Hi, I'm Rachel from Little Vintage Photography and Sunny 16 podcast.
Ilford asked me to come along today and talk to you about the dodge and burn
technique.
This is something that you can do in the dark room.
It's a really simple process.
But it's something that can be quite effective.
So I've got some examples here.
This is an image that I shot at a wedding.
I took this on Ilford HP5 at 400 ISO, and I had to had her stood near a window.
So you can see that we've got this lovely soft light kind of casting in across her
face and over her shoulders.
On this example here, you can see that because of that light, we've got a loss of
detail in the shoulder here in the highlights, so we might want to bring
those out a little bit more and on this version, although she's quite nicely
exposed we've got a loss of detail in the shadow here in the dark areas.
So what we want to do is use the dodge and burn technique in order to burn in some
areas that are a bit too light to give us a bit more detail whilst preserving some
of the other areas so that they don't end up too dark so we can keep detail in the
shadows as well.
If I pop this one in you can see that on this example, we've been able to retain
some of the detail in the highlights and also in the shadows whilst making sure
that we've got a nice exposure on her face as well.
I'll show you now the technique and let's look at some of the equipment that we'll
use.
Okay, so here we've got our negative.
We've chosen the one that we're going to use.
I'm just going to use very carefully my fingers to take out the strip of
negatives.
Just make sure that you hold it by the edges, cause you may or may not have some
sort of like special cotton gloves.
Don't worry if you don't, as long as you keep your fingers out of the way, and I'm
going to use my little air foofer.
I use that to just get rid of any little bits of dust that might have been
attracted to the negative.
So now we've got our nice clean negative.
The negative holder is in the enlarger.
We just slide this out.
Now going to take the negative itself, shiny side up remember, and place that in
the negative holder and just very gently close that over to hold it in place.
And I just want to do a little double check and make sure I haven't got any dust
or anything on there.
You can use the air foofer again if you want.
There we go.
And we're just going to slot that back into the negative draw there.
Now we're going to bring in the easel and we're going to choose what size print
we're going to have.
I've set it for sort of a six by four, which I'm going to do with a white border
on a seven by five piece of paper.
This is the time that you want to choose what size your print is going to be
because if you were to adjust it afterwards you'd end up moving the
enlarger head up to make a bigger print, let's say, your exposure times would be
different.
Now I've got my easel in place.
I'm going to switch on the red light, which I do over here, and we'll have a
little look at the negative.
So I'm going to switch on the light on here just to give us a focus light and I'm
going to bring in my focus finder, pop that onto the image here and have a little
look using the fine focus dial here and looking through the focus finder, making
sure that I'm actually focusing up on the grain of the negative itself.
So I've found the focus on the grain, so that I know that's going to be pin sharp.
I'm just going to double check my framing of the actual image and make sure that I'm
happy with that.
You can see where the areas are a little bit lighter and the areas that are a bit
darker.
So we work out where we need to create a mask.
You can actually create a mask using things like your hands.
So I would perhaps use my hand like this, or you can make your own mask using
something like black card.
And I'm going to cut just a general shape that would work around the area of the
negative that we can see that I want to mask out.
That's the area that I'll be dodging around.
So now I've got my mask it's worth putting it just over the top of where you can see
your negative and checking where the edges of it are going to fall.
You don't want it really close because you'll end up with a very defined outline.
Instead, you want to keep it slightly away from the paper itself, and you also want
to make sure that you're moving it as you do that.
As if you're sprinkling sugar.
That will help to feather the edges.
I'm going to turn off my focus light, so that we can take the paper out of the
packet.
This is the paper we're going to be using it's the Ilford multigrade RC.
RC is for resin coated, and it's the glossy.
Depending on what kind of paper you're using, there'll be different textures on
different sides.
Sometimes it can be a little bit difficult, to actually work out which side
has got the emulsion on, but on something like this, you'll actually see a bit of a
sheen because we're using the glossy.
