Reformed Pyro Workers

"Dennis O'Connor" wrote in message ...
let me paraphrase an old saying no insult intended

It's The Light, Stupid!

First hour and last hour of the day... In between is for meals, car
washing, girl watching, etc... I gotta tell ya that I have pored over the
details of many pictures in geology and hydrology text books taken at high
noon and as a record of the evolution of the land they are fascinating, but
they are b o r i n g as photographs...

You wanted to be a boring photographer? I doubt it... Go way back and
start over... Tri-X in D76, early and late in the day, and start your
evolution as a landscape photographer all over... Somewhere you made a
wrong turn...

With the best of intentions ... denny

"Ken Smith" wrote in message
m...
I may have gone overboard with the highlight controls of pyro
developers.


I like a guy who's not afraid to say what he thinks.

It's the handling of the light. Weston is a perfect example. He
shot in all kinds, and made screaming beauties out of them all. The
early light, late light thing, come on, contemporary photographers,
especially in color have purposely avoided the rich (and complimentary
to film latitude) light, and have made marvelous images. Richard
Misrach out in the bright desert, made fascinating pastel prints.
Black and white is the same. Joe Deal shooting in mid-day California.
It's how you handle your tones. Good forms, long tones, good contrast,
avoid the busy, etc. Your geological textbooks have the shots, but not
the artistic handling of the materials. The turn I'm making is away
from the "classic" everybody does ala zone system, with punch and pow,
and towards an attempt at making an image that seems ordinary, but
creeps up on you to demonstrate its mystery, right there in hard
objective broad daylight. Perhaps you might like to broaden your
definitions of landscape. And I hate to add this, cause I don't really
give a hang about the artworld, but relevance, if you are interested,
does have something to do with furthering styles, and understanding
their message to the world. Classic landscape is right up there with
the watercolor barns, much as I likeum too.

"Dennis O'Connor" wrote in message ...
let me paraphrase an old saying no insult intended

It's The Light, Stupid!

First hour and last hour of the day... In between is for meals, car
washing, girl watching, etc... I gotta tell ya that I have pored over the
details of many pictures in geology and hydrology text books taken at high
noon and as a record of the evolution of the land they are fascinating, but
they are b o r i n g as photographs...

You wanted to be a boring photographer? I doubt it... Go way back and
start over... Tri-X in D76, early and late in the day, and start your
evolution as a landscape photographer all over... Somewhere you made a
wrong turn...

With the best of intentions ... denny

"Ken Smith" wrote in message
m...
I may have gone overboard with the highlight controls of pyro
developers.


Dennis, this is so true it's scary. I hardly use the camera other than
early or late. I like long, creeping shadows.

Tom Phillips wrote in message ...
Gregory W Blank wrote:



There are no wrong hours of the day to photograph, only wrong subjects
for that hour.

Sorry Dennis, I agree with Gregory. It's not just the light; it's what
you do with it. Sunrise/Sunset landscape photography is an amateur
fallacy, usually espoused at "formula" workshops by self taught (i.e.,
know nothing) landscape artists who are merely repeating someone else's
formula. Another word for it is rut photography. For a serious landscape
photographer, ruts are major boring stuff. In reality, it does depend
entirely on the subject and artistic intention.

Nicely put. Now, in the spirit of thoroughness, I must confess a mistake.
A few days ago I contact printed 20 8x10's that made my heart sink, and
caused this and the "Seeks a Master Printer" query. I was convinced that
I just didn't have it, and would remain forever a hit and miss booby. Turns
out, I am only a boob. I cut full sized PC filters to fit my cold light
diffusor, to keep the filters high and away from the lens. I forgot to
remove it when contact printing. I went through several filters on the
lens while projecting the contact light to a MC RC, and the results were
very icky. Surprisingly not a combined contrast effect, but rather
a , greyish, , dead highlight, and an overall odd looking
lack of contrast. I thought the pyrocat
was pooping out, unreliable, or I was just destined to never make good
images. Well, I printed them today with no filters at all, and it turns
out I'm just as good a photographer as there ever was. Joy to the world.
So, ah, er....nevermind.

Ken Smith
Wyoming

"Ken Smith" wrote in message
om...
Gregory W Blank wrote in message
...
In article ,
[snip]

Thanks Greg.

I think the developer and time is the key to everything. Right now I'm
doing
wonders holding a huge range of tones, but the highlights with go dull
if
I print dark enough to get a decent black for contrast. I'm going to
have
to get the highlights denser in the neg to allow for a longer printing
time, but alas, that can put me right back were I started with a too
strong contrast. It's somewhere in between the in between, or so it
seems.
Good grief, I sound like Louis Carrol.

[snip]

Ken Smith
Wyoming

Ken,

Have you considered a different paper with a different curve (longer
shoulder)? May be your negatives are fine, but need something more
compatible on the printing side...

Jim



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Great story, Ken... If only I had never done anything like that so I could
laugh at you - instead of laughing with you as I am......
No, I am not a "formula photographer"... What I was urging was to go back to
the beginning with a traditional film and developer, and traditional
lighting, and quickly rerun through the evolutionary steps that had led to
ramming 14 stops of landscape onto 8 stops of paper or attempting to,
resulting in so much compression and sideways mushing of tones that you end
up with mud...
denny
"Ken Smith" wrote in message
om...
Tom Phillips wrote in message
...
Gregory W Blank wrote:



There are no wrong hours of the day to photograph, only wrong subjects
for that hour.

Sorry Dennis, I agree with Gregory. It's not just the light; it's what
you do with it. Sunrise/Sunset landscape photography is an amateur
fallacy, usually espoused at "formula" workshops by self taught (i.e.,
know nothing) landscape artists who are merely repeating someone else's
formula. Another word for it is rut photography. For a serious landscape
photographer, ruts are major boring stuff. In reality, it does depend
entirely on the subject and artistic intention.

Nicely put. Now, in the spirit of thoroughness, I must confess a
mistake.
A few days ago I contact printed 20 8x10's that made my heart sink,
and
caused this and the "Seeks a Master Printer" query. I was convinced
that
I just didn't have it, and would remain forever a hit and miss booby.
Turns
out, I am only a boob. I cut full sized PC filters to fit my cold
light
diffusor, to keep the filters high and away from the lens. I forgot
to
remove it when contact printing. I went through several filters on
the
lens while projecting the contact light to a MC RC, and the results
were
very icky. Surprisingly not a combined contrast effect, but rather
a , greyish, , dead highlight, and an overall odd looking
lack of contrast. I thought the pyrocat
was pooping out, unreliable, or I was just destined to never make
good
images. Well, I printed them today with no filters at all, and it
turns
out I'm just as good a photographer as there ever was. Joy to the
world.
So, ah, er....nevermind.

Ken Smith
Wyoming

OK Ken... Nope, I'm not into either the salon or the arty stuff... As far
as your vision of the landscape, I would love to see some of your work...
But, your wonderings about whether you have gone too far with tone
compression with the pyro is likely correct, since you felt compelled to
voice it...

I look at staining developers and I see a Band-Aid, not a solution... What
you are attempting to do is compress more stops of exposure onto a negative
with fewer stops of range - we all are attempting this, it is the
photographers eternal struggle...

One way is to expose heavily for the shadows and develop only enough to keep
the highlights from blowing out... If you manage to nail it you get the
classic 9 or 10 stops on the paper... If either your exposure or your
development is off you have a pathetic negative in your enlarger, with which
you will waste endless sheets of paper trying to coax a useable print..

Another way is the staining developer... If you stand back and look at this
objectively, what you are doing is layering a masking density over the
entire negative... Now, the percentage of change i.e., delta = mask
density + negative density divided by negative density is greater when the
mask overlays a thin area of the negative shadow than when it lays over a
dense area highlight... So, what it effectively does is add a greater
percentage of density to a shadow than a highlight, and therefore
moves/compresses the shadows towards the highlights, compressing the tonal
range and contrast on the negative and yielding a more easily printed
negative..
- pyro moves the shadows not the highlights -
The problem with pyro is that there are only a finite number of tones that
can be discerned on the negative as distinct, complete with edge effects,
etc... When you take adjacent tones that were just enough apart in density
to be distinctly visible and lay a masking density over top of them you move
the two tones closer together... The greater the masking density the greater
the compression and eventually there comes a point where the two tones have
moved close enough in value that they are no longer distinct and lose your
edge effects...
Pyro is that it is at it's best when dealing with high contrast scenes that
have large steps between adjacent tones... When you have a negative that
already has a full range of tones close together in value the mask further
compresses tonal areas into each other - and carried to extremes you lose
your edges and have mud...

denny

"Ken Smith" wrote in message And I hate to add this,
cause I don't really
give a hang about the artworld, but relevance, if you are interested,
does have something to do with furthering styles, and understanding
their message to the world. Classic landscape is right up there with
the watercolor barns, much as I likeum too.

