Transcript
Photography: Basic Steps in Making Prints Contact Print
an otherwise good contact print with one strip of negatives upside down
The purpose of a contact print is to let you see all the images from a set of negatives in positive form, and at the same size as your negatives. Photographers look at their contact sheets to evaluate their compositions and to decide which negatives to enlarge. When making a contact print, you place your negatives in direct contact with the photo paper. 1. Find a contact printing frame (there should be one on the shelf one up from the bottom at your enlarger station, on the right-hand side) and make sure it is clean. (Use glass cleaner and a photo wipe to clean it if necessary.) Position it properly under an enlarger. 2. Turn the enlarger on by flipping the timer switch (at bottom right) down to “F” (which stands for “focus”) to see the reactangular area of light being projected. (Make sure that a negative carrier is properly placed in the enlarger in order to get this rectangular shape of light.) 3. Set the enlarger height to 17 (as marked on the post) and focus so that the area of projected light has sharp edges: this area should be slightly larger than your contact printing frame. Note: Never force any equipment. If you cannot crank the enlarger up or down to 17 easily, make sure to loosen the tighten-down screw on the enlarger. Once the enlarger is at the correct height, 17, tighten the screw back down. While doing this you should use the largest (brightest) f-stop on the enlarger lens. Note: Use this same enlarger height and area of light no matter how many pictures you are contact printing! 4. Choose an f-stop. Your choice of f-stop (aperture) should be influenced by two factors: the density of your negatives and the type of enlarger you'll be using. If your negatives are dense, use a bright f-stop (such as f4 or f5.6). If they are thin, try using a very small aperture, such as f11 or f16. If your negatives are of normal density, try using a moderate f-stop (e.g., f8 or f11). Our condenser enlargers are about one f-stop brighter than our diffusion enlargers. Therefore, all other factors being equal, you'll want to use brighter f-stops when using diffusion-type enlargers. Note down what f-stop you are using in your notebook. As a starting point for average negatives, f5.6 for diffusion enlargers and f8 for condenser enlargers are good starting points. 5. Place a strip of photo paper, positioned shiny side up, on the foam of the contact printing frame . Place one strip of your negatives, shiny side up as well, on top of the photo paper in preparation for making a test strip. Close the glass top of the contact printing frame.
6. Make a test strip. A good starting test strip might include times such as 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 seconds. Note that very short times are prone to inaccuracy, while long times can be inconvenient. To make such a test strip, you would expose the whole strip for six seconds. You'd then reset your timer to 3 seconds and then cover most of your paper and negative “sandwich” with a piece of opaque cardboard (being sure not to use anything translucent, such as oak tag, which is thicker than paper, but thinner than cardboard) and expose this first uncovered area for the selected increment of time. When the enlarger light goes off, you would then move your cardboard (held above the glass) a bit to uncover more of the strip, giving it another 3 seconds. Repeat this process yet again, then leaving a last area without any additional exposure, and you will have created a strip with the times listed above. Important: It is very helpful to move your cardboard parallel to the long axis of the film. This means that every frame (and you'll usually have a strip of negatives that is from four to six frames long) will be exposed for all the different exposure times you are attempting to test. Since it’s possible that the density (darkness) of your negatives may vary somewhat from frame to frame, it is very helpful to do the test this way so as to test all the negatives at once. Note that, even if you have multiple strips of negatives from a roll of film, you should use just one strip of negatives to make a test strip. 8. Process the test strip and evaluate it after rinsing off: look at it under good illumination and find the best area. Remember that the darkest areas are those that were exposed for the longest times. It is quite possible that you'll feel that some of your negatives should get longer or shorter times than others: they don't match. Choosing the best exposure time for the whole contact print may involve determining a good compromise time, the exposure time that will be best for the majority of your images (or, perhaps, for the most important ones). 9. Set your timer to the exposure time just determined. Take a sheet of photo paper large enough to fit all the strips of film on your roll of film and place it on the contact printing frame shiny side up. (Note that you should not have a strip of film longer than six frames. A six-frame strip of film will just fit the long dimension (ten inches in length) of a full sheet of photo paper.) Place all the strips of film, also shiny side up, on the photo paper. Make sure the strips go in order (from the first you shot at top left to the last you shot towards the bottom right), and that all are correctly oriented. Lower the glass to ensure proper contact between your film and the photo paper and expose for the total time. No cardboard is involved this time. 10. Process print 11. Make sure that, in your notebook, you've written down the f-stop and exposure time you've used. Also note down the number of the enlarger station you worked at. If you’ve used a contrast filter, note down the filter number.
