Well now, it’s time to turn this negative image into a positive one.
It’s not not easy -
whoops, double negative, sorry.
It’s easy, but a little weird.
If you’re just joining us, welcome.
We’re talking about photography. And this is the third video in a series.
We first looked at the earliest days and this lovely Daguerreotype as well as an Ambrotype,
then we took a look at the
“modern”
black and white film development process.
That second video has about 2/3rds as many views as the first one so if you missed it,
you might want to check it out first.
This one is building upon it for sure.
For your convenience I’ve summoned a clicky thingy.
There’s also a link to the whole playlist in the description.
This video is about photographic printing.
What’s exciting about this process is that we actually get to see it occur.
Unlike photographic film which is generally sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light
(we call that being panchromatic, by the way,
which is why so many black and white film stocks have "pan" somewhere in their name)
...
That parenthetical went on too long for this sentence to make sense without restarting it.
So...
Unlike photographic film which is generally sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light,
black and white photographic paper is not.
And by photographic paper, I don’t mean that glossy paper you might buy for your printer.
I mean this stuff.
Actually photographic paper.
Notice this warning;
"Open only in photographic darkroom."
Opening this box right now would quickly ruin all the paper inside.
Here’s a little secret, though.
The best part of a photographic darkroom is how not dark it is thanks to one of these:
It’s a ♪ safelight ♪
And quite the ♪ safelight ♪, too.
I promise that’s the last time I’ll do that.
This Thomas Duplex Super Safelight is not only super,
it’s Thomas!
And it contains a very special kind of light bulb.
Those of you who have been following the channel for...
a while may remember when I did a couple of videos on high pressure sodium lighting.
I mentioned that in the not-too-distant future we’d be looking at a low pressure sodium lamp.
Well, three-and-a-half years later, this is it.
Well, it’s inside of here.
This is it.
I won’t spend too much time on this tangent but this is a now very-obsolete lighting technology
that previously found somewhat widespread use in roadway lighting.
It’s technically a kind of high-intensity-discharge lamp
but in actuality it’s much closer to a fluorescent lamp in terms of how it operates.
It just happens to use metallic sodium and not mercury vapor to create its discharge.
And that’s why it’s in this special borosilicate glass tube inside another tube.
Metallic sodium really hates being itself and would gladly tear other molecules apart with gusto if it had the chance.
It requires… special containment considerations.
For a very long time this was the most energy-efficient light source we knew of,
hitting 200 lumens per watt,
so it made great sense to use for public lighting.
There’s just one small problem with it.
It looks like this. [60 Hz humming is heard from the fixture]
Low pressure sodium lamps are essentially monochromatic light sources.
They’re not quite because of the starting gas -
the pink glow you see when the lamp is cold is a result of the so-called Penning mixture,
a mix of usually neon and argon which allows the lamp to strike and maintain an arc as the sodium vaporizes.
But once the sodium gets all boily and glowy,
it very much overpowers the starting gas and all you see is a sea of very yellow 589 nanometers.
You cannot tell colors apart under this light source
because everything it hits reflects the exact same wavelength back to you, just in different proportions.
This makes everything you see under it look as if it’s black and white
(or, I guess, black and yellow)
which is pretty trippy but also inconvenient for a lot of reasons.
So we pretty much don’t use this technology anymore except in very particular applications.
Like this one!
The photographic papers that we’re about to be playing around with are not sensitive to this wavelength of light.
OK, they’re a little sensitive - with enough exposure they will be affected
but let’s not split hairs.
Now, you might be familiar with safelights that appear red.
That’s an option as well, but it’s sort of old school at this point.
Early photographic plates and films weren’t really sensitive to red light.
Some weren’t at all.
As a tangent to a tangent, this means that in old black and white photos the colors of objects could seem wildly off
if red was a major component.
For example, a red dress may appear black,
and a yellow flower would seem way too dark as to the film it might as well be green.
These films were very sensitive to blue, however,
so a bright blue blouse of hues might appear close to white.
