information to produce an acceptable print in the darkroom. There is still some crossover, which conventional printing couldn’t deal with, although dye transfer can and did. What to do if you absolutely must have slides of such an uncooperative subject? My preferred choice is to do a medium conversion. A Vericolor Print Film transparency made from the VPH negative would look at least as good as the Ektacolor print and be much better than anything I could achieve with a slide film.
P HOTOGRAPHING IN C OLOR
FOR
R EPRODUCTION
So far, most of what I’ve related are immutable facts about films, papers, and our eyes. As a photographer, you choose the films and papers that provide you with the most palatable set of characteristics, but those characteristics are fixed. Once you’ve selected your medium, how you use it can greatly affect the quality of the tone and color you get. As a photographer, there are steps you can take during film exposure and processing to mitigate some of the material limitations. As a fine printer, you can take actions that compensate for many film idiosyncrasies and allow you to control how the print looks, rather than letting the film control it for you. The cost is often modest. The benefits are better prints, made more easily and reliably. We’ve considered how the image qualities in our prints relate to those of our films and our subjects. We’ve noted that, especially with color-transparency film, we’re often dealing with density ranges far beyond our ability to print easily. As we’ll see in later chapters, there are ways to deal with this problem in the darkroom, but there’s also a way for slide photographers to tackle this problem in the camera. The technique is called photographing for reproduction. The photographer consciously limits the subject luminance range chosen to photograph so as always to work with a density range that the print materials can cope with. Once you run the tonal calibrations that relate your paper’s exposure range to the film’s density range and the subject’s exposure range, you’ll
know what the ranges are and you will be able to photograph for reproduction. At first this approach may feel unnatural, but it’s a logical extension of what you already do as a photographer. You know that your prints won’t usually reproduce the entire luminance range you saw. When composing a photograph, you make artistic decisions that certain luminances will print as pure white in the final print and others will become pure black, regardless of how you saw them with your eyes. All we’re doing is making those decisions more rigorous and applying them to the print, not to the film. A slide made for reproduction usually looks flat on a light table because you don’t use the entire density range of the slide; you’ll probably use less than two-thirds of the range. You have to ignore how the slide looks to the eye and consider only how it will print. Photographing for reproduction with slides gives you a unique tool for controlling placement of tones. A typical slide tone has a very S-shaped characteristic curve, with high contrast in the midtones and low contrast in the highlights and shadows (Fig. 2–3). When you photograph for reproduction, you can decide what portion of the S curve to use for your subject. For instance, if you want “normal” results with slightly higher contrast in the midtones than the extremes, you expose the film normally. In the processed slide, luminances that you intend to print white should come out as light gray, and those that you wish to print black should come out as dark gray. If, on the other hand, you are recording a subject in which you want to hold good tonal separation in the highlights and are willing to give up some separation in the darker tones, you can reduce the exposure of your slide so that the subject highlights are recorded closer to a middle gray. That produces maximum separation in the print highlights and minimum separation in the shadows. Conversely, you can bias the film exposure to the higher side to increase tonal separation in the shadows at the expense of highlight separation. You can use this tool in conjunction with the other tone and contrast manipulation techniques in this book. It’s sole (albeit large) drawback is
Photographing for Reproduction in Color
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