Film printing digital negative.

(final image)

I wanted to try and develop a digital photo of the sky/sea and still get all the tones within both aspects of the photo, and also create a dramatic image by using a filter for contrast, similarly to HDR photos. Because I was only using one photo rather than my HDR's 5 photos, I didn't have all the information needed to get a photo with great depth and/or detail due to over/under exposure in areas. However, I wanted to bring out all the detail possible with the photo I had. To do this I used dodge and burn methods.



First of all I set up the enlarger, using the smallest aperture possible (in this case F16), this will give me more time to dodge and burn when exposing the photo. I put in filter 5 to create the most contrast and I then set the timer to 7 seconds and made a test strip of my negative. From the negative I found that the ground and sea only needed roughly 7 seconds of exposure whereas the majority of the sky needed three times that.

(Test-strip - the ground in the furthest segment to the right is a good quality exposure and the sky in the 3rd segment to the right is of good quality exposure.)

I then proceeded to make a print of the negative using dodge and burn techniques. I kept the timer on 7 seconds and exposed the photo three times, heavily dodging the ground for the first two exposures. This improved the photo slightly, but you could easily see that it had been dodged due to a gradual fade where it parts had been exposed longer than others. It was also still slightly too dark.

(dodge and burn attempt - this dodge didn't work as you can see harsh lines where the card covered the image)

After several attempts I decided to completely dodge the ground and sea by putting thick card over the image up to the horizon. I then exposed the sky for 14 seconds and in this time dodged some of the left had side which was coming out too dark. After the 14 seconds I exposed the whole photo for a further 7 seconds while VERY gently dodging the ground and sea to get rid of any harsh separating lines. As a result of this, I had brought out the under exposed tones in the ground, sea and parts of the left-hand sky as well as keeping the tones in the majority of the sky.

If I were to edit this photo any more I would try to lighten the sky around the horizon as it is currently over exposed. However, there is little detail in the negative to bring out anything of any interest or quality.

(digital negative on acetate)