Saturday, May 10, 2014

The Negative Print


In the old days (that would be when I was shooting film in my cameras) there was a technique that might be used once in a great while, called "the negative print."  It was only used for artistic purposes.  Minor White gave us an assignment to produce one.  The trick is to visualize the subject in real life, and then imagine what the subject would look like as a negative print.  In the darkroom, you would take a black & white negative, and use the enlarger to project the image on to another piece of film, instead of a piece of photographic paper.  Then you would develop that negative, and it would be a positive, and you would print it on paper and end up with a negative print.  I know, way too confusing.  So I tried this today to see if I could visualize something interesting, and I do like the design of this.

5 comments:

  1. Nice, but bet you did not have to go through your college procedures with a dark room and enlarger and trays of chemicals, etc.! :-)
    Joan

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  2. Did you have a day of rain in Sea Cliff? Is this why you had so much time on your hands to go through such an effort to come up with a photo for your blog? I will say, however, that the result is stunning and well worth the extra effort to try something different. This Negative Print is very soothing to the eyes!

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  3. I do like this. The leaves almost translucent. "Soothing" is the perfect word as Ken Schwarz said. bsk

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  4. As Joan pointed out, no dark room and chemicals for this process. Photoshop. Take the color version of the photograph, choose "Mode" - Grayscale. That makes it black & white, and then Command "I" inverts the tones. Bingo! No chemicals, no enlarger, and I can watch Craig Ferguson at the same time! :-)

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  5. Awesome!! and thanks for sharing the process too!!

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