Camera Craft

Otago Witness, Issue 3859, 28 February 1928, Page 60

Camera Craft

A Leat For Ameature PHOTOGRAPHERS

BY

View Finder.

[ Readers of the Otago Witness are invited to submit specimens of their work, and, if they desire it, to seek advice from “ View Finder." Questions will be answered only in these columns and written replies cannot be sent.]

CONTROL IN DEVELOPMENT. Amongst photographers there is always argument as to what constitutes a perfect negative. The argument can never be settled, owing to each worker adapting different negatives for different processes. Some prefer to make thin negatives to obtain their best prints, whilst others prefer a dense negative. This only goes to prove that a certain amount of control can be exercised to produce the negative desired. The inode of evolution of the negative should, therefore, be in terms of print value. The negative is only a means to a ceitain desired end, not the end in itself. The photographer ean express a picture in a high or low key, one in which contrasts are presented, or one in which softness and modulation is the desired end; just as the painter’s effects, because Nature presents these aspects to both, but the painter, by his studied art, has greater control over his mode of expression than the artist with his camera. The photographer’s means of control is by development, essentially mechanical in its operation. The chief means of control is perhaps the timing’of exposure, and by this is meant adequate exjx>sure corresponding to adequate development. If a negative is fully exposed, even to being slightly overexposed, greater control is possible. Control in the case of under-ex* i sure is next to impossible. Development is a fine art in itself, and the photographer can only give expiession to his full pictorial intention by the study of the relation between the exposure and its development. Let us consider the agents of development. We might group developers into, first, those which bring out the lower tones soon after the appearance of the high lights, such as metol, rodinal, and weak pyro. If we develop a correctly exposed plate in these developers and remove the plates during an early stage in development we would have what is called a flat negative, with detail in the shadows. Again, we have another group of developing agents which do not bring out the shadow detail, that is, in the lower tones, until the high lights have attained some density. These agents are such as hydroquinone, glycin, and strong pyro. A plate in such a developer, if withdrawn at an early stage, gives moderate contrasts, but very little expression of detail. Now, despite these two facts, if development had been prolonged sufficiently in either case good negatives would have resulted. There is a limit to the rule that the more prolonged the development the greater the cont; ast. The limit of contrast is reached as soon as the highest light has attained its greatest density possible. Prolongation of development beyond this stage implies that the various lower densities tend to approach the maximum density possible. Therefore, from this point onwards, contrasts, instead of increasing, are i educed, i.e., the tends to get flat. Increasing the content of potassium bromide (which is the restraining agent) or decreasing the alkali content tends to hold back the lower tones, and this method may he regarded as a means of control. This method is only applicable if canied out before the plate has the solution poured •ver it. Once development has started) the above method of control is of no use.

ENLARGEMENT PROBLEMS.

Modification of the developer by means of dilution will not affect the ultimate result if sufficient time is given for the plate to develop. Taking, for instance, a pyro-soda developer of ordinary strength, we would find that full development is reached in a certain length of time, say four minutes. If wo were to dilute the developer to half the strength and allow a longer time in development, then the same density in the negative as developed with full strength developer would be reached. Where errors in exposure have been made and such errors are known modification can be carried out. Thus, in the case of a known underexposed negative, the negative should, on the first appearance of the image, be transferred to a dish of clean water for 10 minutes, and then finished off in a tray of diluted developer. This gives a chance for the shadow detail of the negative to build up, and prevents the high lights from attaining too great a contrast. On the other hand, should over-exposure be indicated, transfer the negative to a 10 per cent, solution of

potassium bromide for a few minutes, then carry on development in a restrained developer, i e., one having a lower content of alkali than a normal developer. By using different developing aggnts we can certainly get different classes of colours in the negative. The following list gives some idea of the class of negative which may be obtained—

Tyro. — Negatives made with pyro have a brown-black colour, and are excellent for all kinds of printing processes. Hydroquinone.—The negatives have a blue-black colour.

Amidol.—Negatives have a unifo. m black colour, with no trace of coloration. Very suitable for such printing processes as bromide and gaslight papers. Metol. —-Gives negatives similar in colour to those developed in hydroquinone and will be found to be very satisfactory for all printing processes. The colour of the silver deposit in a negative has an influence on the print, for the more black the negative is the greater contrast iu the finished print. Finally, a soft negative which might be regarded as being on the thin side will give the best result. This is the class of negative which portrait photographers aim for, and the means of obtaining such a negative should be attempted by every photographer.

Jottings by a Pictorialist. One of our leading exhibitors describes his own methods of making bromide enlargements. They may not be very orthodox, but the results which he obtains are sufficient testimony to their reliability in actual practice. There is a type of not very ambitious photographer who is content, year after year, to make his prints by contact on self-', jning paper. Very pretty little prints they sometimes are, too; full of sparkle, clear, and perhaps with real merits pictorially. Then conies a day when our friend is bitten with the desire to enlarge. And having bought an enlarging lantern, he finds that plenty of the negatives which gave capital contact prints on P.O.P. will hardly yield a passable enlargement at all. He will be told that his negatives are too contrasty; This is very likely the case. But depend upon it their main defect is that their eontrastiness is due to excessive opacity, not to mere thinness in the shallows. There is no crime in eontrastiness as such —if it is inherent in the subject. Not all subjects are flat subjects. But if the high lights of any negative are developed to great capacity enlarging becomes next to impossible. The same negative, developed less far, would have hard just as much sparkle, yet would have enlarged well and easily, even with the not too powerful illuminant with which many amateurs must work. —The Sort of Negative I Like.—

Personally, I like a negative rather on the crisp side, as long as it is “ thin.” Flat or foggy thinness does not give me the results I aim at when making an enlargement. For the quality of the negative ha a very considerable influence on the colour of the enlargement. It is no easy job to get good rich blacks, in a bromide enlargement, from a flat, thin negative; whereas it ought to be easy with a crisp thin negative. True, most of the best makes of bronvd" paper are now sold in two grades—■“ soft ” and “ hard ” —and this affords us great help in making the most of any negative whether of the thin flat or the thin crisp variety. But it will be f or.nd by experience that, mysteriously, it is vlways the thin crisp which makes the best-coloured enlargements, whether, for the purposes of the moment, we may have elected to use the hard or soft varieties.

My view is that “ few but good ” should be our motto in this matter of enlargements. The making of enlargements in any considerable quantities is an expen: A hobby nowadays. For this wry reason we should not be cver-econo-mical about those we do make. By which I mean that we should buy the highest quality of bromide paper (and, for myself, I always go in for “ double weight ” because, for some unexplained reason, it seems to give actually better texture quality), and also that we should not skimp the developer. —An Objection to Amidol.—

The users of amidol nearly always compound this fresh immediately before starting the job of enlarging. That is inevitable. It is also one of the reasons why I do not use amidol. - Every minute is precious; and when I have time for enlarging I like to allot all of it (generally too little time anyway) to the enlarging itself, and none to the preliminary preparations. I find it so interesting to pick out on the enlarging easel exactly that part of the negative I shall enlarge, then to decide the degree of blur to he introduced, if any, and then to expose a test piece of paper to find the right exposure to give, that ex-

pending time on dissolving crystals seems to me a bore.

For this reason —which the reader may dismiss as' laziness if he chooses—l buy my developer in liquid form, ready macle, usually choosing Velox developer or “ Kodak Special developer.” The Velox developer, no doubt, as its name implies, is meant primarily for Velox, which is a gaslight contact printing paper. But it is good for bromide also; and I find that with certain makes of paper it gives a very fine black in the shadows. On the other hand, it seems to give results a trifle harsher' than the Kodak Special developer, and also to grow slower iu action more quickly if used repeatedly. —Stinginess is Foolish.— But here I come to my present point —namely, that whether we choose amidol or any of the ready-made proprietary developers, the foolish thing is to be stingy in their employment. Ileaily first-rate colour in the bromide enlargement cannot be got with developer which has developed previous enlargements in any large numbers—indeed, if I am making only two or three large enlargements, concerning which I desire the best results, say, for exhibition, I use completely fresh developer for eaeh. And not too little developer either. Trying to develop a 15 by 12 print with a mere 3oz or 4oz of developer is a mistake, I am sure. You have, of course, plunged your piece of paper first in water, so that it is quite limp, and 3oz or 4oz of developer may seem to suffice if sloshed to and fro steadily or mopped or.. But though eventually with correct exposure the entire print will reach the same dept. , even after it has come up ominously unevenly, I doubt whether its colour is what it might have been if more depth of developer had been used, and the total bulk thus exposed less to the air during development.

—“ Scandalous ?”— A 15 by 12 piece of bromide paper of the best class and double weight costs to all intents and purposes Is. I see no reason why a shilling’s worth- of developer should not be spent on it. I am aware that many photographers who arr by way of being careful with their cash think a shilling's worth of developer for one print scandalous. But a -genuinely fine 15 by 12 enlargement, suitable for exhibition, a permanent possession on one’s walls or in one’s portfolio, is a valuable and, I hope, beautiful object. To regard its manufacturing cost price as, say, 2s Gd, does not seem to me very dreadful.

This brings me to another point. Whether from economy or because it has always been the custom, it is usual to recommend that the dilution of developers for bromide paper should be greater than for gaslight.

A common formula with many developers is that the solution is to be diluted with equal parts of water for a gaslight print, but with three parts of water for a bromide print. I can only say that one of the secrets of getting juicy blacks in a bromide print is to use the developer strong. (The other secret wi have already seen. It is to get in the first instance the right kind of negative to enlarge from.) This is even more especially the case when the negative is not quite all it should be. But in my own practice 1 always think that it is best to be lavish both with the quantity and strength of the developer. I never dilute my developer with the three times its bulk of water' which is recommended.

