[Leica] Was Medium Format - now sharpness

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

On Jul 8, 2011, at 11:38 AM, Bob Adler wrote:


Does anyone know how sharpening was done in a darkroom? Was it in the
selection of the paper contrast or something else?

Best,



Piqued my curiosity, so here it is:


http://www.pixiq.com/article/darkroom-unsharp-mask


Anybody ever used this technique?


Ken

- - - - - - -


I was aware of the "unsharp mask" technique although to the best of my
knowledge, in my 50 years of film and darkroom experience, no one I knew
ever used it on a regular basis. It is not mentioned at all in either Morgan
and Lester's "Leica Manual", Matheson's "Leica and Leicaflex Way", or L. P.
Clerc's voluminous multi-volume set on the technical aspects of photography.
I probably learned about from some obscure Kodak publication. It was hardly
a tool for 35mm photographers and seemed a technique more suited to large
image sizes or to photo reproduction.

To assure sharp results we resigned ourself to using moderately stopped down
lenses, high acutance films (like Tech Pan), low solvent developers, careful
focus, and tripods. Use of high contrast paper and condenser enlargers would
give the illusion of sharpness.

As cameras best suited to street and action photography prior to 1950,
Leicas, their lenses, and their available films were never regarded as
particularly sharp. If you wanted really sharp (relatively speaking) results
you opted for Zeiss lenses and certainly a larger image size. My recent
perusal of Morgan and Lester confirmed that all of those circle of confusion
tables used to estimate depth of field were calculated for 5x7" images. No
one ever imagined that Leica images could be enlarged to fill the Kodak
Diorama in Grand Central Station.

It all seems so much easier today using PS.

Larry Z