Anyway, those early plates and films could be handled under a red safelight without affecting them,
but since our eyes are much more sensitive to this yellow wavelength than they are red,
and since modern panchromatic films need to be handled in complete darkness anyway,
this is generally a better option for black and white printing work.
By the way, a couple of filters in the safelight are placed over the lamp
to remove the purply-pink light from the penning mixture
as well as dramatically reduce the overall intensity to safer-for-the-paper levels.
Oh and, by the by the way, a safelight like this is by no means necessary -
LEDs or even simple filtered fixtures like these are a much more readily-available option.
I just bought one of these on eBay because it was an excuse to have an LPS lamp in my life.
Oh, and by the by the by the way, the reason this thing is designed like this
is that it’s meant to be hung from the ceiling and bounce its light off of both it and these moveable shutters,
which not only serve as a light output control mechanism
but are also fitted with filters of their own for other darkroom applications.
So now let’s talk about the paper.
First, though, let’s make it safe in here.
How very yellow!
Just as a note, I have the camera’s exposure cranked up just about as far as it goes
so you can see what’s going on.
But the safelight isn’t actually very bright at all -
it’s just to allow you to see what you’re doing, not to light up the room so well that you could read a book.
To me, the room looks about like this.
And as a warning, this video is going to be going back and forth between very dark scenes like this
and ordinarily lit ones… a lot.
So, I’m gonna do my best to tame that with slow fades but be warned brightness is all over the place today.
Anyway, with no other sources of light in this room except for the safelight,
it is now safe to open these boxes of paper in this room under this light.
The paper is kept inside a black plastic bag to protect it from ordinary danger light.
I will unfold the bag, grab exactly one sheet of paper,
then fold it back up and put it back inside the box.
Why?
Well because that’s good darkroom practice and allows you to turn the lights on at any point without worrying about it
but more importantly I want you to see what happens to the paper when you accidentally bump the light switch.
Turning the room lights back on reveals that the paper isn’t white - it’s a kinda gross yellow, actually.
And leaving the lights on causes it to become increasingly discolored with time.
Take a look at this sheet that’s been out all day.
Why does this happen?
Well, because these pieces of paper are coated with a gelatin emulsion of silver halide crystals,
just like what’s on the film.
That’s right, this here paper is actually a large piece of film that,
rather than be transparent and made of plastic,
is white and made of (mostly) paper.
Exposing it to light like we’ve done causes the silver halide crystals to begin reducing into silver,
and the longer we leave it out like this the grosser a color it will become.
Also, it’s thoroughly ruined at this point.
I’m sure a lot of you can see where this is going,
but there’s a critical piece of equipment I haven’t talked about yet.
Let’s ignore it for now and take a look at how this paper interacts with light and photography chemicals.
All we need is uno dos trays,
some tongs, the paper,
and the same three chemicals we were talking about last time.
Developer, stop bath, and fixer.
We’ll be using a different developer than before.
Paper developers tend to be formulated differently for various reasons,
however the stop bath and fixer we’ll be using are also suitable for films
and indeed are the same ones I showed you in the last video.
When dealing with paper I do use stop bath because we can’t easily rinse it between developer and fixer.
The stop bath will neutralize the developer, both stopping the development action and, importantly,
prolonging the life of the fixer.
So it’s neat stuff, and the yellow coloring
(beside that this is really just vinegar)
is a pH indicator so you know when it’s no longer acidic.
Under the safelight the liquid appears clear,
but the indicator will make it appear black when it’s exhausted.
Though really it’s more like a purple.
But you wouldn't know that under this light bulb…
With the chemicals placed in these developing trays,
and the room lights turned off again,
let’s watch what happens when we put a piece of paper fresh from the box into the developer.
It gets wet.
That’s all that happens.
This paper hasn’t been exposed to light other than the safelight
so there’s nothing for the developer to act upon.
But now, let’s turn on the room lights.
Almost immediately, the paper starts getting darker.
Just like in film, the photons coming from the lights cause reduction reactions in parts of the halide crystals,
creating nucleation sites of pure silver within them.
