Rodin,The Burghers of Calais.........

Photographic emulsion on watercolour paper, 1997 Westminster, London

In the North Sea,..........Print scan 1996........

Caitlin, Photography, shares about learning traditional wet darkroom techniques that have digital equivalents in Photoshop in "Dodge and Burn in the Darkroom" https://wherecreativityworks.com/dodge-and-burn-in-the-darkroom/ #MarywoodArt #Photography

Hello Everyone! As I continue to work in the darkroom for my Advanced Black and White photography class, I’ve been working on an image that needed to be dodged and burned. If you don’t know, dodge is a wet darkroom technique for lightening a part of an image and burn is a technique for darkening parts of the image. There is a digital equivalent in Photoshop, but you don’t have Photoshop in the…

As you know the final phase of developing process is the washing of the film. The best method I’ve find is the Ilford one. It has the objective to save water and minimize the residual of thiosulfate in the film to obtain an archival negative or at better a “stable” one. It states that the sequence of washing is composed by three steps:

Fill tank and give 5 inversions, sit some length of time, dump

A few pictures from a recent project.

Direct enlargements from objects on photographic paper.

Feather, sand, flower

‘The Seamstress’ silver gelatin print

A proper darkroom print made by exposing the image through black chiffon. I had been playing with my medium format negatives in the darkroom for a couple of hours, and was on the verge of packing up, when it occurred to me that as I use a lot of physical materials to ‘interfere’ with my digital photos, why not do the same with this analog process? 

Once I had made a couple of tests and adjusted the exposure timing accordingly, the chiffon left a perfect delicate impression on the photo (bottom image). The white streaks occurred where I deliberately draped folds into the material, blocking the light and/or as a result of the resulting moiré patterns.  I remember doing something similar at the start of second year, using scrim, (middle image), when I was taking my first tentative steps in photography. 

What goes around comes around, but hopefully with a more sophisticated touch and purpose each time

The photograph was of a first year fashion student, sat on the floor, thoroughly absorbed in toiling over a garment, hence ‘The Seamstress’ (also a humble reference to Vermeer’s ‘The Lacemaker’). She was beautifully illuminated by a piercing shaft of sunlight which was what initially caught my interest - by draping the chiffon in this way I aimed to increase the sense of light falling across the subject, whilst veiling some of the detail of the scene, already bathed in chiaroscuro. The use of chiffon of course also references the subject matter.