There's a hole in the sky...

 ...where the rain gets in but it's ever so small that's why the rain is thin.

                                                                                                   ~Spike Milligan

Coastal Path

This picture was taken on the Olympus OM2 with the 24mm Zuiko lens on a cold, icy day a short distance from Tentsmuir Forest on Scotland's east coast. The sun was bright in the sky and was bouncing off a frozen puddle that had cosied down in a handy depression along the roadside.

The challenge was to capture as many tones as possible, including the sun partly hidden behind a very thin cloud and the light glaring off the road surface, without going too far and killing the impression of bright, low winter sunshine.

The negative was quite dense but I was sure I could still see detail in the brightest part of the sky. The problem, as is often the case, was getting that detail onto the paper. My first test strip gave me a good range of tones and suggested a basic exposure of ten seconds.

I also wanted to retain detail in the signpost so that it could be read in the final print but it was obviously going to suffer when the sky was burned in so it was clear a bit of footering about would be needed. I popped a piece of paper on the baseboard and gave it a ten second exposure to see how things might look. This was the result.

Look at the big hole in the sky. Not a lot going on there, is there. I had a think - always a good thing to do in the darkroom - and went for a print, dialling back the basic exposure a bit, adding an extra two stops of exposure for the sky and burning in the highlights on the road.

The signpost, as expected, was too dark so I dodged it throughout the basic exposure knowing that the extra sky exposure would fill it back in but, hopefully, leaving it legible. The overall balance of the print (below) wasn't bad but the big hole in the sky appeared not to have shrunk in any way.

I made another print increasing the exposure where the sky was brightest - still a big hole. I made another with more exposure - still a big hole. By now, I was burning in the sky for an extra 70 seconds or so. Ignoring the advice to stop digging when you find yourself in a hole, I thought I'd better see if there was indeed any salvageable tone in the troublesome expanse of white sky.

I chopped up a bit of paper just big enough to cover the area in question and gave the right half 120 seconds and the left half 240 seconds. Bearing in mind the basic exposure was now sitting at something like 8.5 seconds, that seemed like an awful lot.

As it turned out, the required exposure was along the lines of those two guesses. Here's the small test piece.

240s                        120s

As darkroom printers know well enough, the difficulty with such a big discrepancy between the basic exposure and a smallish, clearly-defined area that needs burned in is in blending the two exposures together without leaving the halo-of-heavy-handedness. Instead of trying to get all the tonality in the big hole area down on paper, I went for a compromise and tried to put some tone in but leaving the impression of the sun's brightness.

It's a tricky balancing act and I thought dry-down might have given me a little more tonality than is in the print but it ended up on the light side. In the actual print you can see tonality in the area but it's quite subtle and might not survive the scanning process. By the time I reached this stage, I was fed up looking at the image and couldn't be bothered giving it one final go so I'll stick with what I have for the meantime.

Had I been set up for it, I'd probably have flashed the top half of the paper or maybe just a rough area encompassing the big hole which would have cut down the extra exposure needed considerably. In years past, I'd have probably printed the image darker, as if it were getting towards dusk, which might have made the printing a little more straightforward.

Anyway, the finished result is at the top of the page. I've got good notes so if I choose to print the photograph on Ilford's fibre based paper multigrade paper in future I'll be able to reproduce the print above quite quickly and perhaps take a look at adding just a bit extra tonality to the big hole.