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

The intensity of this initial inspection light is far more important than most people realize. My own experience—and my experience with hundreds of students in years of workshops—is that lack of thought about the inspection light can undo all of the good printing techniques performed to this point. In fact, you need two separate inspection lights: an initial inspection light and a final inspection light. Let’s discuss the initial inspection light first.

Most printers feel that any normal room light serves as a good darkroom inspection light. Wrong! Others feel that a good, bright light best shows the print for proper evaluation. Disastrously wrong! The best initial inspection light is a rather dim light—an average wattage bulb placed rather far away from the print. The reason is simple. You have been in a room lit by safelights from the time you removed the enlarging paper from the box, placed it in the easel, exposed the negative with your basic exposure plus extra burning or flashing steps, then developed the print (hopefully for at least four or five minutes), stopped it, and placed it in the fixer. Since you’ve been in that dim light for approximately 10 minutes, your iris is wide open to gather in the light. Then you put on a bright light. It’s like walking out of a matinee into the noonday sun! If the print is actually too dark, it will look good to you. And if it’s printed just right, it will look too light. A dim light will give you a far better feel of what the print really looks like.

Note

Many feel that any normal room light serves as a good darkroom inspection light. Wrong! Others feel that a good, bright light will show the print best for proper evaluation. Disastrously wrong!

What wattage bulb should be used for the inspection light? It depends how far it’s located from your fixing tray. The only criterion is this: if your finished prints consistently look too dark under normal lighting, or if they consistently lack the shadow detail under normal lighting that you saw under the inspection light, then your inspection light is too bright. Replace the bulb with a lower wattage bulb or move the light farther away. In other words, balance the way you see the print in the fixer with the way it looks when dried, mounted, and viewed under good lighting.

In fact, when I do my initial inspection, I look at the shadow detail, virtually ignoring the mid-tones or highlights. I try to lock the detail I see in my mind for later comparison with the finished, dried print under good room lighting. Adjust your initial inspection light to give you the same dark detail you see in the final print under good lighting.

After your eyes adjust to the dim initial inspection light, you can turn on a brighter light for a complete, thorough inspection of the print. I first remove the print from the fixer tray and place it on a nearly vertical sheet of white acrylic plastic, and then turn on the bright lights. This may seem to contradict the need for a dim light initially, but it does not. The reason for the dim light is to let you see the print initially as you would see it under normal lighting when your eyes are fully adjusted. If the initial light is too bright, you will see shadow detail that is not visible in the finished print (unless you view the print in midday sunlight). The psychological importance of the initial inspection is critical, for once you see shadow detail in the print under a light that’s too bright, it’s hard to strike that impression from your mind. You will always end up fighting that first impression. When you see the finished print, you will attribute the loss of detail in the shadows to “dry-down”. It’s not dry-down, the alleged darkening of an image as it dries; it’s an inspection light that’s too bright!

Once the print is on the white acrylic plastic under the bright lights (i.e., good gallery-quality lighting, not intense lights), I carefully inspect the entire image, especially the highlight detail. I squeegee off the layer of liquid fix from the emulsion. That thin layer of liquid hides the subtle details in the highlights. Again, dry-down is often cited for the appearance of highlight detail in the finished print that was not visible during inspection; it’s not dry-down, but failure to view the print without the layer of liquid fix obscuring highlight detail.

I urge you to try this for yourself by removing a print from the fix after carefully inspecting it in the tray. You’ll notice that more detail immediately shows in the subtle highlights as the print is removed. Then put it on a vertical surface, such as white acrylic plastic. When you squeegee off the remaining liquid, still more detail appears. No more will appear after the print dries. Now hose it down with water or reimmerse it in the tray of fix, and watch those subtle highlights immediately disappear! I call this effect “wet-up!”

Although no more detail appears in the finished print than you see using good inspection techniques, the subtle highlight detail is more pronounced in the dried, finished print. I believe that the reason for this is the slight shrinkage of the print as it dries. A wet 16″ × 20″ print may be more than a quarter inch longer than a dried print. The developed silver grains bunch together more closely as the print dries and shrinks, so the subtle detail appears more prominently. This intensity increase in the highlights during drying is the only dry-down effect I have ever observed (I call it “shrink down”); I have not observed any new detail appearing. (Note: Adox MCC110 paper expands when wet, but strangely does not shrink back down when dry.)

Dry-down is an overused excuse for improper inspection. In fact, if there is a change to be seen, it is the other way. When a print is wet, its blacks appear richer, and they lose some of the intensity when the print dries. This is simply due to the way light scatters off the paper from a wet or dry print. (Matte papers exhibit a dramatic loss of brilliance in the blacks when they dry because of the surface qualities of the paper.) I call this effect “dry-up!”

Most papers can be inspected effectively shortly after the initial dim light is turned on, your eyes adjust, and a second inspection light is turned on. However, most variable contrast papers have a noticeable yellow-ocher cast to the paper base at first. This yellow cast makes it hard to judge the degree of brilliance of whites in the final print, especially if whites and light tones dominate the image. The yellowish cast gradually disappears in the fix, then completely disappears when the print is placed in a holding tray of water after fixing is completed; but the “whitening” of the base can take ten minutes or more. This is frustrating and time-consuming, indeed, but the ultimate brilliance of the paper justifies your wait.

One final note concerning the inspection light: don’t use a light with a rheostat dimmer switch for inspection purposes. The rheostat contains two hidden problems. First, unless you have the dimmer permanently set to a fixed brightness level, you will never have the same brightness level for every print you inspect, and this inconsistency will throw your ability to judge your prints out the window. Second, as a rheostat is adjusted downward from its brightest setting, it yellows noticeably, and this, too, will make your judgment of prints more difficult. Stick with a fixed wattage bulb and determine the proper distance of the bulb from your print for good, consistent results.

Potassium Ferricyanide Reducing (Bleaching)

After the print has been fully developed, stopped, and placed in the fix for a sufficient length of time to allow inspection, reducing (commonly known as bleaching) can begin. A liquid solution of potassium ferricyanide can be applied to portions of the image in order to reduce density by removing developed silver from the emulsion. This should be done under normal or bright lighting. My procedure is as follows: I remove the print from the fix, place it on a vertical sheet of stiff white acrylic plastic, and rinse it thoroughly to wash the fix from the print’s surface. Rinsing the print is important because the fixing bath acts as a catalyst to the bleach. If potassium ferricyanide is applied directly onto the fix, it may act too fast to control.