Bruce Barnbaum - The Art of Photography - An Approach to Personal Expression

Excess contrast often comes across as harsh. It may appear striking at first, but it fails the test of time. Too often, it simply flies in the face of the desired mood. Prints lacking appropriate contrast are simply dull. The question of how much contrast a print should have, how dark it should be, how light it should be, are all subjective questions, and the answers vary from photographer to photographer. Stick to your vision, and do it your way in the darkroom.

Note

Flashing, reducing, and masking are three additional darkroom techniques that are generally considered advanced, but this simply means most people are not familiar with them .

Burning with Variable Contrast Papers

Everything in the previous section applies to both graded and variable contrast papers, but variable contrast papers offer a spectacular option not available with graded papers: the ability to burn at a different contrast level from the basic exposure. To understand the importance of this, keep in mind just what high contrast and low contrast mean. High contrast implies that when shadows achieve dark gray or black tonalities, the highlights are light gray or white. Low contrast implies that when shadows achieve dark gray or black tones, highlights are deeper grays, perhaps even mid-gray tonalities. Or, viewed another way, low contrast may mean that by the time you give enough exposure to a negative to achieve subtle highlight detail, the shadow areas are still mid-tones rather than dark grays or black.

Now, suppose you made an exposure inside an old, abandoned house, and the negative included a window to the landscape outside. That exterior may be an extremely dense portion of the negative compared to the densities in the rest of the negative. If you print for desirable tonalities and contrast for the interior, the window area will likely be blank white in your print. With graded paper, if you burn the window enough to get outside landscape detail, the edge of the wall adjacent to the window will likely have a dark “halo” where your burning touched the wall. This is obvious and therefore sloppy technique.

But with variable contrast paper, you can lower the contrast level for the burning. By the time the landscape becomes visible, the edge of the wall may not be noticeably darker. This may prove to be an image that can be printed only through the use of variable contrast paper. Low contrast burning may allow you to attain subtle detail—or high drama—in the sky without darkening foreground items such as trees, a mountain slope, or a church steeple.

High contrast burning may be the solution to the opposite problem. Suppose you have a landscape with good contrast, but the sky is light, hazy, and lacking good tonal separations in the thin clouds. Not only can you burn the sky at higher contrast, but you may also want to initially dodge the low contrast sky partially or fully, then burn it back in completely at the higher contrast level. This is the way to mesh two or more portions of a negative at completely different contrast levels, melding them seamlessly by carefully burning and dodging where they merge.

Of course, low contrast or high contrast burning can be applied just as appropriately to mid-tone or dark areas. I have emphasized its use in highlight areas just for the sake of example, but the technique can be equally effective when cleverly applied to any tonal area of a print.

Using this technique, I have been able to make prints with variable contrast papers that are simply impossible to print to my satisfaction with graded papers. It’s allowed me to go even further, making images from more than one negative by finding textural similarities and merging them even when contrast levels between the negatives differ. Thus, variable contrast papers open up creative possibilities beyond those of graded papers.

Advanced Darkroom Techniques

There are three additional darkroom techniques that are generally considered advanced, which simply means that most people are not familiar with them. They are flashing, reducing (often referred to as “bleaching”), and masking . Flashing is a method of exposing the enlarging paper to a bit of blank light prior to exposing the negative. This procedure extends the range of visible tonalities on the enlarging paper into the highest densities. Reducing is a method of chemically removing silver from the developed print, thus lightening areas of the print. Masking, which may require special registration equipment, has two different forms. One increases local contrast while reducing overall contrast. The other allows printing of bright highlight areas while protecting adjacent dark areas from any additional exposure.

Flashing

In order to understand flashing, try to understand what happens to the enlarging paper when it is exposed to light from the enlarger. Light comes through all portions of a negative—even the densest portions—when the enlarger light is turned on. Yet, as we know, parts of the print are pure white when fully developed. The reason is that the enlarging paper, just like the negative, has a threshold level that must be reached before any tonality will appear. Until that threshold level of light hits the paper in any area, no density will appear in that area.

Let’s say that the threshold is 10 units of light, the first tonality beyond pure white. It may take 100 units of light to make medium gray and 1,000 units or more to reach pure black. But suppose a dense highlight area of the negative allows just 4 units of light through during the basic exposure, and you want to show some detail in that highlight area.

You could burn that area a minimum of 150 percent to give it the necessary 6 additional units of light to barely achieve tonality; but the burning process will inevitably spill over into the area adjacent to the highlight, and you could get an obvious dark halo around it. For example, if the adjacent area received 100 units of light during the basic exposure, 150 percent additional burning could give it another 150 units of light, turning it into a dark gray strip around the highlight. If you burn just the center of the highlight so as to avoid the halo effect, you may miss the edge of the highlight area, producing density in the center of the highlight but not along the edges. This would be an equally unacceptable solution.

But suppose you expose the enlarging paper to 7 units of blank light through the enlarger after making your basic exposure, plus the required burning and dodging. Now the 4 units of light from the exposure through the negative plus 7 units of blank light gives you 11 total units, revealing subtle tonality in the highlight. Of course, the flash exposure adds 7 units to all parts of the print, so the adjacent area that received 100 units will now receive 107, which is hardly any change at all. The darkest portions, formerly receiving 250 or more units, will go to 257 units, an imperceptible difference. (The same approach applies to both, but for burning, no coordinate system is needed because the negative is in the enlarger.)

An L-shaped card is held atop the hole in the lower card and is used to open or close the opening, or change its shape. This two-card system can be used for both burning and flashing .

For flashing, when the negative image is focused on the easel, place cards adjacent to the easel to mark coordinates of area(s) to be flashed. After the negative exposure is completed, remove the negative and hold two cardboards with an appropriately shaped hole above the enlarging paper. Expose the paper for a predetermined length of time. This method allows flashing only in the portion of the print that requires it rather than the entire print. Some prints may require flashing of more than one area, each for a different length of time. To do this, use several sets of coordinate markers .