Since it’s sitting in developer,
those seeds are immediately embiggened and the entire crystal becomes solid silver which darkens the paper.
In this case every single crystal’s gettin’ turned to silver so this paper’s gonna be solid black.
Why isn’t it shiny, you ask?
Isn’t silver, like...
silvery?
Well, these are tiny tiny crystals of silver which scatter and absorb incoming light.
Essentially they keep light from hitting the bright paper base and then reflecting back to your eyes -
just like how it blocks light from going through film.
So they reduce the apparent brightness.
OK, so let’s see how we can play around with this.
What if I took a flashlight and turned it on against the paper?
Could we see shapes after developing it?
Indeed we can.
What if I put a bunch of objects on top of the paper and then shined a flashlight at it from a distance?
We get a sort of wacky collage where items which shielded the paper from the light
kept it white - or, in the case of the marbles, focused that light into intense points.
I wonder… what if I put my phone screen on the paper like this?
Could we see the image that was on the screen?
Huh, look at that.
We sorta can.
Though, it’s inverted.
The cat shouldn’t be white.
Say, this gives me an idea.
What if we took this piece of film and put it over the paper?
Maybe use a piece of glass to hold it flat.
Let’s see here.
Flashlight.
Developer.
Look at that!
The dark areas of the film blocked light from reaching the paper which kept it white,
but the light areas let light through and so made the paper dark.
We got a negative image of a negative image so now we have… a positive!
Now, before we can turn the lights on to take a close look,
remember that we still need to fix this paper.
Right now the undeveloped silver halides are still there
and without fixing the paper it will look yellow and gross - and continue to get grosser over time.
Fixing is a critical step both for making a pleasant image, but also for long-term image stability.
So, after spending a brief time in the stop bath to neutralize the developer,
we’ll put the paper in the fixer for at least a couple of minutes.
Once it’s been in there for as long as the fixer you’re using calls for
(and assuming it’s reasonably fresh)
we can turn on the lights and evaluate what we just made.
What we have created is a very sloppy contact print.
It’s very sloppy because, well, for one thing I put the negative in upside-down so the image is backwards,
but also the light source was a flashlight and I wasn’t keeping track of exposure time all that well.
This would be tricky to reproduce.
That’s no matter, though.
We can use a light source which makes an even spread of light, and then we can use a timer to help make this reproducible.
For a while, contact prints were quite common.
Take a look at the box for this Spartus Full-Vue Twin Lens Reflex camera.
(this isn’t really a TLR, by the way, it’s a fancy-looking box camera meant to mimic them in appearance only).
It says the picture size is 2 ¼ by 2 ¼ inches.
That’s the size of the negative it makes with 120 film,
and back in its day you would get prints made pretty much exactly how we made this one.
The finished print ends up the same size as the negative taken in-camera.
But what if we want to make a larger print from this negative?
Let’s consider how this negative was created in the first place.
A camera used a lens to collect light from a large area and concentrate it onto the film which recorded a latent image.
Then after development we ended up with a negative like this.
If we had a sort of backwards camera,
we could take the film and send light through it,
then use a lens to spread the image the film contains over a large area.
We could then point that backwards camera at a large sheet of paper
and end up with a bigger print from a small negative.
Enter...
this thing.
This Beseler Printmaker 35 is a photographic enlarger.
It’s a pretty basic condenser enlarger -
don’t worry about that it just has to do with how the light source behaves -
but the fundamentals between all enlargers are the same.
In here is a light source - a 75 watt incandescent lamp -
and a condensing lens spreads that light in an even column down through a film carrier.
A second lens below the carrier projects an image onto the baseboard below.
The key thing is if you put a piece of film into that carrier,
you project an enlarged image of that very piece of film.
And now you can make big prints from small negatives.
Let’s do that, shall we?
Unfortunately I don’t have the appropriate carrier or lenses to hold 120 film in this enlarger
so we’re gonna go with some 35mm film I shot when I took a train trip over the summer.
As a matter of fact I’m missing several things from this second-hand enlarger.
