I've been trying to slowly plow through the three book series The New Ansel Photography Series and finally landed on The Negative (Book 2) yesterday. Today, I came across the following section that made me really sit back and think:
I had to read the above because I was confused by two things. One, what the hell did he just write??? I'm not that far out of college that I can no longer read technical writing, but the second bit of confusion caused a bit of the generic first. Second, I couldn't figure out how colors were produced out of crystals of silver halide, etc. It took a few seconds for me to realize that Adams was only referring to black and white film/photography. I had forgotten that I was reading a book on the negative. Such is my world paradigm that despite the fact I think and talk about shooting film from time to time, it escaped me - if only for a moment - that I was reading about the development of a negative for film photography.
I took a few moments to step back and think about the photo I had just posted to flickr last night. The original photo was shot in color and I was having a hard time dealing with the colors, so I decided to convert it to black and white. With the flick of a mouse, voilà, black and white it is. With a few adjustments, I was relatively happy. (Frankly, I would have liked to have spent 20 minutes or so in Photoshop really getting into the nitty gritty of adjusting shadows, etc, but the day was drawing to a close and this was simply good enough.)
Twenty seconds of click-this-click-that. None of this silver halide light exposure triggering.
I usually accept my paradigm as is, but tonight I laughed and thought, how far we've come...
Crystals of silver halide that are exposed to light are "triggered" so that they will reduce to black particles of metallic silver during development. On exposure, the light produces an invisible latent image composed of crystals that will form image silver when developed, but have not yet undergone any detectable change. Portions of the film which have been exposed to great amounts of light yield a considerable deposit of reduced silver upon development, referred to as a higher density; areas of film exposed to less light yield less silver, or lower density. Thus the image on film is negative, dark areas of which correspond to bright areas of the subject. When printed, the dense areas of the negative give relatively little exposure to the paper and produce a light area on the print, and the low negative densities produce dark print areas. Thus a second reversal occurs that re-establishes the original relationships of lighter and darker values.
I had to read the above because I was confused by two things. One, what the hell did he just write??? I'm not that far out of college that I can no longer read technical writing, but the second bit of confusion caused a bit of the generic first. Second, I couldn't figure out how colors were produced out of crystals of silver halide, etc. It took a few seconds for me to realize that Adams was only referring to black and white film/photography. I had forgotten that I was reading a book on the negative. Such is my world paradigm that despite the fact I think and talk about shooting film from time to time, it escaped me - if only for a moment - that I was reading about the development of a negative for film photography.
I took a few moments to step back and think about the photo I had just posted to flickr last night. The original photo was shot in color and I was having a hard time dealing with the colors, so I decided to convert it to black and white. With the flick of a mouse, voilà, black and white it is. With a few adjustments, I was relatively happy. (Frankly, I would have liked to have spent 20 minutes or so in Photoshop really getting into the nitty gritty of adjusting shadows, etc, but the day was drawing to a close and this was simply good enough.)
Twenty seconds of click-this-click-that. None of this silver halide light exposure triggering.
I usually accept my paradigm as is, but tonight I laughed and thought, how far we've come...
