tech Tuesday: Visual Mind

Posted on Posted in creativity, overnight notes, visual mind

Diffusion sheets as dodging devices. Frederick Sommer. Key thinker. And he was very much a thinker; about photography in the specific and in the other bigger container.

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.
The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions
Frederick Sommer General Aesthetics, 1979
Words not spent today
buy smaller images tomorrow
Frederick Sommer(Aperture, 1962

Enlargers: darkroom notes

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, labnotes, minimum daily requirement, the Lab1 Comment

A box of old guides serves more information than a web of 20 thousand posts.

Defects, negative and print errors. These are from 1950s darkroom brochures that the emulsion makers provided.

Not much has changed… just who is making the mistake.

About enlargers and an overview of what making prints would have been like. Defender became Dupont, one of my first film/paper experiences. Remains my most missed photo company.

In the “blue” above, see the callout of an enlarger. That is a condenser enlarger.

In this image is shown a diffusion enlarger. I’ve marked the two sections which, if made variable, make the diffusion controllable.

In my way of working, I use all three forms of light: Point, Condenser, and Diffused.

Each has advantage, so why limit my range // if you know how, use that knowledge.