Anatomy of a Print

People with only a digital background must get very confused if they're ever tempted to hoist themselves up on the garden wall and peek into their neighbour's lush analogue garden. In amongst the choice blooms and verdant growth of the film world are a whole load of labels which no doubt leave them scrambling for a point of reference.

I see this sort of thing quite regularly when looking at the blogs of digital photographers who now do a bit of film and think good old Ansel only managed to produce his landscape masterpieces in spite of his dated technique. My favourite circle of confusion surrounds tonality and, in particular, the desire expressed by some to imbue their negatives with "inky blacks". Tri X, not prints from the film but the film itself, apparently has these inky blacks.

To be honest, I don't even know what they're on about when they say that. Do they mean empty shadows or blocked highlights? Maybe I'm just showing my age and their words are perfectly sensible if you're another millennial. 

I think the younger crowd are often misled by some videos on youtube where photographers apparently switch on their enlargers, insert a negative, slide a sheet of 10x8 into the easel and produce a lovely print first time. It can all appear to be so easy. Of course, real life isn't always like that and people trying their hand in the darkroom for the first time can easily come away disillusioned by the process and their results. So just to let them know that the well-rehearsed youtube videos don't mimic real life, here's a print I made last week from start to finish. The anatomy of a print, so to speak.

It was a neg I'd never printed from and, in fact, had never even considered for some enlarger time. It had always looked quite bland on the light box. Just now, however, I'm on a bit of a mission, with mixed results so far, to root out and tackle exactly those sorts of negatives. I think the point is that I'm learning to trust the instincts I had at the time of shooting that made me want to point the camera in that direction in the first place. If it's on the negative then chances are there has to have been a good reason, right?

I'm also aware that making contact sheets of all my negs would give me a better chance of unearthing the odd image that turns out to have a bit more about it than at first glance on the lightbox but, despite lots of good intentions, I dropped that practice years ago and haven't picked it up again. I keep promising that I'll start again from the next roll of film and might yet follow-through. What I can't see me doing, though, is catching up with contact sheets of all my old negs. I have contact sheets for my first ten years or so of darkroom work and then nothing. So, for the time being, I'll eyeball the negs and pluck a volunteer from the ranks for some treatment.

Back to the subject neg, now. It was shot on Tmax 400 film on my Olympus OM2 and 50mm f2 Macro Zuiko. The developer was Spur HRX. The negative, owing mainly to the weather but also through slight under-development, is very flat. I popped it in the carrier, focused and straightened everything up and thought I would start with a test strip centred around a middle exposure of xx seconds. The timer I use would give me three exposures shorter than that and three longer each separated by a quarter of a stop. I chose grade 4 for the contrast on Fomatone MG 133 5x7.

There's that test strip above - not a great start. Having earlier been printing from some beefier negs, I closed the lens down by two stops when dealing with what appeared to be a considerably thinner neg. One stop would have been enough. Another test strip with an extra stop of light gave me this:

That was OK for working out an exposure time but it was obvious that the print was still a bit flat. So a grade 5 filter was placed atop the condenser on the Valoy II and another test strip was done but with a full sheet based around the time that looked most promising from the grade 4 strip. I also switched to sixths of a stop for a narrower range of print densities. And here's the result of that test strip:

It was all very "meh" and I was ready to chuck in the towel at that point but I began to realise that, of the test strips done so far, I liked the under-done one the most so I decided to explore a high key approach with another full sheet test strip.

This showed some promise although I wasn't too sure about the composition. But, in the aforementioned spirit of, "I must have seen something to make me take the pic", I decided to bash on. I picked the time that seemed right and did a print on a scrap of paper to see how the only two shadowed areas would appear.

They're the rocks in the bottom right and the small wall of sand in the middle. The aim was for just a little bit of maximum black and they both seemed fine so the first "proper" print was exposed.

It was OK but for a few points. Having decided at the outset against my usual thin black border on the basis that it was too much black for a high key print, I found the sky was bleeding into the unexposed paper as it was too light, particularly in the corners. It's actually more noticeable for some reason on the print than on the scan so you might need to take my word for it.

Then, there was the horizon. The sea is level in the shot but it's barely visible at the base of the sky and the line of beach in the middle distance - which looks like it could be water - gives the appearance that you could water ski down the Tay without the assistance of a boat. I also felt the left hand side of the print needed to be a little darker.

In went another sheet of paper and these points were attended to. The final result is below:

So was it worth faffing around with this print to that extent? I'm undecided, to be honest. Although I thought I could get away with it, the composition is unbalanced by the rocks at the bottom right and the rocks on the right hand sandbank. I suppose I could play them down a little and maybe darken the ridge of sand in the middle of the scene for a bit of balance but it's never going to be anything out of the ordinary. It might have been better had I stuck with a darker, more literal interpretation of the scene and darkened the left hand side as well to improve the composition.

So, for any millennials who read this at some point in the future, real life printing - at least my version of it - isn't quite like it might appear on the "awesome" guy's Youtube channel where everything is, like, super-cool. If your initial darkroom experience doesn't go too smoothly, stick with it.

And the secondary moral of this tale is that, although I'd like to think that I always have a good reason for taking a photo, it ain't necessarily so.