results can be superb.

Maybe its possible to take a photo of a back-illuminated slide with a macro lens, with a regular medium format camera + portra, in some kind of a jig? Slide being illuminated with a light table with some color filters as required. Large portra sheet film could get expensive.

Also I have a 6x9 roll film holder for medium format. Maybe the bellows on that can be stretched to take a macro shot of the vintage kodachrome. Of course there's the scanning and inkjetting option, but that's just not interesting.

It would be preferable to copy it onto larger and more dimensionally stable 4x5 film. And the original needs to be perfectly flat, and have a registered contrast mask attached.
Flashing the interneg film first is an easier, and was the conventional option commercially, but is less precise and controllable in my opinion than correct masking techniques.

is there a good book that goes over these masking/printing techniques you can recommend? Color and/or B&W

just found this book by Ctein

There is an considerable quantity of information available on masking in a generic sense, or in relation to past dye transfer techniques in particular. However, there is NOTHING to my knowledge available in either print or on the web with reference to masking for sake of generating color internegatives, or with respect to using CURRENTLY AVAILABLE films. I have personally supplied quite a few hints on this forum and another one at previous instances. Ctein worked with now discontinued Pan Masking Film, and mainly in relation to dye transfer printing, and a little bit with reference to Ciba printing.

I recommend either TMax100 or FP4 for current masking purposes. With small format originals, TMX100 is preferable. Registering film masks can be nerve-wracking if you don't have a matching punch and pin register setup. You don't need that just to begin learning the technique. But it's rather difficult to do precisely without it, once you are on the road and expect high quality results.

The intensity of mask contrast for sake of a color interneg from a Kodachrome original would be similar to that formerly needed for Cibachrome, between .30 and .60 DMax above fbf, depending on the contrast level of the original itself, as well as degree of magnification of the interneg during enlargement. It obviously helps to have a black and white transmission densitometer when evaluating mask densities; but just having a calibrated step tablet to compare with might be sufficient.

Using pan film masks to correct for hue relationships or hue deficiencies is a more involved topic. You want to learn the contrast basics first.

kfed1984 said:

just found this book by Ctein

https://ctein.com/PostExposure2ndIllustrated.pdf

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Well worth printing out those Ctein links.