A Silent Encounter

by Omar Ozenir
http://geldurkal.blogspot.co.uk/

I took this photo whilst wandering around in the area of the broom makers in Edirne. I slowly approached him with my Rolleiflex TLR, received his silent approval through eye contact and exposed a few frames. I call it “A Silent Encounter” because we didn’t exchange one single word!

Some technicalities for the interested:
Let me explain how I make the black border which I first mentioned in this post. In my opinion, such adornments should be used sparsely. It might look OK on a single print, but on a set of prints it can easily look out of place and become a distraction rather than an enhancement.

One of my easels is a Dunco with four movable blades. This set of small magnetic rulers was part of the package when I had first purchased the easel:

Before I print the picture at the desired size I align the magnetic rulers with each of the four movable blades. For example, as shown in the picture below, I align the 3cm point on the rulers with the edges of the print.

This picture is representative, of course. Everything that follows is done under darkroom lighting and there won’t be an image until the paper is developed. After exposing the paper as usual, using the rulers as reference points I open up the blades by as much as how large I want the white gap between the image and black border to be, e.g. 7mm.

Then I remove the negative from the enlarger (or you can use a second enlarger) and raise the enlarger head so that it’s light now covers the larger space on the easel. Using a steel ruler (or a piece of cardboard with a clean straight edge), I leave a thin gap between the easel blade and the steel ruler (for better visibility I exaggerated this gap in the picture below), cover up the image area with a piece of cardboard, open up the lens aperture and expose the gap between the ruler and the easel edge for 2-3 seconds with light from the enlarger. This will become the black line.

Once I’ve done this for all four edges the result looks like this:

A 30x40cm print on FB paper