You may have noticed that the lens carrier is glued on.
Yeah - I don’t think this is the right one for this enlarger
because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how this was supposed to attach to the enlarger head.
So high-school me just used hot glue,
and while it looks pretty cruddy, it’s held up all this time
so who’s laughing now?
Anyway, first let’s make a contact sheet!
Just like we made that contact print,
we can take this whole sheet of negatives and place it over a sheet of paper to make a quick reference sheet
with positive prints of all these images.
Then we can determine if there are any we might want to print.
First, though, we need to figure out an exposure time.
To start, I’ll lift the enlarger head up nice and high
to make a big spread of light on the baseboard.
To figure out the exposure I should use, I’m going to take a strip of paper that I’ve cut for testing purposes
and place it under the film - any part will do - and then both of them under a piece of glass.
Because the film has a slight tint to it,
it’s going to lighten the paper slightly and skew the black level.
This test strip will allow me to compensate for that.
To test for exposure I’m going to cover up most of the film and paper with something opaque,
then expose the paper for two seconds.
I’ll then move the cover over and do it several times more.
This creates a strip of paper that will show banding,
and each band has been exposed for 2 seconds longer than the next.
Now I’ll develop it, stop, fix, and take a look.
This section was exposed for 2 seconds,
this one 4,
this one 6, and so on.
The first section where the film base stops getting darker is the time I want for the contact sheet.
So now, let’s make a contact sheet with this film and expose it for however many seconds we just determined we should do it for.
You’ll notice that I can’t fit the entire thing over the paper.
That’s because I don’t have paper large enough to use with these negative holders,
and I use these negative holders because my film scanner - yes sometimes I scan film like a digital heathen -
can handle strips with 6 frames,
plus these actually hold 36 images unlike these holders that,
while they DO fit an 8 x 10 sheet of paper,
force you to sacrifice a frame on each roll.
Frankly I’m just making this contact sheet for you
because I already have a digital copy of all of these sitting on my computer.
Ordinarily I don’t bother.
Anyway, get on with it!
Now, to be clear the timing here isn’t really critical.
Contact sheets certainly don’t need perfect exposure
but getting it close to ideal will help identify shots that might be troublesome to print
because they weren’t exposed correctly in the camera or are really contrasty or something like that.
If all you want is a sheet of positive images for reference
you can easily just guess a time and if you can see the film against the paper,
oh well no big deal.
But with correct exposure, we know that clear film -
that which wasn’t affected by the light in the camera -
will make the paper at least close to completely black,
and any part of the image on the film will lighten it.
That makes the images more-or-less representative of how they will actually print without adjustments.
Anyway, with our contact sheet made we can pick a frame to print all big like.
How ‘bout this one?
I like it.
So now let’s print it!
I’ll take the film strip containing that image out of the holder,
and now we need to take the negative carrier out of the enlarger like so.
We’re gonna put the negative in with the emulsion side down.
Because we’re using a lens, it’s going to flip the image horizontally and vertically,
so we need to take care that we put the negative in correctly so that it’s projected normally.
I mean, you don’t have to, if you want a mirror image I’m not gonna stop you.
And also, because perspective is flipped between looking down at the film from above and the baseboard looking up at it,
confusingly you want the image to not be reversed when you’re loading the carrier.
It’s easy to mess this up at first but with practice
you’ll eventually only mess up occasionally.
Now here’s a very important step:
dusting for prints.
Particularly when using a condenser enlarger,
dust on the negative will be very visible in the final print
so you want to do your best to get it off.
I’ll give it a little dusting with one of these blower brushes. I tend to have decent luck with these.
but you could also maybe use compressed air,
or one of these things,
do what you like best.
Then we’ll put the carrier into the enlarger and now we’ll switch the light on.
One thing I haven’t talked about yet is the fact that the enlarging lens has an aperture ring just like a camera lens.
This thing really is a backwards camera that barfs light through the film down onto the baseboard
to duplicate the image.
When you’re composing your print, you’ll probably want the lens wide open to make the image as bright as it can be.
