Tag: camera

Index Prints

Posted on Posted in coursenotes, Getting Stuff, labnotes, visual mindTagged , , , ,

The idea print. Collecting visuals. Stages of the darkroom process. Beyond the wild guess. Looking more than once, while looking at more than one. Building the comparative response.

This index is from the librarians, not the linguists. /’ that it contains so much contradictory information that a verbal message is needed to fix its meaning ‘/ 

The key point of this post is using “jigs” as aid to determining exposure of a print. They provide an efficient way to make several attempts, or tests of settings in making darkroom prints. Typically, they are used to determine exposure setting, however, they could also be used to test changes in contrast filters, or color balance filtration, since while the “flaps” are closed, enlarger settings may be changed.

These devices are the commercial form of what was frequently a kludge made by the printer from cardboard, tape, or, perhaps, scavenged sheet film holders. My initial, 1960s version was made using scrapped film holders. These were sold by the cardboard box full at the surplus stores.

The start point. finding a way in the dark. What is the exposure setting for darkroom materials. Color or black-white paper exposure must be tested; determined by making trial exposures. These are called “test strips” — strips, small samples of the material you will use to make your print.

Durst Test Print Tool
Ways of making test strips.

Drawing patterns, making conclusions.
Index prints are also known as “contact sheets,” or “proof sheets.” Most uses of these are as first edit device for selecting among negatives/slides. The exposure, contrast and processing controls are sometimes lax. I try for a first best use setting for the most interesting of the negatives. This sheet serves as my point of search into my file of pictures. Rather than shuffling through the negatives, I shuffle through my index prints. These prints, in some cases, provide my an easy notepad of what was printed and when. The details of the printing will be in a print/darkroom notebook.


What is the start point of making a darkroom exposure

By using test jigs, I was able to characterize film for making separations for dye transfer in as few as 6 sheets of film. A morning’s work. It was sixty years later that a boastful amateur told a student of mine that wasn’t possible.

Good to know. #OIC

camera lucida duet 

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, meaning, studio table, TheoryTagged , , , ,

The real and the spiel.
The Joycean eyepatch–of AI. What finds we find when the word becomes the key. What hides behind the unopened doors. My searches begin closed, become openings. Sadly, the googs and googlers have reached an end state: commerce.

All travel makes more connections than we are prepared to take. Words become phrases which, in turn produce more phrases. In early periods of a field more variety is brought in as possible sets for the new setting.

Camera Lucida was one set. Visual Studies Workshop was a fertile ground. Consider the words chosen as totems for that new place in Rochester. Visual. Studies. Workshop. It could have been called: SUNY Buffalo Extension. No sauce. Nathan got it right. From that place came people. They maintained contacts as is the case in most fields. In new fields, those connections are stronger than in old fields.

Camera Lucida, a device, book, journal. The camera lucida was a drawing aid with which Talbot failed. This failure became the path of photography. The book by Barthe became the errant irritant in criticism, producing more puss than pearl. Nevertheless, it was productive of thought when it was needed.
Barthes’s Work: Barthes’s “Camera Lucida” explores the nature of photography, the relationship between the photographer and the spectator, and the concept of the “punctum” (a specific detail in a photograph that evokes a strong emotional response). 

Further:

Talbot –dated his efforts to invent photography to his disappointing results using a Camera Lucida as a drawing aid at Lake Como in Italy in 1833?

But alas, it only seemed simple, he later recalled, “for when the eye was removed from the prism—in which all looked beautiful—I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.” The would-be artist was William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877)

Bringing me to my searched items. The Journal of… I have the volumes. They’ve lived in boxes of similar sized publications.

MUFFOLETTO, ROBERT, EDITOR Milwaukee: Camera Lucida, 1979. Milwaukee.
Ceased publishing after Number 7, 1983
A complete set (Nos. 1-7) of the influential early journal of photographic criticism. Contributors include A. D. Coleman, Claudia Wolz, Bill Jorden, and Michael Simon, and topics include photography and therapy, an anthropology of photography, perception and photography, and more. The last issue is a double number written by Arnold Gassan, a photography instructor turned psychiatrist and student/devotee of White. It is titled, “Report: Minor White Workshops and a Dialogue Failed.” Date: 1979. Baumgartner [US]

The box traveled on its own.. Buying from dead critics photographers estates and the oughts of this century I both discover and re-discover influences if not on me directly on the world around me the immediate world of art of the dark-room entering the white room…

phrases I uttered that others published.. The world that lasts is always the world that someone else collects you need a collector an editor a publisher.. so that what you say and what you have selected is preserved by someone on some shelf…

Two parts to an ides:

  • inspriation, first idea, an initial question which may come as a doubt.
  • next, the reason for re-examination and the resulting drive


“Is history not simply that time when we were not born?” writes Roland Barthes in the very beginning of the second chapter of his book — Camera Lucida. I