Generally I put an equa’ part of water to an equal part of developer. This means that for a 15 by 12 print I use 4oz of the original-strength developer to 4oz of . .ter, because I consider that Boz is the right quantity required. As these developers are usually sold in Boz bottles, I therefore use no .ess than half a bottleful for one print, 9d worth, probably. But I have often, for a print requiring great strength in tonal quality, used the developer “ neat ” —a whole eighteenpenny bottle for one print. S-ni-ie photographers think this reckless. But if you make few enlargements, and those enlargements are good, there is no illogical extravagance. —-No Paper Should be Wasted.—

The test exposure must, of course, be developed with developer of the same strength as is being used for the whole final enlargement. That one is not economical with developer is no reason why one should be wasteful. No fullsized sheet of paper need ever be wasted if careful test strips are exposed first. The test strip must be pinned on the easel in such a position that it receives a “ typical ” bit of the image—that is, a part of the picture in which there occurs some high light which, in a perfect print, must be only just detailed and no more —and preferably adjacent to some dark part. Two or- three test exposures may be desirable, for, as I say, there ought neve.- to be a single whole-sized sheet wasted through incorrect calculation of the exposure required. There is waste and waste; and however much pressed for time we may be we shall waste more by being in too much hurry in this respect of testing than by taking the job at the proper pace. —Leave a Margin.— Another thing not to be too economical over is the actual amount of the area of the paper used. Beginners, enlarging some choice morsel from the middle of a negative, want to use the big bromide sheet, which has cost so dear, right up to the very edge. But a margin, if only a narrow one, should be left for trimming. There are often compositional

reasons for this, so that more is sacrificed in getting the pattern right, or ui bringing the verticals truly vertical, than need be when the essential subject-matter runs right up to the margins. A further point we have to consider is whether in enlarging we shall blur the image a little or let it be as sharp as in a contact print. If the degree of enlargement is very great it will not in any case be literally as sharp as the contact print—though to the eye it may look it. I find that when there are very hard contour lines in a subject, white against black or black against white, it is sometimes advisable to tlirow it just a trifle off the focus-point in enlarging, but in many subjects, themselves soft in character, it' is not necessary to increase the softness in enlarging, and definitely undesirable to increase it if th i magnification is considerable. —A Shade Unsharp.—

I notice that I can get pleasing enlargements, even though focussed absolutely sharply on the easel, as long as some part of the subject itself is not sharp, e.g., in a landscape where the foreground is sharp and then the definition falls away to an unsharp distance; but if my negative is one iu which all the details in every plane are sharp then I may find i. desirable to have the image a shade unsharp on the easel, otherwise a niggling quality results in the enlargement.

One last point. The beginner is apt to be disappointed because his enlargement, when dry, has lost the lovely transparency, especially in the shadows, which delighted him when the bromide paper was in its washing water. Various remedies for this have been suggested—waxing, varnishing, and so on. Mostly I find them prone to degrade the quality of tl i print. They seem to “ mess ” the surface somehow. Perhaps that is my fault. I prefer to leave the print alone when finished, merely trying—by buying the best paper, double thickness, and getting by rich development a rich image—to make the loss of quality as small as may be. —Retaining the Wet-surface Effect.— There is no denying that glossy surface paper does seem to retain a litt’e more of the wet effect mentioned in the foregoing paragraph. On the other hand, gios-y paper is anathema “ artistically.” Pictorialists even dislike the comparatively mat' surfaces of the so-called “ carbon surface ” papers, “ velvet,” “ serai-glossy.” and others, which occupy an intermediate position. Now it is noticeable that when a print has been put under glass the matt surface of the printing paper seems to regain some of that transparency and richness which it presented when it was in the water. At the exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society and of (he Salon, for instance, many a print is found to be greatly improved when the sheet of glass is pressed over it on tiie wall, while when it is once more taken from behind the glass it presents the original dead texture which it took on when it dried.

Well, if two prints, one semi-matt or even glossy, and the other matt, are put behind their respective sheets of glass in contact with it, it is not possible to tell which is the glossy and which the matt, save that the glossy is still juicier than the matt one. The surface, being in contact with the glass, is not visible, only what is on the surface; in other words, the picture, with all its tonevalue detail. So no highbrow can be offended at the glossy or semi-matt surface.

The moral is that when you are making an enlargement which is to be shown behind glass you may just as well make it, if not on glossy, at anyrate on semimatt paper, and so retain some of the liquidity. For jiortfolio prints I must admit I still prefer the dead matt.

These casual and somewhat inconsequent jottings are the fruits of actual practice, not won from text books. One of the interesting things about enlarging is that, while part of it may be reduced to some kind of standardisation, in other parts you are always learning wrinkles which you did not know before. Next to picture hunting in the field, enlarging is the best fun in our photographic repertoire ; and how any amateur can be photographically idle in winter, with the excitements of enlarging to fall back upon, passes my comprehension.