written by: David VestalBefore f-stops, there was a consistent set of lens aperture numbers, the Uniform System. Its lens openings were US settings. As you stopped down, each US lens opening had half the speed of the one before it. But that system left no place for openings larger than ƒ/4. The ICP Encyclopedia of Photography gives the US system’s equivalents to f-stops as follows: US 1=ƒ/4;US2=ƒ/5.6;US4=ƒ/8;US8=ƒ/11;US16=ƒ/16; US 32 = ƒ/22; US 64 = ƒ/45(?); US 128 = ƒ/90(?); US 256 = ƒ/90(?!); US 512 = ƒ/128(?). Something fishy there. The encyclopedia is wrong. Those are typos and/or errors of calculation. It skips ƒ/32 and Read more »
Some prints are old; some prints are good— they’re not always the same print
written by: David Vestal“The shock of the new” is a popular cliché, but not too much of what is publicized as new and shocking lives up to its hype. I’m reminded of a night in the early 1950s when Dorothea Lange, on a visit to New York, came to Sid Grossman’s class. I was one of the students. We were awed by her presence, but she showed no interest in us. She had also visited Alexey Brodovitch’s more famous class, attended largely by leading fashion photographers, and here’s what she said about them: “They talk a lot about shock and impact, but their Read more »
written by: David VestalIn the January/February 2009 issue of PHOTO Techniques, Dick Dickerson and Silvia Zawadzky correctly said and showed that printing with two contrast filters— a low-contrast one such as Ilford’s #00 and a high-contrast one such as Ilford’s #5—will not give us “richer” black-and-white prints than printing with any one of the contrast f ilters provided by Ilford, Kodak, and other manufacturers, or with no filter. They then concluded, not altogether correctly, that split-filter printing “does not afford access to a print appearance (contrast, curve shape) unattainable with single filters; it just takes longer to get there.” Intermediate grades In saying this, Read more »
written by: David VestalAfter 60 years of photographing, one of the few things I’m sure of is that I don’t know how to make a photograph good. I have a fair chance of doing that whenever I photograph something I’d want to show you—something that gets my attention and pleases or stimulates me visually. I make black-and-white still photographs, so that sound, smell, hot, cold, and color don’t register in them. I enjoy the whole sensory experience, but everything that works in my pictures has to do it visually in motionless black, gray, and white tones. Paths of motion are recorded, but their Read more »
Images, Old and New, Are Pay Dirt
written by: David VestalA recent task was to tell the gallery that represents me in New York City just how many prints I have on hand of each of more than 100 photos. They have one to three prints of each one. I found no prints at all of several. That was the easy part. Of the rest, I found from one to several prints of each. Finding them required (1) a long-overdue filing frenzy, looking through many prints and putting each one in its place among my boxes, and (2) going through the boxes to find all the prints I have of the photos Read more »
written by: David Vestal“I photograph on unplanned impulse when I’m moved by what I see. It’s not predictable. For me, acceptable imperfection is the price of spontaneity, and that’s often a good bargain.” On Systems In both traditional chemical and digital photography there are systems for photographing things that hold still while the photographer calculates. These include the Ansel Adams-Fred Archer zone system of pre-planned film exposure and development and a newer digital method that combines separate exposures for the subject’s light, midtone and dark areas to get optimum print tones and colors over the whole exposure range. The results can be quite Read more »
written by: David VestalI must start with results or it will take too long to get there, as it did in my darkroom. Here’s most of what I’ve learned about Ilford/Harman’s new Multigrade Art 300 black and white paper. It is a whole new kind of printing paper, technically inbetween conventional fiber-base and RC papers. It comes up quickly in the developer and the prints wash more quickly than what Ilford now calls “baryta FB,” but not so quickly as RC papers. Conventional FB processing, although with luck it works, is no way to handle this paper. I had to learn an approach Read more »
written by: David VestalThis is the final installment of a series in which David Vestal gives insight into historic photographs selected from Great Photographs from Daguerre to the Great Depression, published by the Dover Press and used with their permission. 117. Wright Brothers Postcard, by Unknown Photographer, 1915. This is a booster postcard promoting the wonders of Springfield, Minnesota. It is a good cut-and-paste job, a bucolic equivalent to the montages of avant-garde art photography. It’s well calculated to get our attention, but would not have fooled Sherlock Holmes. “Observe, Watson, the direction of the sun, as shown by light and shadows on Read more »
written by: David VestalThis is the third installment of a series in which David Vestal gives insight into historic photographs selected from Great Photographs from Daguerre to the Great Depression, a book and CD-ROM published by Dover Publications and used with their permission. 089. Mission, Santa Clara Pueblo, by Adam Clark Vroman, 1899. Probably a dry plate. The slanting sunlight says morning or afternoon, I can’t tell which. This is an admirable photograph by a man well known for his photographs of the Hopi people, which are well worth seeing. There’s at least one very good book of his work. 095. Portrait—Miss N. Read more »
written by: David VestalThis is the second installment of a series in which David Vestal gives insight into historic photographs selected from Great Photographs from Daguerre to the Great Depression, published by Dover Publications and used with their permission. Skip to the 1860s. Photography had changed. The daguerreotype had largely given way to the ambrotype, in which the silver of a very thin negative on glass was seen as light tones against black velvet. Like the daguerreotype, it was a one-of-a-kind photo delivered in a little frame. Dover didn’t identify the methods used for its photographs, but I saw no ambrotypes among the Read more »
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