Solarization

[chandrastudios]

how do you guys do your solarization ?

 

[Romanko]

Do you mean the Sabattier effect (partial image reversal)?

 

[BAC1967]

I use a special film, Kodak Spectrum Analysis film 5367, no.1 expired 4/1981. The film is only sensitive to UV and blue light. This was a 4 second exposure at f/4.5. It has been reversed like you normally would with a negative but you can see where the bright sky and some of the glass has become solarized from overexposure. This film is extremely slow, less than 1 ISO.

Volunteer Park Conservatory by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr

This was a long exposure for 1 minute at f/2.8. It is a positive image on the film due to solarization from overexposure.

Sammamish River at Waynes by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr

This was a 2 second exposure at f/2.8 of the same scene. It has been reversed like you would with a negative. You can see where the bright sky has become solarized but the rest of the scene has not.

Sammamish River at Waynes by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr

 

[Romanko]

I tried overexposing HP5+ to get solarization but even at very long exposures of 4 min. at f2 under full sun I could not get the reversal effect. The density just kept increasing until it reached a plateau.

 

[chandrastudios]

Do you mean the Sabattier effect (partial image reversal)?

apparently these are two different techniques

 

[chandrastudios]

I use a special film, Kodak Spectrum Analysis film 5367, no.1 expired 4/1981. The film is only sensitive to UV and blue light. This was a 4 second exposure at f/4.5. It has been reversed like you normally would with a negative but you can see where the bright sky and some of the glass has become solarized from overexposure. This film is extremely slow, less than 1 ISO.

Volunteer Park Conservatory by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr

This was a long exposure for 1 minute at f/2.8. It is a positive image on the film due to solarization from overexposure.

Sammamish River at Waynes by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr

This was a 2 second exposure at f/2.8 of the same scene. It has been reversed like you would with a negative. You can see where the bright sky has become solarized but the rest of the scene has not.

Sammamish River at Waynes by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr

interesting, i always thought that it was a paper processing technique.

 

[chandrastudios]

I tried overexposing HP5+ to get solarization but even at very long exposures of 4 min. at f2 under full sun I could not get the reversal effect. The density just kept increasing until it reached a plateau.

the idea of achieving the effect of solarization through film is new to me because the only way i have approached the technique is by flashing light for a fraction of a second before fixing the image.

 

[MattKing]

the idea of achieving the effect of solarization through film is new to me because the only way i have approached the technique is by flashing light for a fraction of a second before fixing the image.

And that is the Sabattier effect, not solarization.
You are not the first to do that.
In certain circumstances, the results can appear to have some similarities.

 

[Bill Burk]

Your experience is with the Sabattier effect. It is most commonly done with prints in the developer tray. Bob Carnie did a series where he used the Sabattier effect on large format negatives. But most of us just play with the prints.

True Solarization, is an effect of film characteristics where there is a pattern of increasing density in response to light until you reach a certain threshold. As you start to give gross overexposure beyond that threshold density starts to change direction (reversal) and goes down in response to greater amounts of light until yet again it starts to go up. It goes in a cycle up and down as you continue to increase exposure.

That's why @BAC1967 's pictures are so interesting. That's true solarization.

 

[chandrastudios]

Your experience is with the Sabattier effect. It is most commonly done with prints in the developer tray. Bob Carnie did a series where he used the Sabattier effect on large format negatives. But most of us just play with the prints.

True Solarization, is an effect of film characteristics where there is a pattern of increasing density in response to light until you reach a certain threshold. As you start to give gross overexposure beyond that threshold density starts to change direction (reversal) and goes down in response to greater amounts of light until yet again it starts to go up. It goes in a cycle up and down as you continue to increase exposure.

That's why @BAC1967 's pictures are so interesting. That's true solarization.

so do you overexpose while in the camera or during the development process?

 

[Bill Burk]

True solarization takes a gross overexposure in camera. Maybe 1000 times or 10,000 times more than usual exposure.

This is a graph showing theoretical solarization curve from Todd-Zakia, Photographic Sensitometry.

 

[chandrastudios]

i don't really understand this but thanks...to simply understand, i need to overexpose my shots, that i understood. what would the development process be like? just normal ? and does it have to be a specific kind of film? or any black and white film will do ?

 

[MattKing]

i don't really understand this but thanks...to simply understand, i need to overexpose my shots, that i understood. what would the development process be like? just normal ? and does it have to be a specific kind of film? or any black and white film will do ?

For Sabattier, you expose your print fairly normally, and then experiment with an additional flashing exposure on top of that.
For solarization, you experiment with fairly normal in camera exposure of the subject, but attempt to include something - such as the unshaded sun itself - into the frame. The relatively massive amount of light coming from the sun may result in an inversion - light becomes dark - on the print for the sun.
Modern films are resistant to solarization.
See the Wikipedia article for a useful explanation of solarization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar...,open position, producing severe overexposure.

 

[Bill Burk]

It's extreme overexposure and then process as normal.

Different films will behave differently you will have to test. @BAC1967 used a special film.

But you can see he's doing a whole minute at f/2.8 in broad daylight to get into region of reversal (part of the graph number 5) with that particular film.

It'll probably work with some papers too, if you put paper in a camera and treat it like film.

 

[BAC1967]

I did a lot of bracketing to figure it out. I like it best when I get the sky solarized with the rest normal, like the conservatory photo above. With this one only the sun and clouds around it are solarized to get the black sun effect. Again, I had to bracket a few shots to get this. This was 1 second exposure at f/4.5. The sculpture is called Black Sun.

Black Sun Black Sun by Bryan Chernick, on Flickr

 

[Bill Burk]

That’s insanely great!

 

[snusmumriken]

Am I correct in thinking that what Man Ray experimented with was done during printing rather than during film exposure? So Sabattier rather than Solarisation, according to the distinction made above? Is there a difference in principle between the two?

 

[MattKing]

Am I correct in thinking that what Man Ray experimented with was done during printing rather than during film exposure? So Sabattier rather than Solarisation, according to the distinction made above? Is there a difference in principle between the two?

Their only similarity is in how the results sometimes appear.
The mechanisms are entirely different.

 

[Bill Burk]

I don’t think he used the term. Man Ray was calling them Rayographs.

 

[Carnie Bob]

Am I correct in thinking that what Man Ray experimented with was done during printing rather than during film exposure? So Sabattier rather than Solarisation, according to the distinction made above? Is there a difference in principle between the two?

If you see a black makie line in the final print the film has been solarized, if you see a white makie line then the print has been solarized, if you see both black and white makie lines then the orig neg and print have been solarized.

 

[Carnie Bob]

so do you overexpose while in the camera or during the development process?

If you are trying to get a Man Ray Lee Miller effect then you flash light during development or printing depending on what kind of makie line you want. The developer is most important as well , metol based only for my work. I am doing color negative film flash sabattier , solarization, reversal of tones this week . Not sure what you would call it but the effect is quite lovely and my whole series of work is based on this method of production.

 

[Carnie Bob]

A lot of commercial photographers would get a similar effect when using polaroid negative film.. after the main exposure was done they would pop flash
the polaroid before development and get amazing effects.. Frank Okenfel did this a lot as did many photographers here in Toronto back in the day.