Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/06/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I've recently been looking at old photographs from the 1930s and 1940s. I love the look of these photographs, especially those which seem to be taken on slightly overcast days, or indoors with large, slightly diffused lightsources close by (though not necessarily in the fame). A perfect example is one of HCB's shots showing a man and his son on a balcony of some sort, with fine wrought iron railing. In particular, the tonal structure of these seems to be fantastic. In many shots, there are a million different shades of grey even within a small area: often rendered as an almost uniform shade in more modern 400 ASA B&W shots. I'm wondering how I can achieve this: The shots are not massively sharp, but they do exhibit this increadible tonal structure. Is it the film? Lens? Printing technique? Am I actually looking at medium format pictures and should get a Rolleiflex instead? I would really like to achieve this kind of quality: Again, not worried about sharpness, but tonal quality is everything ;) Any suggestions are welcome! M. - -- Martin Howard, Grad. Schl. for Human-Machine Interaction, | HMI/IKP, Linkoping University, SE-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden.| Just Tel: +46 13 28 5741; Fax: +46 28 2579; ICQ: 354739 | say "DOOH" E-mail: marho@ikp.liu.se; www.iav.ikp.liu.se/staff/marho/ +------------