Composing your print?
Yeah, there’s a lot you can do here besides just make a big positive from a little negative.
For one, most standard paper sizes are not the same aspect ratio as a 35mm film frame,
so you’re likely gonna be cropping in somewhat.
But you can also crop in more -
put the enlarger head way up here and you’re projecting a large image which your paper will only occupy a part of.
To help with this process (and with keeping the paper steady)
we use an easel like this.
This particular model has a space to hold 8 x 10 paper on one side, and various smaller sizes on the other.
When the paper is aligned with these indexing tabs and the top closed,
the overlap of the top blocks the edges of the paper from the exposure and creates a small white border around your print which looks nice.
But you could also expose the paper with the top open to make a borderless print if that’s your jam.
In fact in that case you don’t even really need an easel,
but have fun with alignment!
The top of the tower is barely captured on this negative so I’m definitely using the easel and the border.
You’ve probably guessed that you need to adjust the focus of the enlarger.
As you move the head up and down the focal point changes,
so you’ll need to adjust it as you do so.
This knob here changes the distance between the lens and the negative to accomplish focusing.
That also means that the image size changes as you focus so there is a bit of finagling to be done here.
But when you’re happy with how your print is composed,
you can use one of these thingies to help ensure focus is spot-on.
This looks like a microscope and kind of is
but what it really does is bounce the projected image off this mirror and into the eyepiece
so it's magnified a lot.
This allows you to actually see the film grain when it’s focused correctly.
I sometimes put a piece of paper under it to ensure that the focal distance is as spot-on as possible -
but honestly I doubt that helps much.
Anyway once we have our print composed and focused we are almost ready to print.
Almost?
Yeah, now we need to do another test.
Because each negative is unique and the distance we have the enlarger from the easel changes the image brightness,
we need to figure out an exposure time just like we did before.
So we’ll use some test strips and an opaque object to block it while we do that repeated exposure trick again.
This time, though, we need to decide what part of the image we want to test.
Remember this is a negative, so the lightest areas of the image will be the darkest on the paper.
We could test somewhere that should be black in the print,
or you could also test on something that will be grey,
really it’s up to you and you’ll get better with practice.
You may want to use the contact sheet to help determine where you want to test and what to shoot for.
Don’t forget that we have the lens’s aperture ring.
When printing, it’s usually a good idea to close it down so that the exposure takes longer.
This gives you more granular control.
The paper is really quite slow - nowhere near as sensitive as typical films.
So with the lens closed down to f11 or f16 the exposure could easily take upwards of 30 seconds.
This allows you to fine-tune the exposure much more easily,
and we’ll see shortly how a long exposure can be really helpful for difficult prints.
Speaking of exposure times…
I haven’t yet talked about this timer.
Because for me, it’s only useful at the very end.
This is a timer made specifically for photographic enlargers.
You simply plug your enlarger into its power outlet and now it is in control of the light bulb.
It has a dial that points from 1 to 60 - that’s seconds.
A button to start it.
And a toggle switch for bypassing the timer.
The idea is you point the outer dial to the time you want,
and when you hit the button the timer starts.
It moves this pointer to the time you have selected,
and a motor slowly moves it back to the start.
Once it’s there, it shuts off.
Now, the reason it’s only coming into the picture now is because
it’s not very accurate.
While I could set this for 2 seconds or even just 1 for making test strips,
it’s just not precise enough to be reliably consistent.
I have a pretty good internal brain clock for counting seconds so I just use the toggle switch manually.
But even if I didn't, stores sell these clock thingies which are pretty handy to have in a darkroom.
However, for longer exposures the timer’s little bit of inconsistency doesn’t really matter
so once I’ve worked out the exposure time I want, I use the timer.
Now, you can get more modern digital versions of these darkroom timers,
but where’s the fun in that?
Anyway, looking at the test strip we made,
this was exposed for 2 seconds, this for 4, this for 6,
and so on.
This was a clear blue sky so we want it to be light in the print but not white.
