Drawing with Light

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Tonight! La Jete'e

The Third World War is over. Paris has been destroyed. The Earth is no longer habitable. People cluster in underground caves as scientists conduct experiments. The film explains, "The only hope for survival lay in time: a hole in time through which to send food, medicines, sources of energy. The aim of the experiments was to send emissaries into time to summon the past and the future to the aid of the present." A man (Davos Hanich) "volunteers" because he is haunted by an image from his childhood. In his mind he sees a woman (Helene Chatelain) standing at the edge of a jetty at the Orly Airport while a man runs toward her… a shot rings out…the man falls…dying. The volunteer travels back in time, then forward, then back again. Images morph into one another, haunting, frightening. It is over in 29 minutes.

Using black and white still photography (except for one shot) and a voice-over narration, Chris Marker's 1962 film, La Jetee, is one of the most enigmatic and thought provoking science fiction films ever made. The film takes us into the mind of a man and looks at memory, loss, dreams, and destiny. Sent back to try to save the human race, he and the woman meet again. He sees the world as it was before the war: with "real children", "a real bedroom", and "real birds". The narrator speaks: "They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls." They fall in love. She calls him "my ghost". Is this happening only in his mind or is he reassembling the past? They go for walks and to a strange museum filled with mounted representations of extinct animals. Then it stops.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

From the PBS show Creativity, 1982. An excellent segment featuring interviews, commentary, and shots of Winogrand shooting on the street.

Friday, February 27, 2009

ViC MUNiZ

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Controling Contrast in Your Prints:

Contrast Filters

Contrast filters are necessary for increasing or decreasing the amount of contrast in your print. If your test prints are coming out much too gray, then increasing the number of your filter will increase the contrast, making the whites whiter and the blacks blacker. Everyone has a different preference when it comes to deciding which contrast filter to start with, but I have always found for my purposes that a contrast filter of 2.5 suits me well when I’m working on a black and white enlarger.

Changing your contrast filter as you do test prints will also affect your exposure times, so don’t expect the same results in exposure when changing from a 3 to a 3 1/2 or a 4.

The first photograph here mimics the effect of a lower contrast filter. The second illustrates the effect of using a contrast filter higher in number.

Photo by De Buysser

Making a test strip - a traditional darkroom technique

To save wasting a sheet of paper you can make a test strip using a smaller piece of the same paper first.

1 Set everything up as you intend to print - height of enlarger head on column, stop the lens down a couple of stops to the optimum aperture, usually around f/5.6. Focus the negative on the baseboard.

2 Then switch off the room light and turn on the safelight.

3 Pull out a sheet of printing paper and cut it into smaller pieces. A 10x8in can be cut into four pieces. Keep one piece out and place the others back in the light tight packing.

4 Place the sheet on the baseboard in a suitable place on the print. Try picking a spot where there's a good range of tones to assess when you've made the test strip.

5 Now get a piece of black card that's bigger than the test paper and hold it above the paper so that it prevents any light reaching the paper when the enlarger is switched on.

6 Switch the enlarger on and move the card to reveal a strip about one fifth of the area of the paper. Hold steady for three seconds and move the card to reveal another fifth of the paper and hold for three seconds. The first strip has now received six seconds. Repeat this process exposing for three seconds each time you move across the remaining three parts of the paper. The part that was first exposed will now have had a total of 15seconds exposure and gradually steps down to the last exposed strip with just a three seconds exposure.

7 Develop the sheet in processing trays and when rinsed turn on the room light and check to see which strip looks best. It could be that the best exposure falls between two strips, one being too light, the other too dark. If this is the case, set a time that falls between the two. In our case about eight seconds would be best.

Tests strips can also be used to check how long you should burn in areas such as sky or a white dress and how long you should dodge to maintain detail in shadow areas.