B&W Film Photography for Millennials

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.

Japan First Couple of Weeks

Just an update. School observations, lot of discussions. Bonus: teachers from the EU traveling Japan. Good conversations. Everybody is interested in the Finns. Me too.

The quick and short: Social promotion seems to be a global phenomenon. Rationale varies. In Japan the short answer is that the tests sort it all out. In Ireland, there's an initiative to decrease the importance of the single (fatal) exam... Sounds like the typical local school reform that seems reasonable but like 'typical school reforms' over the years, probably not tested, not based on repeatable results.

This is rushed but I'll wing it. When the police interview victims of a crime seeking the details that will help them catch the perpetrator should the police be nice or nasty?
Of course, you can see this coming. You're supposed to say, they should be nice and comforting to people who've just been traumatized. Of course they shouldn't be nasty (that word is just a set-up). I has however been proven that when police are not warm, but a bit cold and skeptical they get better and more useful information. It's the nurse saying, this is going to really hurt, but this is the best way to--rip! off comes the bandage, "I wasn't even ready!" you feel like passing out, and then you're looking at the nurse and wondering why he or she is so cruel. But it's over with. Done.
Well, rip off that bandages is in the end less painful and traumatic. With cops, "OK, you're upset, I get it, but what shade of red sneakers was the perp wearing?"
And social promotion instead of leaving a15 year old in 6th grade until he or she learns the times tables, may in the end not be at all successful. I think it causes more harm and interferes with learning. And I haven't seen anything to support social promotion for children outside of birthday parties and playing poker with grandma. I could argue 'are students there to learn or to be comforted? Ignorance does not lead to security and comfort. But this too is the same reasonable argument instead of scientifically testing the method.

The schools in Japan are very neat and tidy. Students clean them up. The classrooms belong to the class, the teacher is there to present the lesson. I'm quite adept at removing my shoes now. I rigged up some 1/8" or smaller shock cord (bungee) that I quick wrap about my hiking boot hooks. It seems an obvious idea but Japanese tell me they've never seen it. I also carry a shoe horn. I've only got the hiking boots and a pair of Crocs--for when I spend all day at a school indoors.

Students are very polite, seem positive and stay after school to study. After school studying in a classroom doesn't require an adult to be present. I met some of the more difficult students. I'll see them again.  This was a very interesting experience. The skeptical, critical, suspicious looks so often seen with adolescents in the states? This group had them. Most of the other students seemed very young for their grade levels and age and were very open and trusting.
One little guy yesterday at Niigata station, couldn't have been more than 8 years old, big boxy backpack, school uniform. I kept looking around for his mom or older sibling. Baz says, 'Nope he was taking the train on his own.' He was looking at the image of a whale on the tiled floor of the platform. So I found the video on my phone of the two blue whales and tapped him on the shoulder and then held it so he could see. Two minutes. When it was done, he nodded, looked up at me and then went back to waiting.

Being a traveler is not like being a tourist. Tourists are shown places, people, things and events. Travelers, being on their own are nosy, intrusive, we will look, walk in, stare or start taking pictures before being invited; poking our nose in places many of which we probably shouldn't be poking them. Sure there's a cachet and snobbery about being a traveler instead of a tourist--at least half of it is bunk. I'm not more adventurous and cool so much as exhausted, stinky and lost (and lost a lot).  Yesterday when I went down to the Zenkoji Temple in Nagano to witness the Buddhist morning chant there was a group of Americans, I caught a few, 'hey, who is that guy?' looks. Clearly I was on my own and knew where I was headed--not because I'm part of something, but only because I was there yesterday and couldn't think of anything better to do at 5 am today.  The day before it was stooges at the Temple. I knelt down in the wrong spot when the monks were walking out of the temple. The guard put his hands on my shoulders, I moved with his direction and started my most common chant 'gomenasai' (I'm sorry). A monk stepped forward, waved the guard off and set me down so the parade could pass. I got my bonk on the head, a blessing but also I think a reminder to 'pay attention to this moment.'
Buddhists seem pretty cool and forgiving.
Teacher in Japan are allowed to rap students on the head. I'm not sure but I think it's probably from this Buddhist practice.
The other thing we travelers fall into is pretending we're the only ones here. Everyone one of us at some point is guilty of pretending that only we are Marco Polo. Even Marco Polo wasn't alone, he just happened to spend some jail time with a writer.

