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

I have made negatives in the slit canyons of Arizona with exposures up to three and a half hours. Despite the long exposures, some portions of those negatives have no density whatsoever, indicating that areas of those canyons were so dark that no amount of exposure would have reached threshold. Yet the highlights are so bright that they have high densities even with compensating development. Some of these negatives end up way, way outside the realm of standard negative densities. Yet they produce some of my favorite, and most popular, prints.

You’ve got to get away from the thinking that everything has to fit inside a box. My negatives vary all over the board. Some are dense. Some are thin. Some are unnecessarily dense because I made a serious mistake somewhere along the line.

But I don’t throw away those negatives. Some of them give me prints that I love. They’re usable negatives, even if they’re not perfect. I make no attempt to keep them within the boundaries prescribed by others. And I often expose my highlights above Zone 10... intentionally!

As I pointed out in Myth #3 above, underexposure yields flat prints and immediately ruins the possibility of making a good print. Overexposure, on the other hand, gives you a denser negative that requires a longer enlarging exposure, but the print will be just fine. In any reasonably standard situation (not cathedrals or canyons), you’d have to overexpose by 5, 6, or 7 stops to push the negative up to Zone 15 and beyond (where the negative flattens out on the shoulder of the exposure/density curve). But, if you underexpose by just ½ or 1 stop, you’re below Zone 3 where the negative flattens out on the toe. As long as you’re between those spots, you’re OK.

The greatest sin in black-and-white photography is underexposure. If you overexpose, you get a denser negative, requiring a longer exposure under the enlarger when printing. The negative will also have a bit more grain. Other than that, you rarely lose a thing. The moral of the story: when in doubt, overexpose!

Loosen up! You don’t have to be exact. In fact, being exact is a formula for disaster—or, at the very least, it’s a formula for very predictable and very boring results. There’s nothing about photography that’s exact! Make sure you have enough exposure so you’re on the straight line portion of the exposure/density curve. If you’re a little too high, don’t worry about it. You’ll still have a perfectly workable negative. It may require a little longer enlarging exposure, but who cares? You’ll have to manipulate the print anyway with some burning and dodging, just to make it look like the scene as you saw it—or as you envisioned it differently—when you stood behind the camera (please reread Myth #1). What can possibly be exact about a process like this?

This negative of a very low-contrast scene—an evenly lit sandstone pattern—has relatively high density throughout. By giving ample exposure and overdeveloping the negative, I achieve a significant contrast increase and end up with a dense, but perfectly printable, negative (Figure 13-8). The densest portions of this negative and the Hexham Abbey stairway negative (Figure 13-7) are about the same; the remainder of this negative is far denser than the other, apart from the windows .

Figure 13-8. Negative of Summit and Rolling Hills

Photography is an art . It is based on the sciences of light, optics, chemistry, computerization, etc., but if you get too hung up on the science, you lose the art. Understand the scientific basis, but don’t worry about getting an exact Zone 5 to the fourth decimal place! After all, how many painters measure the hue of blue or red on some decimal scale? None of them! They look to see if it’s the color they want. Then they work with it. Photographers should approach photography in a similar manner.

Not every negative has to fit a predetermined density range. Not every print has to have a black, a white, and all the tones in between. Some prints don’t even want a black or anything near a black. (See Myth #7, below.) You can have a high key (i.e., light toned) print without any blacks or dark grays. You can have a deep, moody, low key print with no whites or light grays. You can have a print with anything you want, as long as it effectively conveys the mood or feeling you want to convey. You can’t convey your thoughts if you’re restricted to printing by the rules. And you can’t convey your thoughts effectively if you try to start with negatives that all have the same density range. It doesn’t work. It can’t work. You’ve got to have the flexibility and creativity to say something important, and you can’t be creative if you’re limited by arbitrary, restrictive rules. Throw them out, have fun, and open up to real creativity!

My educational background is not in the arts, but in the sciences. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in mathematics from UCLA. I understand graphs. I can read an exposure/density curve, which tells me not to expose shadows in Zone 3. But I also think that following densitometry curves to determine exposures is absurd, as is remaining within strict limits in negative density range. You’ll miss opportunities at every turn. You’ll restrict yourself to a limited range of possibilities. It’s bad enough when someone else imposes restrictions on any aspect of your life, so why impose restrictions on yourself? Break out of the box. Use the full range of the negative. Allow yourself the flexibility of negatives that vary in density. Don’t feel guilty about such variation. Be proud of it. You’re simply giving yourself artistic freedom. You got a problem with that?

Myth #5: All contact proof prints of negatives should be made at the same exposure

As we just learned, negatives should not have a standard range of densities. Once you accept this truth, and once you start creating negatives that vary in density from one to another to best suit your expressive purposes, you will almost immediately discover that all contact proof prints should not be made at the same exposure. They can’t be. If they were all made at the same exposure, you’d get very dark, unreadable contact proofs from thinner negatives and very light, unreadable contact proofs from denser negatives. In either case, you wouldn’t obtain the information you need to decide how to print that negative. You might ignore a negative that is perfectly printable—perhaps a negative that is capable of yielding one of your finest prints. At worst, you might even throw away a potentially excellent photograph.

I vary my exposure for contact proofs to accommodate the wide range of densities I have on my negatives. However, I do keep one thing standard: the contrast level of my contact proofs. I make all of them at a fixed, low contrast level. This gives them a somewhat dull, perhaps even a slightly “muddy” look, but they give me an immense amount of information about the image.

That explodes the myth, but let’s go farther. Let’s look into the contrast level needed for useful contact proofs, then discuss how best to expose them. If I made my contact proofs at a medium contrast level, I might lose detail in either the highlights or the shadows on high contrast negatives, giving me little direction on how to print them. I’m looking for information, not excitement, in my contact proofs. The final print is where I want emotion; the contact proof is where I want information.

When I was printing contact proofs on graded papers, I made them on Grade 1 papers. Then, after exposing them, I developed them in a two-solution developer. I started out development in Kodak’s Selectol-Soft for about two minutes, then moved the contact prints to Kodak Dektol for another two minutes or so. With this development method, I lowered the contrast even further—to about Grade ½, shall we say.