A Coffeehouse In Cunda

I was so impressed with Omar Ozenir's website in his native Turkish language that I asked him if he would be willing to translate some posts for this blog. He kindly agreed. Omar (left) is happy to provide further translations if reader reaction is positive (don't forget to leave a comment!). Since people who visit this website all share my and Omar's passion for film photography, I think I know what the reaction will be. Over to Omar.

A Coffeehouse in Cunda

by Omar Ozenir

 

A picture from Cunda (pronounced Djunda), a small island off Ayvalik on the Aegean coast of Turkey. It’s the early hours of a sunny May morning. Sparrows are circling above my head, their chicks are screaming from nests high up on the ceiling; the world is beautiful, life is beautiful. After taking a final sip from my Turkish coffee I stand up slowly and…click, click, click…silently finish off a roll of medium format black and white film in this place which has long enchanted numerous other photographers.

Some technical details for the interested:

This kind of picture poses a typical technical problem. The difference in light values between the indoors and outdoors is so vast that it’s not easy to transfer both ends onto photographic paper. For example, if we print for just the indoors we get a result like this:

The problem is obvious: all windows are blank white, as if an outside world does not exist. Although I can see that the negative has captured plenty of detail in the windows, this information has not been transferred onto paper. To understand what‘s going on here it’s enough to have a look at the chart below, which shows the relationship between exposure values and tones on photographic paper.

The horizontal axis represents the amount of light the paper is exposed to, whereas the vertical axis is the corresponding darkening of the paper (#1,3,5 show changes in the graph according to different contrast filters). The important thing to notice is that the paper shows no darkening at all until it is exposed up to the point shown with the red arrow.

We can conclude that the windows of the coffehouse are so dense in the negative that light passing through it simply isn’t strong enough to pass the threshold shown in the chart above, hence it can’t produce any tone on the paper. As far as I’m aware, there are three potential solutions to such a problem:

The first is to foresee the problem and expose and develop accordingly. In other words, had I developed the film less the windows in the negative wouldn’t have been this dense and might have printed through.

The second is to use a low contrast filter at the printing stage. I don’t like this solution because we lose local contrast in the indoors whilst trying to capture the outdoors.

A Third Way

The third solution, and the one I prefer to use in similar situations, is flashing. The logic is clever: if photographic paper starts to develop tone only after being exposed to a certain amount of light, then if I can somehow coax the paper to that point, any further tiny exposure should start to record as tone. What we do is extremely simple: remove the negative and expose the paper with some light!

We can flash before or after exposing with the negative, the order doesn’t matter. We even don’t have to use any contrast filter. We only have to determine the flashing exposure, and for this I revert again to a test strip. I raise the enlarger head a bit, remove the negative, close the lens aperture as far as possible and expose a piece of paper in intervals of a second. What I get is something like this:

Here, the leftmost strip hasn’t received any light. Moving to the right, every further strip has received 1 second more light. If you look carefully, you won’t see any tone until the 5th second. It’s only after the 5th second that we can see a trace of tone. In other words, if I expose the paper for 4 seconds I will have moved it up to the threshold described above and every further small amount of light (i.e. that which passes through the dense negative parts) falling on the paper should now record. If you find there is no grey on the test strip, that means you aren’t exposing it enough and you should repeat the test strip by e.g. opening up the lens aperture a bit. If, on the other hand, even the first second on the strip is grey, then you are exposing it too much and you should repeat it by reducing the intensity of light, e.g. by raising the enlarger head further, closing the lens down a stop or two or using a neutral density filter (some enlargers have built-in neutral density filters).

I’ve printed the first picture in this post by using the flashing method. Here is a detail comparison between a flashed print and a straight print:

Note the difference in tone and detail in the window and gas tanks.

One final note before I forget it. If you decide to use flashing you have to flash test strips of the picture as well and base your decisions of exposure and contrast on these flashed test strips (you are likely to find that you will want to use a slightly higher contrast filter).

A print fresh from the oven: