MorseBlog

This is the first post on a series of attempts to print some of the images I made in the Mathematical Trees Study blog post . This post contains a lot of detail notes of the process a more readable summary of the project is here . My objective is to explore these images for their potential and also to stretch my darkroom skills. These images in heavy fog are haunting but also a real problem to print. There is such a narrow range of tone there is not really the idea of shadow just different highlights. This tends to mean that want appears an scene evenly lit by the diffuse light is in fact a gradient brightest closest to the sun moving subtly darker away. The negative scan below is not my objective, it just reveals the subtle range of tones. I want to present the fog as white (not gray) and yet have the trees apparent.  Scanned Negative My first attempt was to try and tease out some contrast on Ilford MG Art 300 paper. This paper is based on a cotton rag watercolor paper so has a st...

Introduction In a couple of earlier posts on my physical split printing and toning ( Here and here ) I used Wephota FO5 technical film for the transparency portion of the work. Being a technical film it is very high contrast which can be a benefit and a curse. For the physical split printing project the film worked well enough; however I wished for higher contrast to allow more of the substrate image tones to show through the surface image. I also have been exploring masking in the enlarger and my work so far has struggled to get a high enough contrast dodge mask so there is a second use for controlling for higher contrast.  Another area I have worked on was my Lith-Lith prints  where I created a warm tone positive transparency from technical film that I mounted over aluminum foil for a spectacular look. In this case I want to reduce contrast so more of the primary image tones show. So again a desire to control for contrast. The final piece to this was that a number of years a...