Another hour or so spent in the darkroom over a tray of warm LD20 developer, and I've actually got a set of prints which show some progress!
After last week's debacle, I decided to do all the exposures first, then develop the sheets one by one. So I exposed 2 sheets of my "garden shed" negative for 40s at f/8 and another 2 sheets for 80s at f/8. I repeated the exercise for the "trees" negative.
The theory is that longer exposures flatten out the contrast, because the amount of light energy reaching the shadow areas of the negative reaches a point where more exposure does not cause any significant darkening of the blacks, but the less exposed highlight areas receive more light energy. A more exposed sheet requires a little less developing time, but when the development is stopped the difference between the highlights and shadows is much less. Conversely, a lesser exposed sheet will take longer to develop, but when the shadows are established, the highlights are only just beginning to fill in. Here's an example of the visible differences:
 |
| 40s at f/8 - stopped when foreground blacks looked right |
 |
| 80s at f/8 - stopped when foreground blacks looked right |
You can see that the contrast on the 40-second print is much greater than the contrast on the 80-second one (look at the dark stains on the lower half of the door). In both prints the colour is a sort of vintage albumen-print colour. I will try some experiments in future with radically shorter exposures and more dilute developer. The waiting time will be much longer but the colour effects should be more pronounced.
I only had time for one more print in this session, so I revisited the trees negative which I started with last week. The following print is the longer, less contrasty exposure. I am quite pleased with this and look forward to comparing it with the higher contrast exposure when I develop it, hopefully next week.
 |
| 80s at f/8 - stopped when bark textures looked right |
No comments:
Post a Comment