maybe you need to go visit the nearest photography gallery and spend some time just looking at work that is not yours. Then try figure out how to print like one of the ones you like. Hint: it all starts with a good negative. As Jorge said get some books and do the tests. This is an interactive sport. You gotta get out there and do it as much as you can and learn from your mistakes. Good luck
leec
Paul Coppin's comments reminded me of something. It is easy to forget some of the most basic elements of the craft, because to some extent one thing can be tweaked to compensate for a error somewhere else. Up to a point.
I used to despair when a negative that I had great hopes for came out "blah" for no apparent reason. Eventually I realized that putting multiple rolls through the developer over a period of weeks, neglecting to apply the filter factor, or shooting wide open in dim light and hoping for the best....didn't amount to reliable practice. (Printing a thin negative on #4 paper is just not the same as printing a properly exposed and developed on on #2).
Probably the greatest revelation came when I discovered that using faucet-temperature wash (about 75 degrees, in Houston, Texas) after 68 degree (more or less) chemistry was an invitation to reticulation, which looks just like horrible grain. On the advice of a more competent photographer, I went to one-shot developer, a good meter, and fastidious attention to all of the rest of the details. Not surprisingly, the average quality of my pictures seemed to improve immediately.
None of these help with composition or "seeing", of course. However: a technically good image of a marginal composition is not only more attractive for its own sake, but it helps to isolate those subjective elements which can be either improved on or minimized on the next attempt.
The first thing I will address is basic darkroom technique.
The best thing that I use to prevent muddy prints is a Beseler Analite 300 exposure meter. This is used for the enlarger, and can determine the paper grade for a negative as well as the exposure time. Find one and buy it. Mine cost $20. If it doesn't come with the instruction manual, contact me and I'll send you a copy of mine.
(Tonight's project for me will be measuring the Analite against the Ilford EM10 exposure meter and making a slide ruler/cheat sheet for the EM10.)
Buy a grey-scale card. Photograph the card, and develop the film. Use it to determine if your development procedures are good, and adjust them so it comes up good on #2 paper.
I measure everything like it was either explosive or cost a zillion dollars. Chemicals, temperature, the works. When the trays get warm, I cool them down with an frozen gel pack. Keep everything precise, it pays off.
Composition:
This is something that takes some time. I recommend the book, On Being a Photographer by Bill Jay and David Hurn. Figure out something that you want to communicate photographically to someone else. Then photograph that.
Spend time seeking good images. Photograph things that make you say, "Wow!" Drop by a few art galleries, have a chat with the owner and just ask what sells. Go to a library or book store and peruse the photography section. Make a mental note of the images you like.
And most of all, remember to have fun with it!
"It's the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." - Walker Evans
Darinwc,
In all likelihood, you are being to self-critical, and perhaps you have expectations of instantaneous success. For most of us, developing photographic mastery and style are a long and sometimes difficult process. Part of this process is dealing with results that do not meet our expectations.
Let me make several recommendations that might help you produce better prints:
1. Try using Ilford FP-4+ developed in HC-110. This film and developer combination should give you fine-grained negatives, and don't make prints bigger than 8 x 10 inches for now.
2. Buy the Zone VI Workshop book and the complete Ansel Adams Photo Series. Read these books very carefully and follow the instructions contained therein. If you need to, outline the books and type up this outline in order to commit the information to memory. When the light is changing quickly, you will not have a lot of time to think about what you are doing nor will you have any time to look up valuable technical detail.
3. Try to locate Fred Picker's three photographic videos on E-Bay. Watch these videos repeatedly.
4. You will need to do a lot of testing to derive your personal film speed and the proper development times for your negatives and enlarging paper. You will need to learn how to make a proper proof. Don't skip these steps. Refer to the Zone VI Workshop and the Ansel Adams Series for more information.
5. Consider using Ilford Galerie fiber-base enlarging paper. It's good stuff. The important thing to remember is to choose good materials up front and stick with them for a while, like three years or more until you really know these materials well and have developed considerable confidence in your ability. If you change materials every week or every month, you will have a more difficult time developing good photographic skills.
6. Use cold light as your enlarging light source and use a Pentax digital spot meter in the field. Also use the best photographic lenses you can afford, which also applies to your enlarging lens.
7. Try using Polaroid materials to check your compositions. You may also try using a $200-to-$300 point-and-shoot digital camera for the same purpose, one that has a built-in viewing screen so you can check your work.
8. Try taking workshops offered by John Sexton. Sign up for his field courses and also his darkroom classes. He is a great teacher and a very highly skilled darkroom artist.
9. Consider buying a number of photographic art books by the masters, such as Adams, Weston (Edward and Brett), White, Caponigro, Sexton, etc. Spend time each day studying the compositions in these books.
10. Purchase photographic books dedicated to composition and view camera handling. Learn how to use all the movements of your 4 x 5, including depth of field and focusing.
11. Study the works of master painters, especially those devoted to Formalism.
12. Purchase "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and "The Artist's Way." Do the exercises in these books. When finished, buy the remaining books in both series and keep doing the prescribed exercises.
