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 »
