Photographing shadows and highlights

Photograph by Peter Frisby

I've had a great couple of days here in SW Scotland with Peter Frisby from Staffordshire. Peter came to me for some one-to-one tuition. The weather was beautiful and I took him to my favourite hidden cove down on the sea shore on the first day. The light was really spectacular with a pastel blue sky and lots of dramatic clouds. Absolutely ideal for landscape and seascape photography.

Despite the fact that Peter has been taking photographs for only a very short time, he has done a great deal of reading on the subject, so he had a reasonable grasp of the fundaments of exposure.

One of the things that was confusing him was the situation in which a landscape might have a foreground in shadow and a background brightly lit. I explained that there were several methods of dealing with this very common and quite difficult situation. The photographer is faced with a choice of (A) exposing for the shaded area - so allowing the bright background to become over-exposed and 'burnt-out'. This always looks dreadful. (B) Exposing for the brighter area of the picture and allowing the shaded area to go dark. (C) Compromise and interpolate the exposure between the two extremes - rarely very successful. Most frequently (B) is the best.

In the real world, you have several options open to you to combat the problem.

1 - Use a gradual grey filter to darken the bright background in the upper section of the picture.

2 - Put the camera on a tripod and take two shots from precisely the same angle. One exposing for the shadows and one exposing for the highlights. These can then easily be put together in Photoshop using the Layers Mask. This is a highly effective and probably the best way of doing the job.

3 - Expose for the highlights and - if the foreground is not totally black - subtley lift some detail back into this area using Photoshop's Dodge Tool facility. I work on the principle that an under-exposed area of an image can be lightened to reveal detail, while an overexposed, burnt-out, area is just about hopeless.

Peter has not yet got to grips with Photoshop, so when he spotted the photographed the scene above, we had an ideal oportunity to demonstrate option 3. He exposed for the brightly lit far distance, and allowed the foreground to go dark. Once opened in Photoshop when we got back to base, we simply selected the 'Dodge' tool with a large brush at about 8% transparency to lighten the highlights. Several passes were made over the foreground to achieve the results shown. I don't have Peter's original to show you, but I can assue you that foreground really was very dark indeed.

Now just in case you are tempted to get all 'precious' and sniffy about 'manipulating' an image in this way, just remember that those icons for the 'Burn' and the 'Dodge' tool come straight from the darkroom. The 'Dodge' icon represents the bit of round card we used to cut out and stick to a short length of stiff wire. Photographic printers would jiggle this 'dodger' about over over a dark area of the print during exposure in the enlarger. The effect was to lighten that area. The 'Burn' icon is a representation of the printer's hand making a hole through which he would direct extra light to a particlular portion of the print in order to darken it. So, you see - there's nothing new about Photoshop - the Victorians were using the same ideas over 100 years ago.



Peter (that's him above at work in Kirkcudbright Harbour) was using an Olympus E-510 and I have to say I was very taken by it. It handles very well indeed and I was impressed by the results. Peter's shot of the shells (below) is needle sharp.

Learning how to print black and white

When I visited the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC in Birmingham last week, I happened to be attracted to the Ilford stand. Now I can say with pride that I have won many awards in what used to be the Ilford Print of The Years Competitions in the past, so naturally, I took a close look at some of the winning prints.

I saw one print that was definitely out of focus in the enlarger and the quality of the print left a bit to be desired. Perhaps it’s because so few photographers are competent with film printing these days. Standards must have fallen.

Now when I was a lad…

I don’t suppose many professional photographers have started their careers on their hands and knees, but that is what happened to me. My first job after leaving school clutching my solitary ‘O’ Level in art – the only examination I ever took - was to print the photo-sales for a local weekly newspaper. For this mammoth task (there were hundreds of black and white prints to do every day) I was given a suitably elephantine piece of equipment – a gigantic, old-fashioned horizontal enlarger.

If you have never seen a horizontal enlarger, and in this day of digital, there is no reason why you should have, you’ll have to imagine a 19th Century lantern slide projector running on rails about 6 feet long. I blame this obstinate colossus - all mahogany, brass, and leather bellows, for my permanent stoop and stunted growth.

The inventive and sadistic chief photographer had mounted this enlarger against the wall, vertically, to save space. A large hole had been sawn in the ceiling above to accommodate the lamp house that housed a light bulb the size of a football. Even so, the brute was still so long that in order to print anything bigger that a whole-plate, the baseboard had to be put on the floor. It needed to of us to heave the lamp house up the rails to print a 10 x 8. That bulb got so mad hot that smoke would filter though the ceiling into the typing pool upstairs.

Oh how I wished that dreadful thing would go up in flames.

Despite the size and power of the bulb, by the time its light had travelled down to the lens through the enormous condensers, it barely had strength to trickle onto the printing paper. Exposures of quite extraordinary duration were called for and these had to be timed by counting the seconds in my head. There was no darkroom clock, and I couldn’t afford a watch on £3 a week. I dreaded orders for multiple prints.

These long exposures and the monster’s instability in its unnaturally upright position, meant that if anybody in the building slammed a door while I was counting, the condensers would get the shakes, the print would blur and I would have to start again and make a fresh one. This terrible state of uncertainly shredded my youthful nerves and, to help me relax after work my older colleagues would sneak me into the local pub, where they taught me to drink pints of strong beer, several years before I was legally entitled.

I was only allowed out of the darkroom for tea breaks, and then I would come out blinking like a bat, to brew-up for an ill-assorted bunch of dissipated press photographers. The tea was so strong that if stripped the glaze off the mugs. During these tea breaks I destroyed my taste buds and learned a great deal about bad language and photography.

Darkroom kit for FREE

After my talk at the Ayr Photographic Society last week, one of the members contacted me to say he has now decided to convert entirely to digital. Wow! I'd no idea I had such powers of persuasion.
So - anyone who wants an entire set of darkroom gear (several enlargers and everything else I'm told) just contact me and I will put you in touch. It's free to anyone who can collect from Ayr in SW Scotland.
Sounds good to me.