When you look at an amazing image in a magazine or up on the wall in an
exhibition chances are it's undergone some degree of post production work.
With digital photography this would obviously happen in a computer and I know that
some of you love fiddling with your images, adjusting and
tweaking which is brilliant.
But i also know lots of you don't.
You've written in and you said you'd much rather get it right in camera and
just be able to leave it alone.
But even back in the days of fiml when you took your roll of film to a high
street mini-lab, they would have adjusted the density how bright or
dark it is, and even the colors, even though you didn't know about it.
Post production has actually been around pretty much since the dawn of
photography. I'm here at Itchen college in southampton who have kindly lent me their
Dark Rooms to show you what I mean.
As I'm back at college I thought it would be a 'bit of a Wheeze' to make a print from one
of the very first
black-and-white negs I ever shot when I was doing 'City and Guilds' at college
myself which was twenty-odd years ago!
Look - this is a flat looking image. A bit misty and dull -
it is a bit lifeless!
With a little bit of post-production in the dark room
I think I can make a big difference to that.
Right - that's the enlarger loaded with a new sheet of paper.
To increase contrast in the good old days - you had to use either a
different grade of paper, or one of these. It is a contrast filter. This paper sensitive
to different colored light so I'm using a number three contrast filter to lift
the contrast a bit.
I want it a little bit darker
so I've open the aperture on the elarger bit. It's a bit of a 'Faff' compared to
digital! So I'm going to put the
coloured filter over the lens of the enlarger
and we're just going to make an exposure. There it goes.
14 second exposure, and I've opened the aperture of the enlarger a bit
so it is letting out a little more light,
because in photographic printing more light means a darker print. Where as in
the 'film' side of things it would be overexposed and be too bright.
Right - that's our initial exposure.
Next thing I wanted to do was to darken in that sky. So what I'm
going to do is open up the lens of the enlarger some more...
so that's one -
almost 2 clicks. A 'click' and a half I've done
because I want lots more light to hit the sky.
How under the control it and make it more moody round the edges
is with what is called 'Dodging and Burning'.
I want the light to hit the 'empty' sky area which will make it go dark.
To achieve this. Instead of making a hole with my hands - which I could do and let light
pass through it
onto the sky area.
I'm going to mask the area that's OK.
Like doing sea gull impressions on a wall. Here we go...
The emlarger is set, we're going to run another 14 seconds, and I've got to be
very ready!
Here we go!
Hands under the light
I need to make a little shape here to dodge that
All the time there is light 'burning' onto the top of the picture
and the Church Spire and the sky, but it should not be doing anything
on the rest of it which was OK.
I'm going to give it a tiny 'burn' around the edges as well.
A quick one of those in the corner to put a dark vignette all the way around these corners...
and we should be there.
Let's go and see what we've got.
Did it work?
This is kind of exciting! This is the bit I which I used to really
enjoy doing this is I suppose like the modern
uh... watching the of paper come out of the printer.
20 seconds - slide it under the chemicals
and let's see what happens!
This process takes about 60 seconds
The way this works
is there is silver in the paper and
silver tarnishes doesn't it!
These chemicals
are accelerating the
tarnish process
effecting silver crystals which have already had light hit them
and it accelerates the 'tarnish'. Look look - here we go! We've got
that very moody thing going on in the corners of the sky were l 'dodged it
so very different look to the
'straight' print we have outside.
It's going to take a few more seconds
as we wash this back and forwards.
With color printing
that was a whole different ball game because you couldn't work under red
light.
Color printing was all done in complete darkness
pitch black
not like this - no matter what you saw in movies! Pop that into there
to stop the developer.
Believe it or not
Kodak in London in their labs - and possibly around the world - were the
largest employers
of blind people in the world.
Because obviously, blind people can work in these conditions and is no different
is completely normal so they were brilliant
when it comes to working with photographic printing.
Right - let's rock that back and forward. This is called 'Fix'.
This is bleaching away any of the silver
crystals which
have NOT been affected by light because we don't want those. If you put this picture outside
into the day light
all the unaffected crystals
be start to be affected by light and the picture will vanish.
So it's going to take about a minute
of washing backwards and forwards and being 'bleached'.
but as you see already just looking at in the tray
that's a bit of post-production
and it's a lot more 'Faffy'
than it is on the computer
but it does result in a very nice image.
All this 'Dodging and Burning'
they will happen in the computer - you have a little hand which does this
you'll see that later.
A few more seconds ...
that's fixed.
It has bleached away the silver and we can put it into the wash.
All we are doing now is washing it
to take away
any of the chemicals
so we can go outside.
Here we go - fresh out the dryer,
and quite different. Look here is the original print
very grey, washed out
no sky detail.
In this one I have gone a little over the top
but with some post production it is
much darker, more moody and I've added some sky contrast.
You can see, post-production
has made a big difference.
You could also do image manipulation in a dark room
using bleach on a print you could remove things from the picture that you didn't
want in it.
Very often you would see black-and-white shots of models which have had their eyes
bleached in the white areas to make them much more 'Starey'.
You could add things by sandwiching negatives
negatives together in the enlarger and printing through them both at the
same time. You could do loads of things
working with colour you could do some amazing stuff but you had to be very
very skillful
you also have to have a whole bunch of chemicals which deteriorated pretty
quickly
and the big down side
whatever way you did it - you needed a great big dark room to do it in!