[pure-silver] Re: NOW: Exposing paper was Re: POP with paper negs?
- From: "richard l. gifford" <rlgif@xxxxxxx>
- To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 17:15:04 -0600
Ray Rogers wrote:
>
>
(snipped heavily)... where humans are involved, we
> tend to look at the eyes initally, and then take in
> other points, but repeatedly come back to the eyes...
A large portion of viewing time is spent acually on
> the eye sockets.
>
Not with some of Mortensen's humans. ;-)
But to get serious and mix some of the recent topics,
Mortensen studied brilliance and how to obtain it. He
concluded print brilliance comes from midtones, well
separated. Thus his liking for flat lighting and
various means of expanding midtones. Sometimes an
interesting conflict with my own nuttiness about
separating shadows regardless of where the subject is.
Resulting brilliance might or might not be your
primary subject, but a non-brilliant print favoring a
well-separated highlight subject might not be the best
choice either. It appears that we can have lots of
highlights while still not making what we like to call
a brilliant print. Initially I exposed prints for
highlights and tweaked contrast, it sounded like a lot
of sense but not for long. Now I'm with Ryuji, I pivot
around wherever the primary interest is to me, which I
find is seldom either very high or very low, and
sometimes print controls are predicted in advance to be
necessary to arrive at a meaningful initial work print.
Isn't that part of visualization? And I confess I
catch myself trying to think in terms of midtone
subjects so the brilliance more nearly falls in the
same place as the item of most interest. I wish I had
more experience with fog, but it's hard to predict here
halfway around the globe from the U.K.
Mortensen is well worth reading. He was very
methodical, and all his methods and subjects are not
the bizarre stuff often discussed. I'm planning to put
my collection on the block. Unfortunately they are
scarce due to this significant figure being banished to
the hinterlands by my hero Ansel and friends, so they
bring collector's prices now.
Regards... Dick Gifford, Adair Ok USA
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