Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/10/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Here's one recipe for "The Glow." Not the only one, but this should work for you. Anyone can do it. Try it, you'll see. 1. Use an older "long normal" lens--58mm f/1.4 or 1.2. Various makers made 'em and you can get 'em on eBay for a song. One nice new one is the Ricoh 55mm f/1.2 for very little money. A Noct or a Summarit will serve well enough if you only have Leica lenses. Don't use most current 50/1.4s. If you want a cheap sample for yuks, get an old Spotmatic and an old Pentax M42 screwmount (not Leica screwmount) 50/1.4 Takumar. 2. Use a K2 filter (Wrattan #8, medium yellow, whatever you want to call it). 3. Shoot in good light away from the sun, and don't provoke flare. Shade the lens. Stay away from very high contrast situations. 4. Don't use a thin-emulsion film--stick with old-fashioned conventional emulsions. There are a couple of these left; one is Kodak Plus-X. 5. Expose enough. Say, Plus-X, E.I. 64 (that film's real speed), and maybe a bracket up for safety. 6. Use a conventional, traditional developer. Again, there are several, but Kodak D-76 is one. 7. Don't develop too much. Say, 10% or 20% less than the manufacturer recommends for outdoor scenes, no more than the manufacturer recommends for flat indoor scenes (giving generous exposure and not developing too much is called "pulling," and it was common in the days before reliable light meters and before the pernicious disease of "pushing" became an epidemic spread by the hobby magazines and photojournalists <g>). 8. Use a diffusion enlarger. Most enlargers are somewhere on the spectrum between purely collimated and purely diffuse light, with a point-source head at one extreme and an actinic (cold-light) head at the other. A Durst "condenser" enlarger is pretty diffuse, because the light source is a large frosted light bulb. A dichroic-style head like a colorhead is quite diffuse. Most photographers have no idea of the difference their light source makes in the way their film looks. The selfsame Tri-X negative printed on a Leitz Focomat IIc and a Saunders 4550 VC head make the _film_ look like it has very different characteristics. Try it. You'll see. (Yup, I have.) 9. Use fiber-base paper. 10. Don't print with too much contrast. Most photographers print with way too much contrast and way too light. Cartier-Bresson was always egging his printer to use less contrast--he sent the master repro prints for _The Decisive Moment_ back to the lab to be printed with lower contrast. With many negatives, photographers unknowingly push past the natural scale of the negative and they think that lowering the printing contrast will look "flat." Actually, lowering the printing contrast brings out more gradation and makes the print look _richer_, until you get past the threshold where a complete range of tones is present--which most photographers seldom do. Voilá. Le glow. Try it, you'll like it. - --Mike