Only the Best Prints Will Do

I made just two New Year Resolutions for 2014: earn a living and lose weight. Nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe I should add a third: quality and not quantity in the darkroom. If you're like me then you want to make the most of a darkroom session and that means trying to print from at least a few negatives. It seems such a waste setting everything up and only coming out with one decent print so I always try to maximise the time.

The problem is that sometimes I emerge with four or five quite decent prints - all of which I know can be better in some way. So I file them away in a box thinking that I'll revisit them at some point and go the extra mile to get them spot on. But I seldom do. Consequently, I've got a lot of these work prints lying around and precious few that I think of as the finished article. That's going to change.

Here's an example of a print that I'm happy with. And yet it started
life as an overexposed cock-up looking something like the one below.

Which goes to show that sometimes you have to see beyond your initial
 visualisation to arrive at the best interpretation of a scene.

About 14 years ago I used to belong to Dundee Photographic Society, a club that's over 130 years old. I joined so that I could see at first hand the prints of visiting lecturers such as Tony Worobiec. What the club also did was encourage its members to take part in the monthly print and slide competitions. That was a good discipline. It forced me to select one negative for the competition and produce the best print I could which then had to be matted.

I could do with some of this single-mindedness now. I've made quite a number of prints since returning to the darkroom in earnest about nine months ago but whilst the vast majority are fine for illustrating blog posts they're not as good as I can make them. That's partly my thinking behind doing a portfolio or two: I'd have to whittle down the negs to the ones I really like and then do the best I could for each one.

I got to thinking about this again after visiting the blog of a talented Stockholm photographer, Marie Westerbom, the other day. She seems to have rediscovered film a couple of years ago, sold off her digital equipment, and, like us, is now an analogue nut. It must have been a wrench because she has some beautiful digital shots in her Flickr stream.

Click here to visit Marie's blog.

In this blog post, Marie describes how she worked on one pinhole neg in the darkroom over four days trying something a little different each time. Her favourite print was the final one - a lith print. I thought this was an excellent way of concentrating the mind and working to get the best out of a negative.

I have a tendency to look at a negative and see the print I want to produce, somewhat blind to other possibilities. But what if I made it a little darker or lighter or increased the contrast? What about printing it for shadow detail at lower contrast and then bleaching back the highlights? There are usually a few ways of printing a good negative and sometimes there's no substitute for a few sessions in the darkroom for revealing the best approach. The two pics at the top of this post are a good example of this: I would normally have thrown the overexposed one in the bin. You can read the full story about them here if you haven't already.

Upside Down

I remember Eddie Ephraums describing how he would make a print and then look at it upside down and in a mirror checking for any "imbalance". He'd make a proof print which he dodged and burned where necessary and even went as far as spotting it before putting it away. A while later, he'd approached it afresh, viewing it under different types and strengths of lighting before deciding whether to print it and, if so, where he was going to take it. This all takes lots of time. Of the many thousands of negatives he exposed every year, he seldom printed more than about 20 to exhibition standard annually.

Compare that with the habit I've developed of trying to knock out a few prints in one darkroom session. I suspect I'm not alone in approaching the craft of producing a finished print like this. Are you all so focused that you're able to produce the best print you can or do you tend towards my scatter gun approach?

I'm going to slow things right down from now on when I go into the darkroom. Instead of being armed with several negs, I'll take in just the one. And I'll stick with it until I'm satisfied that the print I have is the best of which I'm capable.

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