May I interject?
I've just looked at the vines image. Interesting subject, well spotted. However, as an example of exposure and development practice, it seems to fail.
All that follows is subject to the proviso (which we have to keep constantly in mind when viewing on-screen images) that this is on my screen. (a 27" iMac)
1: The shadows are a featureless black. This suggests underexposure. Perhaps the system of development is not giving full box speed after all? I have turned my screen brightness up to its full and uncomfortable limit and can see nothing in there.
2: It's hard to tell from a reduced-resolution image on a screen, but I don't see any enhanced texture here. The bricks look like bricks look in real life. I have not seen the subject, so they may have exhibited much lower contrast. In the photographic armoury, would a filter have worked better?
3: Something funny is going on along the lower edge. Is it over-exposure, a light leak, or uneven development? My own insticct would be to burn it in.
May I repeat that this is all based on what I can see on my screen. I may have been deceived by it.
The original onion image seems to exhibit much more satisfactory tonality.
On my monitor, there is plenty of detail in all but the very darkest of the the shadows. This is a byproduct of intentionally printing this as a rather high contrast image. It might be possible to bring those up a bit if I reprinted this, as the negative itself isn't underexposed to best of my recollection. But, as we've discussed here before, I reject a slavish adherence to "all tones must be evident in every print". I seek to print to the aesthetic of the image not just make Zone System test strips
The original scene was a flat, featureless light behind a building at the end of the day that lacked any real highlight definition or midtone "pop". The entire scene probably had an SBR of less than 1 stop. The texture you see in the brick faces was not remotely as pronounced as you see it here. It was the expanded development that increased that midtone contrast and provided highlights that were essentially nonexistent
in situ.
As an aside... Beyond being familiar with the US photographic tradition (The Westons, Adams, et al), I have some familiarity with the French as well (Atget, Brassai). But I know little about how UK photographers approach the work. I have spent some time looking that work of people here as well as people cited as exemplars of UK photography. It seems to me that the UK body of work tends much more toward photographic realism and much less so toward abstraction. Is that a sampling error on my part or a valid observation, I wonder?
As to the lower edge, I must confess a bit of trickery. This image is intentionally printed upside down because - at least at the time - I liked the abstraction more. What little light that made it into that alley that day was coming from above and is hence evident at the bottom of the image. I probably should have burned that a bit to remove the distraction.
Now, the
meas and the
culpas. I find this image interesting as an experiment not particularly as a great visual achievement. It's from a handheld 35mm negative and lacks a lot of technical merit. But it does demonstrate that - in some cases - long, dilute development can yield a kind of graphic novel effect and "grit" which is mostly objectionable but can be harvested in service of an aesthetic. In this case, I took that and amplified it with high contrast VC printing to get what you see. I like the sense of this image but not its execution and have a note to repeat it with a 5x4 when the occasion arises.