We can look at some of the features of the tower to help with this too,
but perhaps of even greater help is the contact sheet.
If we like how this looks, we can compare the test strip with the image on the contact sheet and work out an exposure time.
I think I want the exposure to be somewhere between these two values,
so we’ll split the difference between 6 and 8 seconds and shoot for 7.
Now that we have determined our exposure time we can set the timer to that time,
put in a fresh (and whole) sheet of paper,
hit the button…
and just like that we’ve taken a picture.
Or I suppose given a picture?
Now of course we can’t see the image yet, but we will in a moment.
Now I’ll finally tell you about an important technique.
When putting paper into the chemicals,
you want to sort of slip it under the surface so that it immediately gets covered across the entire emulsion.
You don’t want to just plop it in there ‘cause that’ll be weird and bubbly.
Then you want to gently rock the tray back and forth to keep moving the solution around
and, of course, cover whatever might not have been submerged.
Alright, here it comes. Our im-
no, that… that’s...
that's not what we were just printing
you pulled an editing trick on us you…
you…
tuber!
That’s the one we just did.
Yes that one.
OK, so after it’s been in there for a sufficient time -
yet another variable you can play around with -
we’ll put it into the stop bath for thirty seconds or and finally into the fixer.
This fixer only takes a couple of minutes to dissolve the undeveloped halides
and now this print is complete!
Well, aside from rinsing.
You want to get all the fixer off of it because it can damage the print over time if you don’t.
There are a number of print-rinsing products out there,
or you can fill like a two-compartment sink and plug one side of it and just sorta trickle some water over it while you slosh it around in there for a while -
there aren’t hard and fast rules here,
don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
Except, maybe if you work in a professional photo finishing lab
but then you knew about all this already.
What are you doing here?
Anyway, after you’ve rinsed it for a while you’ll want to dry it.
You might put the paper up on some sort of flat surface and use a squeegee to get most of the water out
then hang it to dry. Or just put it on some towels.
Or use a dedicated print dryer.
There’s ever so much incredibly specific equipment you can buy if you feel the need!
So that’s the basic printing process.
This print, though….
It’s pretty dark.
One of the struggles with darkroom printing is that it’s really, really hard to judge the print under the safelight.
Everything looks much darker than it really is,
and even a light gray looks quite different from the white border.
So it’s pretty easy to see a really dark image and think it’s probably fine when…
it isn’t.
Honestly this just takes a lot of practice to get good at -
practice that I haven’t had in years.
So, uh, let’s try again but with less exposure.
This is a much better print, though it could still probably do with a bit of lightening up.
It could probably do with some extra contrast, too.
And wouldn’t ya know it, there’s a way to make that happen.
The majority of black and white paper in use these days is variable contrast paper, or VC.
The RC, by the way, isn’t Royal Crown, or radio-controlled,
it’s resin-coated and describes the construction of the paper.
I’m not gonna delve into that here because that whole topic is just filled with very, very deep rabbit holes
but basically resin-coated paper isn’t very absorbent and is a lot easier to process, handle and dry
but has its own downsides of course.
Oh and “pearl” is just the surface finish.
Anyway, the emulsion on variable-contrast papers is made of multiple parts,
and these parts are composed of silver halide mixtures that are differently sensitive to particular wavelengths of light.
Of course none of the silver halides are sensitive to this yellow safelight or red light.
However, their sensitivity to the other parts of the spectrum is different between them.
All of the crystals are equally sensitive to blue wavelengths.
With blue light they quickly capture a latent image and have a compressed dynamic range in the final result.
However, some of the halide crystals aren’t very sensitive to green wavelengths.
Under green light, those basically don’t form a latent image at all,
and it takes much more exposure time to turn the paper black since only some of the crystals are affected.
This may sound trivial,
but with the aid of simple color filters between the enlarger and the paper,
you can adjust the ratio of sensitivity between these components
and thus adjust contrast in the final print.
Here’s how:
This is a set of Ilford Multigrade contrast filters.
They are graded from double zero - that’s very low contrast -
to five - very high contrast.
