Isis - November 1990

 

Kodak T-Max 3200

In Spanish when something untoward would happen to me my grandmother would say, “No hay mal que por bien no venga.” That translates literally to, “Nothing bad happens that for a good reason it happens.” In English the equivalent is, “Every cloud has a silver lining.”

The key to consistent photography lies in that very word, consistent. When something unexpected ruins your photograph you can track it back if you have that consistent system.

The original solarized print

 

In photography many a fabulous result has happened because of a mistake in that consistency. I had a Man Ray event in my darkroom work once. My involvement with a darkroom began in 1961 and stopped 8 years ago when Rosemary and I moved from Kerrisdale (I had a darkroom) to Kits where I have an oficina (computer, monitor and scanner).  I print inkjets. The combination of scanning my negatives with my good scanner and the resulting inkjet provides shadow detail that has always been there but that a traditional darkroom could not. 

My Man Ray occurred when I had projected a 35mm negative of a lovely ecdysiast called Isis on to 8x10 photographic paper. I put it into the developer. The image began to appear and somehow for some reason I turned on the darkroom lights.   I turned them off quickly but the “damage” was done and I had a very nice solarized print a la Man Ray.

Because I still teach or try to teach in these blogs I am placing here how it all happened:

1. A scan of the original negative. Because I had her right hand little finger much too close to the edge that was a salient mistake.

2. In the solarized print I had added by edge burning some black to give her little finger some space. This original solarized print is quite light.

3. I scanned that number 2 and with my 22 year-old Photoshop-8 I have darkened the print and added a bit more contrast, etc.