Making a black and White print

[cliveh]

How long do you think it takes to be reasonably proficient at producing a decent black & white print? It took me about 20 years.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

What do you consider decent?

 

[MattKing]

Christopher's question is a good one.
I started in my pre-teens.
By age twenty I was good enough to get paid for it.
So somewhere around 5-8 years.
And there were a lot of distractions around through that time.

 

[cliveh]

What do you consider decent?

Prints that I am happy about.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Christopher's question is a good one.
I started in my pre-teens.
By age twenty I was good enough to get paid for it.
So somewhere around 5-8 years.
And there were a lot of distractions around through that time.

Prints that I am happy about.

My HS photography teacher taught me how to do a test strip and told me that my print should have "white whites and black blacks and greys in between." I've been trying to achieve prints I'm happy with ever since. I supposed making a "decent" print is just about as subjective as making a "decent" negative.

 

[Maris]

Some of the first prints I made in the 1960s are very good. But "some" actually means very few but not none. This from the 10000 or so negatives shot in my first year.
The big change over time was an improvement in the hit rate. And this came from better subject selection, more disciplined negative exposure and development, and lots of practice with modern variable contrast enlarging papers. Wrangling worthwhile pictures out of those old graded papers was often a chore and a compromise.

 

[dpurdy]

How long it takes probably varies from person to person, however one way to get better is to make sort of close to right test prints without stressing for hours. Then put those prints somewhere you can look at them a lot over some amount of time and start to see what you like in a print and what you would like to do differently. When you have a good idea of it, go back and re print it making the changes you want and then live with that print next to the old print and see if it did indeed improve it.

 

[Ariston]

I am just starting and have already learned how important it is to have a good negative to begin with. I have a negative that produces a print I love, but is marred. So I try to get the same thing out of a second negative shot at the same time and it is just not as good. I cannot draw the contrast I want out of it for some reason - probably the sun just dipped a little behind a cloud or something.

 

[eddie]

My first "decent" prints happened after I learned how to make good negatives. But, what I thought was decent 50 years ago isn't the same as it is today.

 

[R.Gould]

A lifetime, just as you think you know how to make a good print something else happens and you learn something new, I started making prints at age 9, and after 60 years I am still learning