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Photography: Basic Steps in Making Prints Enlargement Enlargements are prints you make for some sort of display. Generally, for this class, you will make enlargements on 8 x 10 (inch) photo paper. The actual image size will be slightly smaller, because of how the easel works. When making an enlargement, you will place your negative (shiny side up) into the negative carrier of the enlarger. Print quality is more important for enlargements than for contact prints, since you show enlargements to other people, whereas contact prints are for your own use. 1. Find a printing easel, with either a fixed mask or with movable blades, and position it on the baseboard of the enlarger. 2. Raise the lamp-house assembly. With the diffusion enlargers, turn the large knob on the left side of the lamphouse assembly, right at the back of the lamp-house, to do this. With the condenser enlargers, DO NOT turn this corresponding large knob. Instead, lift a lever that you'll find on the left side of the enlarger, at the same level as the negative carrier. Take out the negative carrier. 3. Place your strip of negatives in the negative carrier shiny side up, centering the image you wish to print in the opening. Handle your negatives by the edges only: don’t put your fingers on the images themselves! Close the negative carrier. If your negative is not precisely where you want it, lift the top half of the negative carrier a bit to avoid scratching your negative when repositioning it. 4. Replace the negative carrier in the enlarger and make sure that it clicks into place. Lower the enlarger lamp housing back down all the way. Failure to do this before turning on the enlarger light may lead to light escaping and fogging photo paper -- your own and/or somebody else's -- when you turn on the lamp. 5. In the top right-hand drawer at each enlarger station, there should be one piece of 8 x 10 photo paper that, on one side, has white letters on a black background: the letters spell out: “Focus on the other side of this sheet.” Raise the masking blade assembly of your easel to insert this sheet, white side up, into the easel. Push it towards the far left corner of the easel, pushing it up against the metal tabs found in that corner of the flat part of the easel. Lower the blade assembly most, but not quite all, of the way back down, and make sure that the movable blades just cover the edges of the focusing sheet. You have now given yourself a good surface on which to project and focus the image and have also properly positioned the easel blades/mask to define an area just smaller than your photo paper. Doing so ensures that you will not inadvertently crop your image (which would involve projecting your image beyond the area of your photo paper, thus “cutting off” the image). Note that if you want to make a 5 x 7 inch print, you can follow the same procedures, but using the 5 x 7 piece of oak-tag that should also be in each of these top right-hand drawers in place of the 8 x 10 photo paper. 6. Flip the timer switch to “F” (“Focus”) and change the height and focus of the enlarger so as to get your image sized as you wish and sharply focused. As you begin this process, open the enlarger lens to its brightest setting. In order to focus your image properly, you absolutely must always have the enlarger lens at its widest open f-stop. (Later, you can shut the lens down to any other f-stop you like, but only after you've focused the image. It is impossible to focus a dim image as well and as readily as a brighter image.) 7. Depending upon the density of your negative, shut the enlarger down to a moderate setting. Extremely dense negatives can be printed more easily with a larger (i.e., brighter) aperture, while very thin negatives should be printed with the smallest (i.e., dimmest) available aperture. The idea is to get a convenient printing time: both very short and very long print exposure times tend to create problems. It is also advisable, if possible, to avoid the extreme fstops at either end, but especially at the bright end of the scale (e.g., f3.5 and f4). This is because, at the bright 3
extreme, the image is projected even by the very edges of the lens, which tend to introduce distortions: the projected image won’t be optimally sharp. 8. Make one or more test strips to determine exposure time before you make a print made entirely for the one time you select as the best exposure from a test strip. Do not assume that the exposure (f-stop, time, and perhaps filtration) you used to make a contact print will be correct for an enlargement from one of the negatives from which you made that contact print! This will hardly ever be the case! Rather, you need to make a new test strip each time you start working to enlarge a different negative, although sometimes you can use what you’ve learned from enlarging one negative from a roll of film to help guess at good times for a new test strip for an enlargement of another negative from the same roll of film. In making the test strip for an enlargement, the only notable difference in procedure as compared with making such a strip for a contact print, is that you need to be careful not to touch the photo paper with the cardboard you use to hold light back from the test strip. Hold the cardboard at least an inch or two above your photo paper as you make your enlargement test strip. After evaluating the test strip in good light you will proceed to make your enlargement. As with the contact print, write down all relevant exposure information in your photo notebook. This includes: fstop, exposure time, enlarger station number, and the number of any contrast filter you may have used.
