Saturday, November 02, 2024

Werner Herzog --March 1996 - left my darkroom print - right my inkjet print after scanning

 Darkroom print where I used a colour head on my enlarger and printed it partly with a yellow setting (for shadow detail) and then with magenta (for contrast). On the eyes I used potassium ferrocyanide to bleach and bring out the detail of the eyes. Note the non archival nature of Ilford Multigrade plastic coated paper.

 

 While my photographic career blossomed and prospered in that 20^th century I have adopted many of the photographic advances of the 21^st.

I became a good darkroom printer of b+w and colour negatives and even learned to transform my Kodachromes and Ektachromes into Cybachrome prints.

The bête noir of printing in a darkroom was to show shadow detail. Even Ansel Adams with his zone system could not extract all that information in the shadows of his negatives.

In that century with Cybachromes prints having a lot of contrast which was enhanced by their extreme glossy look the only other alternative was to convert slides into internegatives then have them printed as colour prints. This method was not entirely sharp and we all knew that few colour prints were archival.

The solution to all the above happened by the end of the 20^th century when scanners came into the picture. Scanners (my Epson Perfection V700 Photo) are able to extract all that shadow detail. My 20-year-old Photoshop 8 has a most useful tool that brings out not only the shadow detail of negatives, slides and prints but also the hidden shadow detail that modern digital cameras are designed to curtail as people now want contrasty and sharp photographs.

When inkjet printing was introduced, photography was still being discussed as not being art. Those that printed inkjets attempted to rename these prints as giclées. Few ever figured out that in this French term translated to spray had a slang term that equated it to male ejaculation.

Those who know about photography in that past century might know that Ansel Adams used to sign the back of his photographs with pencil. This meant that he had printed them.

In that other century some photographers (and this one) would file our enlarger negative carrier. This resulted in what is now called a crazy border. The crazy border confirmed two facts. One was that the photographer had not cropped the negative and had not cropped the image in camera. It also meant that the photographer had printed the photograph and not a lab.

As a graphic example of all the above is March 1996 portrait of Werner Herzog. I used my Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD loaded with Ilford FP-4 Plus. I used two lights. One was for the background and the other was a light high up ensconced in a grid which narrowed the light. The negative produced was in high contrast.

On the left of my example here the best I could do in my darkroom hides most of the information (which was there!) in the shadows. Compare that with the scanned negative and printed inkjet on the

People might say that the photograph on the right is not realistic. But with my human eyes I saw those details as our eyes can go from black to white with those middle greys with no problem.

I believe that inkjet prints should not be given the respect they deserve as well as those who print them.