I’m an old photographer and I’m always surprised at how many people under the age of 30 say “I want to do black-and-white film.”
I usually groan a bit, then I ask, “Are you prepared to spend hours and hours in a darkroom and have most of you images not work?”
They always say yes,
I love black and white, but the hours and hours....
Bazyl & Spike
Here’s what would work: [I know because I did it]
Step one: Shoot film,
(hopefully there’s a good light meter in the camera, or they have a DigitalSLR (I quickly learned that the meters in DSLRs are smarter than me, the Zone System, Minor White, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston....wait, he never used a light meter. I use the DSLR exposure for the ISO. Forget handheld or spot meter. Too many variables--the DSLR meter is always smarter (back light, sure sometimes that's a problem).
Forget the zone system. It's a lot of endless worrying. I found it good to know about, but using the broad concepts was usually more practical and more useful.
Process the film (Weston used a pyro developer which had some nice qualities, especially developing to exhaustion. The density range is almost self regulating. The end of my B&W career, I was using a pyro developer.)
Then: Scan the negative,(This is to make a mask, so super hi-resolution isn't required, but it'll help when you're in Photoshop. The critical factor is to keep everything 1:1 in size)
Open the scan in Photoshop, make the best possible adjustments and
Then using an inkjet printer, printout onto transparency film with an inkjet printer a MultiGrade adjustment mask.
Take this into a darkroom, sandwich it above the neg and you’ve just save 20 years of endless frustration learning. There’ll still be some dodging and burning.
I’ve done this following a book called [I think] The Digital Negative.
Not sure if it had instructions on making color multigrade masks. I think I just figured that out on my own.
The mask does not have to be very high res. One step I think is to blur it a bit.
Here's the problem: Ideally there'd be a PhotoShop 'filter' to create this mask. I don't think one exists.
It wouldn't be difficult to make. (I remember at a MacWorld in about 1996 speaking to an Adobe guy. Told him about the distortion from the Schneider 90mm 4x5 lens (it's like a 16mm DX or a 20mm FX DSLR lens) Suggested shooting a grid on a flat wall and using that to create a PS Filter to fix it. A vertical rectangle near the edges becomes a square. I remember it as more than just stretching. He didn't even blink. "That wouldn't be very hard to do."
Now Lightroom reads the metadata, and automatically un-distorts the specific lens and corrects vignetting. Brilliant. I use the Nikon 28-300mm FX zoom lens. It's $950, might not be great for film, but digitally to get this quality and range I think would take two $2500 lenses. The vignetting correction filter for the 90mm Schneider cost $350 (about $900 in today's money) and lost two stops.
I don't think it would be at all difficult for Adobe or a smart coder/photographer to create a filter that would 1. compare the negative scan with 2. The corrections you made in Photoshop and 3. Output a color mask for density and contrast. It would be better than anything you or anyone could do in the darkroom.
It might take two masks to achieve the needed densities.
What I quickly discovered with PhotoShop (before you were born, when PS was version 2) is that Ansel Adam’s print quality while hard to achieve with film is digitally dead simple.
Pictorialist quality it much more difficult to attain. Close approximations are not difficult, but usually not very good.
If you can correct in Photoshop to achieve your desired image, than it's just a translation to photo paper, chemistry, toning to match it. It is complex, but even if you just get close, you've gone a long way to making the great print you 'visualized.'
You still need a full darkroom, it takes hours, days, weeks. (Audiobooks make the time fly by....ask me anything about Stalin, Lenin, WWII, Chinese history... these were the longest audiobooks at the Los Angeles Public Library)
Gauging Station Yangtze (Chiang Jiang), Wu Gorge from a 4x5 neg, camera hand held
Nasty fact: When the Getty Museum showed Manual Bravo's photographs that he printed in his 90s, a lot of them were printed out-of-focus. He didn't just trip up that once with the optician's shop neg.
There's a famous night shot of Manhattan shot from the observation deck at Rockefeller Plaza. It has all the same problems as your night time-exposures, shake, aerial blurring. Many 'great' photographs can't take a lot of magnification.
I was hired to photograph a print of Richard Avedon's famous photo of Nastasja Kinsky with the snake. While I took the photo the owner's wife stood next to me chatting. She was a beautiful woman, but she sighed and said, 'Youth. Look at that skin...' While I had it on the light box at A&I checking the color (it was a 4x5) Ish, the owner of the lab came over to say hello. He saw the transparency, ,and remembered when the originals from the shoot came through the lab; he chuckled and said, "That has got to be the most retouched photo in history!" She had pimples, the snake's head was never in that position....
It's all good, but remember you are never as bad as you fear....
....but also don't get too big in the britches. Life is a learning process where everybody dies before graduation.
Edward Weston is very different from Ansel Adams. The way I look at it is: Ansel Adams got to the mountaintop, there was no place further to go. (Dave Gardner who printed almost all of Adam's calendars, posters, books... said he was very nervous showing Adams 'off-chart masking' of his images. This is the same as Unsharp Masking in Photoshop. Adams loved it. Said he wished he could do it in the darkroom with all his work. (He actually could).
Weston processed his film to exhaustion (of the developer) with some 'inspection' [late in the developing process the unexposed silver-halide crystals are less sensitive to light, so a very weak bulb can be used]. He then contact printed his 8x10 negatives and used different developer combinations to make soft or hard prints, (lower or higher contrast). Factors in Weston's prints: 1. many of his most famous images are of reasonably normal contrast range or less subjects. (flat light) 2. He'd print them hard and they'd have a great visual contrast. 3. Glossy photo paper was first available at the time he made his famous Peppers images. [no one would remember these had he done them 10 or even 5 years before].