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Test Strips In the sections of this handout dealing with making both contact prints and enlargements there has been mention of test strips. You are instructed always to make a test strip first, before proceeding to make a contact print and/or before making an enlargement. There are several types of test strips, with some being more useful than others, depending upon the situation. First, remember that when you begin a new enlargement, you need to make a test strip for that enlargement – even though you have already made a contact print (and, before that, a test strip for the contact print) with that image on it. There are a few reasons why this is necessary, with one big reason being that your enlarger height is almost certain to be different for the enlargement as compared to what it was for the making of the contact print. Incremental test strip: This is the most common type of test strip. Because most test strips we make are incremental, we often don’t even use the term “incremental.” An incremental test strip is one that shows “strips” of different exposures times. That is, different sections of the test strip were exposed for different length (increments) of time. Here is an example, a test strip made for an enlargement:
The spread of different times is very useful here: we seem to have at least one strip (on the bottom) that is too light (too little exposure), and one that is too dark, but neither is really extreme. Ideally, incremental test strips should be like this: they should have some sections that are too dark and some that are too light (and, of course, some in between). And there are two intermediate strips that seem to be very close to what we might want. Another good thing about this test strip is that it was set up so that a range of dark and light values from the original scene (i.e., in this case, the dark of the black cat and the relatively light values of the background) is included in each of the four exposure strips. This points to a general rule of making test strips: Always include a good range of values within each segment of the test strip. Test strips for contact prints will virtually always be incremental test strips. See the following contact sheet test strip example:
This test strip is mostly too light. The next step should be to make a new test strip for longer exposure times. If the times for the test strip above were, for example, 10, 13, and 16 seconds, it would make sense to make a new test strip for times such as 18, 22, and 24 -- or thereabouts. It would not make as much sense to make a new test strip for 16, 18, and 20 (since you've already seen what 16 looks like), and it would make even less sense (!) to make a new test strip for 13, 16, and 19 seconds: you'd only get to see one new time. If your exposure times are already very long -- let's say, 40, 45, and 50 seconds long -- it would make sense to use a brighter f-stop so as to avoid having to use e x t r e m e l y long exposure time. Avoiding extremely long exposure times is a matter of convenience, for the most part. But avoiding extremely short exposure times is a matter of accuracy. Making a test strip with times as short as one, two, or three seconds can cause a lot of problems. For one thing, our timers are not entirely accurate, and the effect of timer error is magnified when you use very short exposure times. It is also very difficult to burn in and dodge enlargements (to make selected areas darker or lighter) accurately when dealing with ultra-short exposure times. Still, you may run into situations where it seems that your test strips are going too dark unless you use really short exposure times. 5
The best thing to do is to use a smaller aperture. For example, if you seem to see that a two second exposure time looks good when you're using f4, consider using f8 with an eight second exposure time. Using f8 will dim your light considerably: it will be only a quarter as bright as when you use f4, and you will therefore be creating the same exposure situation with f8 at eight seconds as you had with f4 and two seconds. Non-incremental test strip: A non-incremental test strip is one made for just a single exposure time. Generally, we avoid making test strips this way, since a big part of the idea of making a test strip is to get multiple guesses (of exposure times) on single pieces of paper (i.e., strips). But there are times, at least when making enlargements, when it does make sense to make this kind test strip . . . but only if you have already made a more traditional incremental test strip. If you are pretty sure of the best exposure time, after having made and examined an incremental test strip, but you are not quite sure, it can be helpful to make a single-time test strip that includes key areas of the image. Note: It is hard to think of a situation where this sort of test strip would make sense when dealing with contact prints. Another type of non-incremental test strip is one made for a single exposure time but also including dodging (holding light back from selected areas of the image) and burning-in (adding light to selected areas of the image). Back to incremental test strips: Sometimes, even though you've made a good test strip that includes all the important values (lights and darks) of the image in each segment, and that has a good range from sections that are too light to other that are too dark, you still might not be sure precisely what exposure time to use. This is often because the jumps in exposure are too great, and you can't find any one section that looks quite right. In such situations, it often makes sense to make an additional test strip that is incremental but for which you use smaller jumps in exposure. For example, imagine that you have made a test strip for times of 10, 14, 18, and 22 seconds, and it appears that the best time is probably somewhere between 14 and 18 seconds. A test strip that includes the times 16, 17, and 18 seconds might help you fine tune your choice of exposure time.
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