English language learning in Japan seems to be very successful. Many people do not speak it of course, many people refrain from letting on that they speak it (or they might wind up with someone like me bugging them with a lot of questions), but those who speak it even at very basic levels are highly functional. Many people are in international business, an urban planner, international relations, so they learn it for their profession. English and Japanese are very different, so the level of communication is surprisingly good.
Also, like many places some people will just repeat it in their language several times. So long as people are friendly about it, whatever information is then exchanged is positive and probably answers at least part of the query.  (They don't get loud about it like many Americans and Brits).
A woman on a bicycle yesterday started speaking to me when I was almost to my son's apartment. I'd been gone for two weeks in Kyoto and climbing Mt Kita (Kita Dake) [but not the 4-5 peaks south of it I'd over optimistically planned to transit]. It's a small city, not too many foreigners, so she was curious. I'm not sure what she was asking or saying, but she was quite verbal. So I told her  I was an American teacher, Los Angeles...what else might she be asking? Maybe she wondered if I was lost. I showed her Google Maps on my iPhone with the dots leading to my destination. Then she pointed at my backpack, "force, you force.' Someone earlier when referring to the mountain we'd just climbed said, "We fight. Fight." They weren't throwing down, they were saying 'we struggled.' So I showed her the photo of me standing next to the Kita Dake 3193 meters sign.
One of the great things about Japan which can make it a bit more difficult is literacy must be well over 99%. Many signs and indicators are all text. I was trying to buy bleach in a store and I had to unscrew the lids and sniff them (never stick your nose into the bottle unless you know what's in there, because you've read the label.)
OK. Too much. My head hurts.
More school stuff this week. More castles. Not enough geology--everything is so green here there's not a lot of bare rock. In the Southern Alps Minami, my first impression is that they may (MAY) be like the Santa Monica Mountains. Shale with a silt or sandstone top layer. I've spotted a nice example of a hanging glacial valley, but everything else I've seen appears to be stream cut. There were snow patches from about 2000 meters up to the 3000 meter ridge, July 1-so well into summer. These steep mountain valleys had to have been glacial in the most recent ice age. They're trying to keep their snow all summer even now.
Later

Six Properties of Metals

This is a mnemonic of the properties of metals from the California Dept of Ed Standards for 8th grade science.
Malleable and Ductile are synonymous--but the standards include them anyway.
I came up with this mnemonic after experienced teachers were unable to rattle them off. They completely understood them, but they couldn't rattle off the list.

Scale: Atoms to you

There's probably a lot of problems with this. Open to suggestions. I always want to understand based on what I know, can see, can touch.
Hold an apple in your hand....

Blue Whales

Here is a diagram I made to show students to clarify what's in the video of the two blue whales who decided to check me out one day in 2010 near Palos Verdes in Santa Monica Bay (California).
First you'll see a dolphin pop up. I think it was afraid because a pair of the largest animals that have ever lived on the planet are below, mouths open large enough to swallow a Prius, but scarfing down krill. A day or two before a sea lion popped up even closer, and it seemed to be looking at my face.
At the bottom is a link to the video.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6iYyyNafbk

 Keep in mind, it is illegal to approach sea mammals this close. However if they want to come visit you, that's OK. As soon as I saw one heading towards me I started paddling out of the way. When it came up to look I stopped. This is when I was surprised by the lead whale.
They knew what they were doing. I'd paddled out there several times to visit. When I saw where they were I would paddle to the general area, then just wait. They'd come up, and usually they were curious enough to take a look, then it seemed like they would use me as a marker buoy for 3-4 dives, coming near, but eventually working away.
Gray whales seem more skittish, possibly because there's a local orca pod (who will pop up for a look from a couple of hundred meters away and uninterested will change direction.)

