Sheep Photos

In my previous blog post I mentioned that I wanted to turn some of my sheep photos into prints so that I could frame them and put them up in my knitwear studio.

On Saturday I had some time to visit the darkroom and I am pleased to report I managed to successfully do some 8 x 10 resin coated prints.

You’ll see from the cover photo, that I initially printed a contact sheet and selected several photos I’d possibly like to develop into prints. In the end, after lots and lots of test strips, I printed a total of three photos.

Here are the first two I enlarged from the 6 x 6 negatives into prints:

In the next print I decided that the people in the background were a distraction and didn’t quite fit in with the two previous prints I had done:

I therefore cropped the original photo on the enlarger so the final print showed just the sheep:

This did mean that less of the closest sheep was shown in my cropped photo but I actually didn’t mind this since I had a similar thing happening in the first print so felt it helped towards the cohesiveness of the three photos.

Needless to say, I am absolutely thrilled with these prints and am really excited about framing them and putting them up on the wall of my knitwear studio.

Practicing the ‘Burning In’ Technique in the Darkroom

In one of my latest Darkroom sessions I decided I wanted to enlarge a photo I’d taken of some logs which were outside a house I was staying at during a recent visit to Rye.

I had taken this photo using my Hasselblad 500 C/M camera and some Fomapan Creative 200 ISO black and white film.

I used Ilford IV Multigrade Resin Coated Pearl paper to make my prints. In the first print I made I used a 2 1/2 Contrast Filter and exposed the print for 5 seconds:

I was quite happy with the detail in the top half of the photo but I felt the detail was lacking somewhat in the lower part of the photo on the logs.

It was a bright, sunny day when I took the photo and I didn’t have a lens shade at that point to use on my camera. The lower logs were more exposed to the sunlight.

I therefore decided that this would be a good photo to try out the ‘burning in’ technique. I exposed my next print again with the same contrast filter and exposure time. However, this time I hovered some paper over the top part of the image and exposed the lower part of the photo to a further 5 seconds and this was the result:

I was pleased to see that the lower part of the photo was starting to show more detail in the logs. However, I felt the contrast filter I was using was lighting the lower logs a bit too much.

In the next print I decided to remove the contrast filter completely but I still ‘burned in’ the photo the same way as I had done for the second print and here is the result:

I liked the fact that you can see more detail in the lower logs but by not using a contrast filter, it made the photo darker overall. I also still had the problem of the little log that looks almost white in all of the photos. Although there was minimal detail on the actual negative of this log.

Perhaps I could perfect this photo even further but I wasn’t sure what would be next best to try. I don’t think I wanted to try any other contrast filters and all I could think is that I try ‘burning in’ some smaller areas a bit more.