So what you want to do is make sure that you have it with the emulsion side facing up.
That's going to go into my easel.
I know that I've got that already set in the right place.
I'm going to show you the way to do it if you don't have a timer on your enlarger,
some people do, some people don't.
So what you can use is a timer on an app.
Just make sure it's a dark room timer specifically so that you haven't got any
white light.
The red light on here wont fog the paper.
On the timer I've set it to five seconds because I know that's the total amount of
time that I want that print exposure to be.
And at three and a half I will bring in my mask so that the final one and a half
seconds of that total five seconds has the mask on it.
So I'm ready to go.
Three, two, one.
Okay.
Bringing in the mask.
There we go.
And that's it.
Simple as that.
I've got my dodged and burned print and I'm going to take it over now to
developing.
See how I did.
So I've got my print.
I'm just going to pop out over here on the dry surface, get my gloves on.
These are the nitrile gloves.
It just means that these are ones that I can use safely with photographic
chemicals.
Okay, I'm going to get those on.
I've also got my nice new shiny apron on, which I love.
This was a Christmas present.
I use the develop tray as the white tray, stop tray as a kind of like neutral gray
and the fix tray is the red tray.
That's how I do it.
I also label them.
Sometimes your trays aren't colored in that case obviously make sure you, you
labeled them and I work left to right, so develop, stop, and fix.
After it's been fixed, I then pop it into a wash tray
that's basically just clear water.
Or into the sink.
With the trays I also have corresponding tongs.
It doesn't have to be the corresponding color, but just make sure you have
separate tongs for each of the trays.
I'm going to start with my print.
That's going to go into the developer tray and it's going to go into 600 ml of Ilford
multigrade I've mixed up here, so I'm going to slide the in quite smoothly and
then just start to agitate the bath by which I mean rock it backwards and
forwards gently.
Just to make sure that it's completely, fully covered and that it's done
relatively evenly as well.
And then you can start to see it developing, which is lovely.
I think that's always really magical, it's a lovely, lovely moment whenever you see a
print develop.
Once it's been in for a minute, in the developer tray, I use the corresponding
developer tongs to lift out the print.
I tend to hold it just with a corner and that's going to go into the stop.
I'm going to put it in upside down, and just literally let it drop into there.
Put those tongs back and then move to the stop tray.
This means that we don't have cross contamination and that's going to be in
there for 30 seconds and then it'll go into the fix.
Again, you can agitate that by moving it around.
Again, you can use the clock on the wall, your watch, or a timer on a dark room app
for that, just to make sure that you get that right.
Once it's gone through the stop, again, I use the stop tongs to lift the print out
and put them into the fix tray.
Let it drip back into the stop bath
and then transfer it smoothly into the fix tray.
And make sure that it's face down in the fix because that gives it the best chance
of making sure that it's fully coated with the fix.
So it's been in the fix for two minutes now, going to do the grand reveal and turn
it over and see if we've got a photo.
We've got a print.
Hurray!
It's always a nice moment.
This is our print that we've done the dodge and burn technique on.
We've got a bit more detail in the areas that were highlights before.
I'm going to switch on the white light so we can see it properly and then get into
the wash.
I'm just going to take it over now and put it into the wash tray.
You don't actually have to have anything as fancy as this.
This is just nice because Ilford have got this here.
If you needed to, you could just pop it into a separate little tray or bath of
water and make sure that that's in there for at least five minutes and then do a
final rinse just under the tap.
It's our final print.
Yay!
So that's it.
That has been using the dodge and burn technique in order to achieve a particular
look with this image of our bride stood next to a window.
As you can see, we've now got a bit more detail in the highlights and a bit more
detail in the shadows, whilst we've kept that lovely exposure on her face.
I've used it in this instance for this particular artistic look, but you can also
use it to repair some issues with images that you've got.
Thanks very much for watching.
You can check out Ilford's other videos for more tips and techniques.