Big photographs are impressive. From 1950 to 1990, New York’s Grand Central Terminal had a changing display of 60×18 feet (18×5.5 m) backlit transparencies. This display was a Kodak advert – the iconic Colorama series, described as “the world’s largest photographs”.
In 2006, six photographers converted an aircraft hangar into a pinhole camera, creating an even bigger photograph – 111 feet (34 m) wide and 32 feet (9.8 m) high.
Most major manufacturers of film and photographic paper release datasheets with technical details about their product. If you’ve ever looked at such a datasheet, you may have seen graphs like the ones below:
These graphs are called characteristic curves (because they show they show the characteristic properties of film or paper) or sensitometric curves (sensitometry being the study of light-sensitive materials). In this post I’ll try to explain how characteristic curves can help us with film choice, metering, exposure, developing and printing – in short, at pretty much every stage of the (film) photography process.
Lockdown 2020 was a blessing in (a very big) disguise, as it gave me the opportunity to research, build and begin work on creating a darkroom.
My passion for analogue photography stemmed from my final major project at university, in which I spent pretty much a full year in the dark! I fell in love with the process of creating work that I was able to manipulate at every stage, I wasn’t a slave to digital buttons or options on a screen. The more tactile, physical approach to creating an image was incredibly exciting to me. Therefore, it became a dream of mine to one day have my own darkroom.
Here lies a tale of perseverance and victory. You see I’m a self proclaimed ideas person, it’s on my CV and everything so it must be true. The unfortunate thing is I’m not so good at finishing any of these totally brilliant ideas before being distracted by yet more ideas, shiny things and squirrels.
In Part 1 of this three-part series, I used histograms of famous photographs to introduce some fundamental ideas about contrast and tonality. In this part I’ll talk about software curves, and what contrast means in the context of photography. The next and final part will be about characteristic curves for film and paper. The idea …
