I Leica this print

Pow of Errol river, low tide at Port Allen, Carse of Gowrie

There's an old saying that you can make darkroom printing as easy or as complicated as you like and there's definitely something to that. However, whilst there may be several ways to skin a cat in the darkroom, so to speak, the photographer can still stack the odds against a simple print by his choice of subject matter and lighting.

Sadly, making life difficult for myself is one of the few things I excel at. The biggest problem is shooting into the light. Dark foregrounds and bright skies with trees breaking across the horizon make it a tricky job to retain detail in both the shadows and highlights. "Contre jour" landscapes always appeal to me so I've got lots of these awkward negatives that are a doddle to sort if scanned into Photoshop but give me the heebie-jeebies at the enlarger.

My last darkroom print was a case in point. It was shot on my Leica M2 with a 50mm f2 Summicron on the camera. The film was Ilford FP4 but it was a while back and the developer escapes me. Chances are it was ID11 1+1. I knew as I stood on a wee bridge looking at this scene that the print would require a bit of work. I suppose some would call it a form of pre-visualisation (sic) but, if so, it was definitely more Stephen King than Ansel Adams. The more exposure I gave for the shadow areas, the denser the sky would be on the neg. I bracketed about half-a-dozen shots of the scene so I had a range of negs with varying amounts of shadow detail in the hope of finding the best balance against the bright sky.

When I got to the darkroom I went for the neg with the "second best" shadow detail as the next one up the shadow scale had dense highlights that I didn't really fancy the look of. I've just started printing with Ilford MG RC V, the pearl surface, and it's proving to be a great paper purely from an image quality point of view but it always takes a bit of time to get a feel for a new paper so I was playing it safe. MG V has a sparkle about it that its predecessor lacked in my opinion and I'm fairly comfortable with the pearl surface so it's looking good.

It's not too expensive as paper costs go these days so I used a full sheet for the first test strip. When I looked at the negative, there were tones all over the place that needed careful consideration from an exposure point of view so I went for a wide scale test strip with half-stop intervals on grade 2.5 which gave me seven steps from 5s to 45s. I started at the right hand side because the rough grassy area there looked like it would need the least exposure and the left hand sky the most.

I was using the Leitz Valoy II - my favourite enlarger - and the second generation 50mm Leitz Focotar for the print. So it was an all Leitz affair from start to finish. Here's the grade 2.5 test strip which provided just about all the information I needed.

I went for a 6s basic exposure with an additional 20s for the sky. I could see from the test strip that burning in the water at grade 2.5 would provide a nice sparkle but would crush the boats until they were featureless shadows so I opted for a 10s burn of the water at grade 0 to tame the highlights without affecting the boats too much. I did a wee test print with those times to see how it looked. This is it.

A couple of things needed a bit of attention at this point. The river banks were a little lacking in detail and over-spill from the burning in of the water was darkening the land between the water and the distant hills too much.

I dropped the grade to No2 and made up a wee dodging tool to dodge the problematic strip of  land throughout the basic exposure. The resulting print has a nice atmosphere to it and I was pleased that I managed to capture the quality of light I sometimes see at Port Allen. What surprised me a bit was the sharpness of the image, bearing in mind it was hand-held - and notwithstanding the fact that it was only a 6" x 9" image on 10" x 8" paper. But then the end result is the culmination of all the various elements from start to finish.

The Summicron, even though it's pushing 65 years old, is no slouch and the Focotar is as good an enlarging lens as you'll find. FP4, although not one of my favourite films, can certainly have a bit of bite to it. In fact, thinking about it, the weakest link in the entire chain was me! Haha. I have to say something about the Valoy II again. It's a really special machine in my experience and produces the best prints from 35mm film that I've seen from any enlarger of my acquaintance. I use Ilford's below-the-lens multigrade filters with it and find that they work very well, especially for split-grade printing.

So that was the tale of an enjoyable little print that gave me a lot of satisfaction. At the end of the day, it wasn't a straight print but didn't really cause me too many problems and I enjoyed the challenge. And what about the all-Leitz effort that went into its production? I'd love to repeat it but the M2's shutter is needing attention again so it might be a while before I can repeat that set-up.

I know we should be all about the image, the camera is just a tool, etc, but there's a certain romantic notion - to me anyway - of using Leica equipment at every stage of the process. I've had a feeling for a long time that this approach might result in something a little out of the ordinary and so it proved.