Michael Scarpitti wrote:

"Dennis O'Connor" wrote in message ...
let me paraphrase an old saying no insult intended

It's The Light, Stupid!

First hour and last hour of the day... In between is for meals, car
washing, girl watching, etc... I gotta tell ya that I have pored over the
details of many pictures in geology and hydrology text books taken at high
noon and as a record of the evolution of the land they are fascinating, but
they are b o r i n g as photographs...

You wanted to be a boring photographer? I doubt it... Go way back and
start over... Tri-X in D76, early and late in the day, and start your
evolution as a landscape photographer all over... Somewhere you made a
wrong turn...

With the best of intentions ... denny

"Ken Smith" wrote in message
m...
I may have gone overboard with the highlight controls of pyro
developers.

Dennis, this is so true it's scary. I hardly use the camera other than
early or late. I like long, creeping shadows.
Dennis,
Where do you find a paper that has a reflection density range greater
than 2.1? Cramming a 10 stop scene range into a 7 or even 8 stop paper
range has to lose one end or the other or to cause overall drabness.
Most natural scenes that have such brightness range are double scenes,
like windows where you want to show interior and exterior detail as the
eye sees it. Painters do that. Photographers have to realize that they
must do that in the darkroom by dodging, burning, bleaching and any
other trick they can muster. It is not likely that a straight print of a
wide range scene will have the "life" you yearn for. Your eye adapts
when it looks at one place or another in the scene. Unless you want to
design and use one of those unmentionable dxxxxal cameras to do such
scanning, expect to spend hours on one print.

In article ,
"Dennis O'Connor" wrote:

OK Ken... Nope, I'm not into either the salon or the arty stuff

Not to be a wise ass, but why do Landscape if your not trying to
do Art? I can see enviromental documentation but thats a little
different and you probably could use a digital camera for that.

If you manage to nail it you get the
classic 9 or 10 stops on the paper.

You or anyone else will just get a representation of 10
stops on paper. Ten stops defined by the film will
require much burning and dodging in relation to an
average papers range of available stops, for any given
contrast grade.

Take care
regards Gb.
--
LF website http://members.bellatlantic.net/~gblank

"Patrick Gainer" wrote in message Dennis,
Where do you find a paper that has a reflection density range greater
than 2.1? Cramming a 10 stop scene range into a 7 or even 8 stop paper
range has to lose one end or the other or to cause overall drabness.

Yup, gawd's truth...
I did carelessly use the term '10 stops' on the print when I mean't
zones/steps... My bad... there I said the z word, may lightning strike me
down
Now, tell me something I don't know; like how to get more stops on the paper
while retaining an adequate density difference between the steps to avoid
mud...


Most natural scenes that have such brightness range are double scenes,
like windows where you want to show interior and exterior detail as the
eye sees it. Painters do that. Photographers have to realize that they
must do that in the darkroom by dodging, burning, bleaching and any
other trick they can muster. It is not likely that a straight print of a
wide range scene will have the "life" you yearn for.

Exactly the lament of our recently reformed pyro worker in his original
post... I was merely trying to point a way out of the wilderness..
denny

In article ,
"Dennis O'Connor" wrote:

"Patrick Gainer" wrote in message Dennis,
Where do you find a paper that has a reflection density range greater
than 2.1? Cramming a 10 stop scene range into a 7 or even 8 stop paper
range has to lose one end or the other or to cause overall drabness.

Yup, gawd's truth...
I did carelessly use the term '10 stops' on the print when I mean't
zones/steps... My bad... there I said the z word, may lightning strike me
down Now, tell me something I don't know; like how to get more stops on the paper
while retaining an adequate density difference between the steps to avoid
mud...

Nuetral Density grad filters or fill flash, or a combination of the two.
Have to do this as I, like Patrick states shoot transparencies for interiors

Check www.baltimoremagazine.com

the Hippodrome article this months
issue. I used 4 minute exposures on Provia, counting the seconds outloud,
for the feature spread.
--
LF website http://members.bellatlantic.net/~gblank

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