Luminosity

 

Luminosity. What a lovely word. So descriptive but not in a matter-of-fact way. There’s some room for interpretation. Ask ten people and you’ll probably get a few different meanings. People can be luminous, as can starry skies. A forest in the right light can be luminous. So can prose.

A photographic print can also have luminosity but here’s where the versatile nature of the word starts to cause a problem. Because what, exactly, is a luminous print? What does one look like? How does one achieve such an uncommon thing?

A luminous print sounds ominously like the Leica glow, a nebulous entity that many talk about in reverence but far fewer have ever experienced. Although the two may seem to share some qualities, they’re actually more like two adjacent circles in a Venn diagram, happily existing apart from each other and only occasionally threatening to share a tangential point before veering off to do their own thing.

I spent an afternoon this week contemplating print luminosity and emerged intrigued by the concept. I first heard of it when Michael Johnston of The Online Photographer fame penned an article (it should be available here) for The Luminous Landscape (of all websites) about “the glow”. He wrote of, "That rich, soft, pearly look that some master prints have."

Mike even went as far as to proffer a recipe of sorts (heavily edited below) that might be helpful in achieving the glow. 

1. Use an older lens. An old, fast "long normal" lens‚ a 58mm f/1.4 or 1.2‚ works wonderfully.
2. Use a K2 filter‚ Wrattan #8, medium yellow, whatever you want to call it.
3. Shoot in good light away from the sun, and don’t provoke flare. Shade the lens. Stay away from very high contrast situations.

4. Don’t use a thin-emulsion film‚ stick with old-fashioned conventional emulsions.
5. Expose enough.
6. Use a conventional, traditional developer.
7. Don’t develop too much. Say, 10% or 20% less than the manufacturer recommends for outdoor scenes, no more than the manufacturer recommends for flat indoor scenes.

8. Use a diffusion enlarger.
9. Use a rich fiber-base paper.
10. Don’t print with too much contrast.

The complete recipe goes into much more detail as you'll see if your read Mike's article in the link above.

I’ve always meant to give it a go and might yet get round to it. Then Phil Rogers, esteemed editor and author of Fogblog, told me in an email about US photographer Steve Mulligan (we were discussing film/dev combos and Steve likes FP4 in HC110, as does Phil). I looked at Steve’s website and enjoyed one of his articles about luminosity.

That led me to Minor White - you’ll find out why if you read Steve’s article - and I went and tracked down one of Minor’s books on archive.org (you need to sign up but it's free and takes two minutes) to see for myself the kind of image that meets the standard. I seem to have a lousy eye for subtle differences between films, developers and lenses but even I, a half-blind pseudo aesthete, could understand what the fuss was about. Some of Minor’s prints - even seen as dodgy scans in a book reproduction - seem to have an other-worldliness about them. I can imagine the originals lighting up a darkened room.

Have I ever made a print that I would describe as “luminous”? I racked my brain for a while but came up with a blank. In pursuit of this goal, I think the exposure for a scene must be perfect and then the development must place the highlight tones just so. The negative has to be a good fit for the paper’s sensitivity curve and everything about print exposure and development must be spot on. When everything is right - including the light at the taking stage - then a luminous print has a chance to shine. It’s no wonder, then, that such a print remains outwith the everyday capabilities of the average photographer although, happy accidents can and do happen.

I included the two prints of Dunino Church in Fife here because I feel they’re possibly the closest I've come to a luminous print. They were taken about ten months ago within 20 minutes of each other - front and back views of the church in the mist - on the Rollei SL66E. Whereas the front view had a somewhat ethereal feel to it, the rear view had a lovely gothic atmosphere. There were some delicate wee bits in the rear view that I wanted to make sure could be seen, such as the highlights on the eaves visible between the two trees closest to the camera and the iron railing just to the left of the ivy-covered gate pillar at the right hand side. I set up with the 80mm to start with but it messed with the relationships of the various small details so I used the 150mm instead.

These shots fulfilled some of Mike's criteria and I have some hope that, with a bit of work, they might approach the luminous mark. The negatives look good and I’ve maybe got to try one or two things to see if that shy and retiring inner glow can be coaxed out of the silver gelatin.

I’ll let you know how that goes. In the meantime, I think I’ll look out my 1960s Takumar 50mm F1.4, a roll of XP2 and a yellow filter and search for the right light to put Mike’s recipe to the test. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.