Point here? Everyone can make great black-and-white, almost no body can do it with film.
Most of the history of B&W photography was mostly flat (low contrast) prints, not very sharp (most lenses were garbage, a few were really good, but most unknown photographers used junk. This one of the reasons why old boxes of negatives are printed or scanned and turned into undiscovered gold.)
Some great photographs and great photography careers are made by sticking to very narrow parameters.
I'm off on this tack, so let me go on a bit. A lot of B&W photographs from the 60s that are considered 'really great' are one of two things. One: Great subject: horrible war footage, great artist, leader.... best possible print from an okay neg. Two: good subject shot and printed using 'studio' standard set-ups, tripod, carefully shot, and printed using the best old school methods. Most B&W of the period had blank white areas of lost detail, D-max blacks that also lost all detail. It's okay. Young people see it now and say, 'oh wow!' I want to do that.
What I learned about any art is live with it. After a couple of months, do you hate it? A good test is to hang something on the wall, make no effort to look at it, then after a couple of months, put it in a closet. Do you miss it? (It's easy to shoot a lot of photos. One guy I met once had the same DSLR I had, he boasted, "I've shot 800,000 pictures. How many have you shot?") One photographer puts his first work prints on the wall and just leaves them there. He says that after a couple of months, he knows which ones are worth printing.
Los Angeles River from the Fletcher Street Bridge
App ‘Filters’ are more gimmick than what they claim. Sure that sort of looks like Kodachrome... It doesn't have to be exactly like it, after all how many Kodachrome slides have you held in your hand or looked at through a loupe? The issue is that you can look at a decent Kodachrome image, just for the color saturation, everyday for the rest of your life and never be bored. Images from almost all of these Apps, are usually less interesting than your original (after cropping, tweaking exposure.)
A B&W darkroom is a very complicated and specialized tool. Takes up a lot of space. One tool I never knew anyone else in my generation to use:
It's often good to 'flash' or slight 'fog' the paper a little bit. This is just a bit of overall lighting. If you were to do this to a piece of photo paper that had no other exposure, then developed it with a sheet that had no exposure at all, they would both be equally blank white.
What a 'flash' (this is not an electronic flash, just a light bulb) does is add a little density to the lightest parts of the print. These areas would otherwise just turn out blank white. With just a little overall exposure added, the detail in these areas appears. Too much and the print will lose the white highlights and appear gray.
I figured this trick out after seeing the Manzanar photographs of Toyo Miyatake at UCLA. He fogged his paper a bit, but in some prints he went a tad too far and I could see the overall gray. The trick is not unknown.
What I did that was different was I put a yellow 'bug' light in a snoot made from ABS pipe on the ceiling of my darkroom, about 10-11' high. I think I may have also added some filters. My goal was to wash the entire area under my enlarge with even light that was the color of the lowest contrast multigrade filter (I used Ilford's filters). It was connected to a separate timer.
I was later told by a photographer who'd spent some time with Hurrel, that he'd done something like this himself.
The mathematics of this fogging or flashing are really interesting. A small amount of light can affect the low end of exposure significantly, while mid-range and higher densities (towards black) need something like 128x more exposure to move.
The second lesson here is there are a lot of tricks the old guys used that were forgotten or ignored. Most photographic equipment makers, other than the camera and lens makers, haven't learned anything new since they started.
What if you do not have 400 square feet and a couple thousand dollars, and plumbing and wiring skills...and plan on spending 30 hours a month for the next ten years.....?
What would help in B&W printing:
1. Very clear darkroom set-up. I can’t tell you the number of darkrooms, especially at schools, that I’ve visited where the safe-light is the wrong one for multi-grade (variable grade) papers.
2. Tray processing. I made a tray rocker. Very 19th Century mill. Tray rockers are great.
3. Clear instructions and chemistry. Add 200ml to 1 liter, and make a 7% mixture using 28% stock....
4. Toning. Sepia toning is wonderful. Most of it is just orange and tried once.
5. Print finishing. I never figured out how anyone printed on paper, let it dry on screens and the prints were flat. I always had to place mine in a dry-mount press for flattening. My dry-mount press weighs about 300 pounds.
I think a university, high school or college, offering rental darkrooms to the public would make good set-ups widely available, self-supporting and possibly profitable.
Commercial b&w labs can be very good, but they could never, or would never make one of my old prints. It's not that they aren't good, some are (or were) top notch. I could never do what they did.
Maybe some combination of lab, darkroom rentals.... or a cooperative. This last would probably be best. Hire some old duffer like me to help set it up and maybe run it (I'll talk to anybody, share all my secrets, but don't need another project or a job).
If you want more information on any of this, ask. I was just sorting something out and this stuff started leaking out and I thought, why not?
Should you do B&W film photography? It's a lot of work, more than you can imagine. But the prints I made and have lived with, some for 40 years--I still like seeing. The thing about color is that no printed color system has ever come close the range available in the real world. B&W is like drawing, it doesn't attempt to match reality and so it's premise is not one of failure. Also, after years and years of looking at 4-color printing in magazines, books, posters... and Kodak Prints; and seeing the real world-- the printed color just looked canned.
Charlie Parker Memorial for Kansas City (Robert Graham), before it was assembled and transported
These are just some B&W prints I was able to quickly find and upload.
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