gdanmitchell
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The cycle of trying/testing was much long back then. Today, we still make guesses and rely on hunches in post, tryinghtenings to see how they work, but the feedback loop is way faster.
But now as then, there aren’t any quick and easy fixes or formulas that automatically produce ideal results, and there is a lot of failure and learning along the way.
Your post demonstrates (102 pages later, yet again) that the significant factors that produce good, effective images are mostly about vision, technique, and understanding and application of knowledge about how visual imagery works.
No one say s that there are no differences between lenses, but the hope that some magical lens will lead to a print like those shared here is going to be in vain. I have no idea what lens you used, nor do I care — the images simply work. And it is all that other stuff — a good model, a thoughtful pose, composition, light, and working the image in post — that make them work.
It is easier to prattle on about the search for some perfect technology that will be The Answer To All Things, but the reality is that once your gear gets past a level of technological competence, the tiny differences between Thing A and Thing B are essentially background noise… and what matters is how you see and how you bring that vision to life.
Nifty Fifty wrote:
However, it must be said that the tonal values of the final print depend crucially on the processing during enlargement. A perfect negative, simply printed straight, is rather the exception, unless you're working with controlled lighting or individual negatives, no matter how well you control your negative processing. At the time the photograph in question was taken, I was still tinkering around quite aimlessly in this regard (the restriction to ONE film type with densitometry tested development came later), and so the contact print shown below illustrates quite well what a straight print on grade 3 would have looked like. Back then, all of this required a certain amount of experience, since when printing you had nothing to judge other than the negative and, if applicable, the contact print, from which you had to estimate what you were creating under the enlarger. Unlike today, of course, you couldn't see, control, or undo these adjustments. Or to put it another way, the true nature of the work only became apparent once the print was developed and the light could be switched on. Strictly speaking, it could only be properly assessed once the print was fixed, washed, and dried over night, because the highlights brightened somewhat during washing, and the entire print darkened considerably during drying. This additional darkening couldn't simply be compensated for by a shorter exposure time based on a fixed factor. It was quite demanding if you wanted to get it just right. And it could be quite nerve-wracking at times.On the other hand, it was incredibly fun, and you ended up with a unique piece that you had handcrafted yourself from start to finish. That was fantastic, and I completely miss that in digital photography.
Incidentally, while the highlights in the print are also overexposed, they don't appear as severely blown out as in the scan. Nothing beats a physical original.😉
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54969088349_c9b789b6b3_b.jpg20251207_122539 by Werner Wurst, on Flickr...Show more →
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