ryunin
TPF Noob!
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2010
- Messages
- 89
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Prague, the Czech Republic
- Website
- www.romanvalekphotography.com
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos NOT OK to edit
For about three years since I took up film photography, I thought dodging and burning are tools to only make tiny little changes on prints to make a photograph "perfect" or just the way you like it without changing the reality too much. I thought it was more of correction tool than creative tool. In the meantime I adored the pitch dark or blocked, you called them blocked I think black parts in Corbijn or Kratochvil's photographs. I kept asking my friends in photography, how do you achieve those perfect black parts? How to achieve that much contrast etc. And they gave me all kinds of technical tips and explanations. But last weekend I saw the film War Photographer about James Nachtway and at one point they are working on his prints with his assistant, a real printing master, I'd say. And Nachtway tells him, could you get more out of the sky? And could you make this lighter and that darker etc. I felt like a newly born baby! So this is how you do it, you just work on the print as it was a painting you just paint anyway you like it, black here, white there, gray here.. just like when I used to paint myself. So how it is almost sure that the large perfectly black parts of Kratochvils and Corbijn's photographs were simply burned into the paper and whatever the photographer liked light or lighter were dodged. I think you just need a negative that is contrasty enough and then you just choose any part you like completely black and burn it. Or am i very wrong?