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Previously captured on film: Analog (Film) Photography - Film Pinhole Photography - Winter Jinx - Seaside Pinhole Photography - Theatre District at Sunrise, Buffalo, NY - On Main Street, Buffalo, NY - On the Road around Buffalo - Lake Erie Lakeshore on Pinhole - Erie Basin Marina on Pinhole - From Ohio Street - As the Names Change - Buffalo Classic on Classic Medium - One More White while Appropriate - More Winter in Hamburg, NY - Palace in Winter - A Shed - The Chimney - Road Trip 2018 in a Page - Road Trip 2018: The First Few Darkroom Prints - First Roll of Infrared Film - Road Trip 2018: A New Darkroom Print - Analog Colors - Cheap Shots of Sunny 16 - Darkroom: A Split Grade Print

This was a very exciting darkroom session for me as I was going to try something new. Something I read about quite a bit, something I had briefly tried before without success, something that needed more time to relax and not be rushed. I had two prints in mind and wanted to try split grade printing on them. I read many online articles and several descriptions in books and it seemed like every person had their own process figured out for split grade printing. I tried one method before and was not happy with the results but to be honest, I just did not have enough time to make adjustments and a few more prints. I did not give that method a fair chance. Nevertheless, I was going to try something else this day. As a starting point, I was going to follow an online post by Dave Butcher called split grade printing the ilford way.

What is split grade printing? It provides an answer to printing a negative with high dynamic range that a photo paper cannot handle. Get the highlights right and shadows will be too dark. Get the shadows right and the highlights will be blown out. It relies on multi-grade photo papers that are a commonplace today. Instead of a single exposure with a given contrast filter you make two overlapping exposures at two different grades. The low contrast filter prints the highlights and the high contrast filter fills in the shadows and blacks. Each of the exposures can be adjusted separately and dodging and burning can also be done differently at each of the exposures providing quite a bit of flexibility.

So how did it work for me? The first photo I worked on turned out too flat, too gray, with no real whites or blacks. I studied it for a while, measured the light falling on the easel, and determined that the photo was a bad candidate for the method to begin with. Yes, I could have adjusted the grade for the highlights to provide more punch and extended the exposure for the shadows but understanding that I could in fact fit the original negative's dynamic range on the photo paper led me to a decision to go with a straight print at grade 2.5.

However, making the same measurements on my second print for the day that was a whole different story. Definitely way more stops there! My initial test strip confirmed the theory. One more test strip and one partial test print later, I was ready to expose the 8" x 10" paper. There was another first for me on that front. I was using a satin surface RC paper. Until this time, I had only used glossy or pearl. From the partial test print, I knew that the split grade printing method alone would result in an acceptable result, however, I wanted something more dramatic. For that reason, I also decided to further burn in the sky.

If darkroom technicalities are not your thing, I've probably bored you quite a bit today. I will stop my narrative here and share the print. Of course, it's really difficult to convey the outcome because in order to share the print, I had to scan it and convert it to a digital form, thus really limiting the actual impact of the paper print. While I tried to use my calibrated monitor to get the scan as close to the print, it still is nowhere close to being an exact match. Now all of your monitors or tablets or cell phones will have different brightness, different tonal range, and thus the photo may look totally different. As with a lot of photography, darkroom prints are no exception and look their best viewed in their original form. The Internet and social media and 99% of the way photography is shared and viewed today is unfortunately a pretty sub-par way of enjoying photography. But that's a whole different philosophical topic ...

Boskovice CastleSilver gelatin darkroom print, 2018

Boskovice Castle, Silver gelatin darkroom print, 2018
 

Enjoy The Beauty That Surrounds You! #etbtsy

Do you enjoy reading my photography blog? Would you like to see more black and white photographs? Visit my World without Color photo collection or the Timeless Buffalo site, which is dedicated to black and white photography (digital, film, and pinhole). If you'd like to see more darkroom work, I currently have to galleries available: Darkroom: Road Trip 2018 and Darkroom: Czech Republic. Please, let me know if you have any questions about any photo products offered, or not offered, I will be happy to help! For a quick reference to all photo galleries and collections as well as all photo products currently offered through my site, please, visit the Products page.

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