Without a filter in-place, most paper behaves as it does with a grade two filter.
Now, Ilford includes a grade two filter because all of these filters are calibrated to produce the same exposure,
so if you want to adjust contrast up or down you don’t need to figure out a new exposure time
assuming you printed with a filter in place from the start.
Grades four, four-and-a-half, and five require a doubling in exposure time from the rest,
however that’s still pretty easy.
If you look at filter 00, you’ll see it’s yellow.
This filter is blocking the majority of blue light from the enlarger,
meaning only the slow-to-respond green-sensitive halides will be affected in the exposure.
Filter 5, on the other hand, is magenta.
That blocks the majority of green light but allows blue through,
eliminating the effect of the slow-to-respond crystals.
Remember, they’re all equally sensitive to blue.
This causes the paper to quickly become fully-exposed,
compressing dynamic range and increasing the apparent contrast.
All of the grades between five and double-zero have slightly different ratios of blue-to-green,
allowing you to dial-in a sweet spot between these two response curves.
I don’t know if I’ve explained that all that well,
but let’s re-print this image with a contrast grade of 3.5.
I didn’t use filter 2 when making the initial prints so I am going to need a new exposure test.
I’m also going to test between the wall here and the sky
because I want this part of the sky fairly close to white.
That might be a mistake but there’s only one way to find out!
OK, let’s go for this exposure time, and make one more print.
Since we’re now biasing the light towards blue,
what’s essentially happening is the darker parts of the image are getting exposed more quickly.
Requiring less light to turn the paper black means the highlights can stay brighter compared to the shadows,
and the range of brightness values we get on the paper is compressed somewhat.
And...
here’s the resulting print.
What do you think? I think it’s a big improvement.
Now let’s talk about when you’d want to go the other way.
I like this image a lot.
The bystanders on the platform combined with the perspective convey a sense of the immense scale of the locomotive,
and the casual stance and luggage of the people tells the story of train travel.
We are looking at a digital scan of the negative, though.
This is a very challenging image to print in a darkroom.
Film can capture a much wider dynamic range than paper can,
and since the front of the locomotive is in shadow,
exposing the paper so that we can see detail in the sky crushes the front of the train into a sea of black.
But we know there’s detail to be found there -
looking at the scan we can clearly see the engine number but in this print...
you just can’t.
The people are also now in silhouette, when we can at least see some detail here.
This is the exact sort of image we’ll want to use the lower contrast filters for.
To show the effect of the lower contrast filters,
I made these three 5 by 7 prints.
These were exposed for the same length of time with the 2.5 filter, the 1 filter, and the double zero filter.
Notice that the filter is pulling up the shadows
but not affecting the highlights.
We see just about the same darkness in this corner across all three prints.
But as we go down in contrast grades,
the shadows are revealing more detail.
With less and less blue light in the exposure,
it took a lot longer for the paper to darken to black,
and in fact on this print it didn’t really make it there at all.
To get more detail out of the highlights we need to expose for longer.
These three prints were all done at 7.5 seconds.
Now, let’s take the double zero print and add exposure time to it.
Here’s double zero at 11 seconds.
And now 18.
More time finally pulls the highlights down to the point we can begin to see the sky’s detail,
and indeed more detail in the train cars, too.
But of course the shadows are also getting darker, now.
I think the exposure on the 11 second print is pretty close to ideal,
but I wish we could pull a little more detail out of the sky.
I wish there were a way we could combine these two exposures somehow.
Oh wait, there is!
Dodging and burning.
Users of photo editing software who have never spent any time in a darkroom are about to get their minds blown.
If we stop the lens of the enlarger down so that the exposure will take a good 30 seconds or so,
we can play around with casting shadows over the paper in regions that we don’t want to get too dark
while the exposure is happening.
That is called dodging,
because you’re blocking light from the enlarger and causing it to miss the paper.
This image is a perfect candidate for dodging -
I want the front of the locomotive to be brighter but still want the paper exposed long enough to see detail in the sky.
