If it weren't for this photography course I would still not have a web-presence at all!
Well - fear and trepidation aside - here's some of what I'm trying to do.
I am going to put together a portfolio of silver prints using the traditional darkroom skills. I'm not yet a master printer - but I want to become much better.
I thought I would start off by producing a couple of contact prints from digital negatives. The process is fairly simple: first, render a digital photograph as a monochrome image, invert it to a negative and flip it horizontally. The resulting image is then printed onto an OHP transparency acetate using the ink-jet printer. When completely dry, the resulting actetate negative is contact-printed onto your choice of photographic paper, in the darkroom. The first image is an example of a finished print using this process.
As you can see, the image printed at grade 2 is lacking contrast, although the midtones are good and the sky detail has held well. I used a program called ChartThrob (http://www.botzilla.com/blog/archives/000544.html) to calibrate a Photoshop curve which is applied to the image prior to inverting it. The resulting image is below:
Now the image (still printed at grade 2) has a much greater contrast and the sand and sky highlight details are much better preserved.
I will use this program again to calibrate the process for cyanotype and gum prints... later.
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