[pure-silver] Re: Hubert Grooteclaes
- From: "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:50:05 -0800
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eddy Willems" <eddy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 2:24 AM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: Hubert Grooteclaes
Hubert had an old portret enlarger lens, wide open it was
soft like you
see in his pictures,
at the end of his life he was printing his old negatieves
again but this
time very sharp
and yes he worked with color pencils on his prints
best regards
I am on my dial-up right now so looking at the images
is really not possible. However, FWIW, soft focus lenses and
diffusers tend to spread out bright areas of the image. When
used on a camera they diffuse the highlights mostly,
spreading them out. The exact effect depends on the
mechanism of diffusion, i.e. whether from uncorrected
spherical aberration or straight diffusion from some object
in front of the lens.
When used on an enlarger, and enlarging from negatives,
the effect on the print is the reverse: the lens is still
diffusing the bright areas but these are now the shadows so
the effect in the print is to spread out or blur the
shadows. While this kind of diffusion has been used to good
effect it is quite different from the effect on a camera or
when making a reversal enlargement. I find it mostly leads
to rather murky images where the effect on highlights leads
to a glowing quality.
Without seeing the photos I have no idea of what
Grootclaes was doing but it should be fairly obvious.
OTOH, if he was able to make sharp print later than the
diffusion or whatever it was, had to be on the enlarger.
There are a great many materials which can be used for
diffusion, those with simple geometrical patterns, like
cheesecloth or window screen, tend to have a directional
diffraction pattern (typically star- or cross-shaped) where
a soft focus lens does not.
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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