Mnemonics: Drawing to learn

Basic methodology used in Medical School applied to middle and high school.
Draw the picture, label and describe the parts as you draw. Tell the story.
Do this the first time, carefully think about each part, then cover your drawing and notes and on blank paper, draw and label everything you can remember.
Two things will result. First your drawing won't be complete. Second, you will be surprised to see that you remembered things you didn't expect you would, and that you've forgotten things you thought were the easy parts. No worries. Correct this drawing, then test yourself again. Keep practicing until you get 100%. Great.
The next day, test yourself again before looking at your notes. You'll miss some things or a lot. Don't worry. Make corrections then....test yourself again-blank paper.
Then wait a day or two.... after that wait a week... make a note on your calendar to test yourself again in three weeks a month.... After that you will never forget.
Sounds like a lot of work? It's not, maybe an hour, hour and a half, not more than two hours total for all the practice.
These are just a few. Part of the Common Core liturgy is 'no more drill and kill' none of the 'Four C's' is content. Unless you know something (content) you can't think creatively, critically or whatever the rest of that is...
Know what foveated vision is? Know where your blind spot is?

  

The is the perfect first drawing. I like to start the first week of school. Today we will learn all of this drawing. On Friday we'll have a quiz, most of you will do great!
WHAAA?!!?!
Draw a circle. Now let's follow light as it enters your eye. Light enters the cornea, it's the first lens that begins focusing light.... all the way back to the optic nerve that carries the information to the brain. Part of the requirement is that students say what each part does.

The next lessons are to make Blind Spot Detectors and to learn about foveated vision. 

:

Icons of Depth & Complexity

When I was earning my GATE Certification at CalState Fullerton, we learned how to use Sandra Kaplan's Icons of Depth & Complexity. The icon images that were available were pixelated low resolution. So part of my working with them and thinking about them I decided to re-make a set with Adobe Illustrator. One of my educational ideas is that we should present our students with the best quality information, graphics, printouts, etc...

Here is a screen shot of some of what I did:  This is a personal use so I don't think I'm

violating any copyrights. (And Dr Kaplan drop me a note. I've looked for an e-mail address for you. I'd be more than happy to share the high quality vector art images I've made and make any changes.)

My favorite Depth & Complexity Lesson? Harriet Tubman.  Her timeline and multiple perspectives are more exciting than any action movie plot. Born into slavery, escapes to freedom by crossing the Pennsylvania state line, repeatedly returns to Maryland to help many others escape, then the Fugitive Slave Act takes away her safety in Pennsylvania, and the Dred Scott Decision makes her a wanted felon. She recruits for Tom Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, ( he was hanged by the Federal Government) so that makes her a terrorist?)....volunteer nurse for the Union Army, led a raid in South Carolina that freed 750 people... By 1865 she was a national hero. $10 bill? She should probably be on all the money. Harriet Tubman could be the first Depth & Complexity Lesson Action movie. 

As in all things pedagogical a good idea or method is then applied to everything.
I would argue that the icons can be used for science, but it's not the best fit.
So this is what I've been working on.
It's easy to sketch out the basics for science: Mass, Forces (Gravity, Electromagnetic, Strong & Weak Nuclear), Space, Movement, Energy (which can form a different perspective than Force. (How are a battery and an asteroid similar and different?)
I have basically two approaches. First following the Scientific Method. Second is my translation of Kaplan's idea to science concepts. Still very much a work in progress.
Where I think we are heading, actually where I think we have begun understanding where we are heading, is to systematize and organize our thinking, but to not restrict it. Daniel Kahneman and Pinker and others have pointed out that overall we are becoming more intelligent over time.  Maybe the Romans couldn't have had steam trains, but Archimedes was clearly heading in directions we are only beginning to learn are not  exclusively modern. I would like to see these icons used to compare Nikola Tesla to his historical period, and then project the two paths our future could take. (Tesla had a radio controlled boat years before Marconi 'invented' radio-using Tesla's patents.)

 

The icons for classifying a phenomenon or principle. As I've stated, a work in progress. 

 

And this image was just so much fun: I could credit Roy Lichtenstein as a source or inspiration, but he got his visual ideas from comic books... so Boom!

I'm just getting started.