So, with a bit of shadow-puppetry skills,
I’ll just block the locomotive for part of the exposure.
You are witnessing the first time I’ve ever attempted dodging and you know what?
Here’s the print.
It’s not bad, is it?
I mean, I’m pretty pleased.
If you’re doing as sloppy of a method as shadow puppets you want to make sure you’re moving a little bit
so you don’t create hard edges.
And there aren’t any hard edges here,
though you do notice some blooming around the locomotive.
The other flaw with the method as I’ve done it is that my fingers are attached to my hand
so I ended up dodging this area of the platform as well.
It’s not too bad here but I did a second print with more aggressive dodging
and honestly this looks like a light-leak in the camera or something.
This one was a little overdone.
If I wanted to do a better job, here, I would have obtained or even fashioned a dodging tool
on a stick so I could cover just the locomotive.
Then I would just rotate the tool to make sure the shadow casted by the stick didn’t stay in one place.
If there were an area that I wanted to be darker than the rest of the image,
I could use burning.
Here you block all of the image except what you want darker and expose that further.
A simple yet effective photo manipulation technique.
If you want, you can get really precise and create masks.
Ilford gives you this red filter with the set of contrast filters
which you can use to project your image onto photo paper without actually exposing it.
If I were really committed,
I could compose my print on the easel, then put a piece of ordinary construction paper or similar below the enlarger
and trace out the shape of the locomotive.
Then I could cut that shape out and make whatever trimmings I might need to
to get as close to the shape as possible and create a very precise mask.
What I’d then do is put some photo paper in the easel, then use the red filter to project the image onto it without exposing it.
While it’s projected, I’d place the mask as precisely as I could, turn off the enlarger and remove the red filter after I’ve done so.
Then put whatever contrast filter I might want in there,
and then finally expose the paper for 20 seconds or so.
If I developed the paper as is there’d be a big hole where the front of the train was
because the mask blocked the light.
However if I expose for another 20 seconds after removing the mask (and being careful not to nudge the paper),
now that hole gets filled in with the front of the train but exposed for half as much time as the rest of the image.
Simple, huh?
Anyway, I think we should stop now.
We have only just scratched the surface of this topic.
Ooh that’s gonna show up in the print.
Uh, anyway, I’m just giving you an overview of the process and that’s about as deep as I’ll go.
There are lots and lots and lots of YouTube channels out there dedicated to film photography and darkroom printing,
and if this interests you I'd encourage you to check them out.
It’s hard for me to pick out one of these film-based channels because their scopes are so different between them,
but I have recently found The Naked Photographer who has not only got a much better (and proper) darkroom setup
but has been doing a lot of great experiments and comparisons.
If you’d like to check out that channel there’s a card and I’ll probably pin it in a comment, too.
I said in the outro of the last video that we’d look at why 35mm film became the dominant format
and pretty much remains so to this day.
Well, uh, we’re out of time.
But the mere existence of this thing should give you a decent clue.
Enlarging this tiny film frame to an 8 x 10 inch print is about a 6000% increase in size,
and yet it still looks pretty sharp.
Film is pretty amazing stuff.
♫ contrastingly smooth jazz ♫
Resin-coated paper isn’t very absorbent and it’s a lot easier to process, handle, and dry but…
oh you sharnt… you aren’t supposed to see this image yet.
Right.
Then I will fold it back up, put it back in the box…
which is upside down.
For a very long time, this was the most efficient energy…
dangit!
For a very long time, this was the most efficient energy lights…
I did it again! I said efficient energy!
The paper is kept inside of a plack…
plack blastic plag!
But even if I didn’t, stores sell these clock thingies which are pretty han…
pleurgh
dangit!
I don’t mean that glossy paper you might buy for your print…
yeah I need to have it in my hands!
We’d be looking at a deuhhh!!
So, how many of you had no idea how this process works?
I sorta get the sense that it's a lot, but also I'm not sure.
Like, I imagine even a lot of the older folks out there who used film cameras for decades didn't know this,
but maybe I'm completely off base there.
Anywho, toodles!