13. Try to take photographs on a weekly basis and spend time in the darkroom working on your technique.
14. When shooting, don't become overly bogged down with technical matters if you can help it. Try to cultivate an intuitive vision with a mastery of technical matters that comes from repeated practice. Work as smoothly and as automatically as you can.
15. Don't expect to create a masterpiece with each picture, and don't spend too much time critiquing your work, especially in the field.
Good Luck!
Darwin, here's what I did to learn...
After I had made my first two 4x5 pictures (yes, only two) I went to Bob Carnie's lab in Toronto. I had sought him out since I heard he was the best printer in the city. I told him I wanted to go to some workshops to learn to use my camera and I wanted to learn to print. He yelled at me. He said not to take any #%*# workshops, to spend the money on film -- tri-x to be exact, rate it at 200 bring it to him, he would process it in pyro and my job was to keep shooting until I was ready to print.
I photographed steadily for almost a year, reading everything I could, looking at every photography hanging anywhere. Then I started printing. Bob even showed me how to place my body infront of the enlarger for movement. I rented space at his place every weekend for a few months and then I took a month off work and printed there every day. I was feeling totally hopeless in those early months and everything I photographed and printed looked like a dog's breakfast.
I was only printing on RC and running them through a machine, but I was learning. Bob was busily working and as he flew by I would grab him and ask, "what's wrong with this?" "Flat" he would grunt.
What the hell is 'flat' and how do I fix that??? And on we went, and I would get to see what he was printing, and other people were doing and I was learning.
Then he said, "Build a darkroom and do fibre." Fibre scared me at first -- I think I imagined it might dissolve in my hands. But it was my biggest and most delicious learning curve. I couldn't take another winter of driving into Toronto to see Bob, so I had him fibre print a whole bunch of stuff and I came home and basically copied what he had done. He didn't tell me anything except what paper he used. The learning was in figuring it out. And now I can transfer that to all the work I print on my own, occassionally asking Bob for input.
I guess what I'm saying is that I didn't think I had a hope in hell of ever learning to print to the standard I wanted, ( still have miles to go) and having a mentor proved to be the key, especially the exercise of copying his prints of my work. If you know of a fine printer, it might be well worth it to try that exercise.
Learning to print has been instrumental in improving my field work, critical in fact.
This has been a bit of a ramble, but I hope it is of some use.
Patricia
I feel your pain, only backwards. (??) I was shooting 35mm, and very happy with the results. I went to 5x7, and luckily, although composition was 50/50, (and still is) the clarity of the shots were still good. I enrolled in Photojournalism last year, and went back to 35mm shooting. I thought "no biggie, been there and done that". The pictures were horribly grainy, and looked like crap. I beat myself over the head for weeks, took the camera in to have it checked out, tried different types, speeds and brands of film, and still crap. I was frustrated as hell. Then one day, I tried a different developer, and time sequences for each step, and realized that I had been over-developing all my film. I went from what I "had" been doing, to someone elses "perfect formula" and screwed up dozens of rolls of film, and opportunities for pictures of events that will never happen again. Forums are great, and I am a twice-daily reader of this one. Books are great tools, but the best tool imaginable is trial and error, and finiding what works for "you".
Your problems with "muddy" and "grainy" prints will go away once you improve your exposure and darkroom processes. You received lots of good advice on this already. If you apply yourself, you can make excellent progress in these areas relatively quickly.
Compositional skills derive from both study (how-to books, books and exhibitions by photographers you admire, etc.) and lots of hands-on experience. And hands-on experience refers not simply to taking lots of pictures, but also getting analysis and feedback on your work. At the end of the day, for every photograph you took that "didn't work", you should know exactly why it didn't work, and what the corrective steps should be. If you don't have this information, then you're simply banging your head against the wall with no way to improve. Sounds to me like this may be where you're at right now.
I think you'd really benefit from having a photography mentor or expert support group to give you on-going feedback on your work. I took a few photo workshops which gave me some basic ideas, but what I really found valuable was the feedback I get from working photographers in my local area. I don't have a darkroom, so I get all my B&W negs developed and printed at my local B&W custom lab. The lab owner is also a professional photographer, and frequently other photographers visit the lab while I am there; so while I have my negs on the light-table I've frequently been able to get a variety of comments on what compositionally worked, what didn't work, what I should have done with exposure and development time, what filters I should have used; etc. This real-time feedback specific to my own efforts has been extraordinarily helpful; frequently I go back to reshoot the same composition (implementing the suggested changes) once or twice until I get it "right." Even after several years of this, getting it "right" is still extraordinarily difficult (I think even St. Ansel once said that if he got one "keeper" out of a month's worth of shooting, he'd be happy), but at least I have a process (which increasingly I can execute on my own) to get there.
Another thing I've done is purchase photography guidebooks to my geographic area (southwestern U.S. in my case), pick out some pre-existing compositions that I find intriguing, and photograph them on my own. This may seem like plagiarism (it really isn't, as there are lots of variables at work), but by trying to re-create a known "good" composition you can actually learn a great deal about why that composition works as well as the technical prerequisites for pulling it off. I quickly learned that getting such photographs is not easy, it's hard! Getting the lighting, perspective, exposure, etc. right is difficult and often took multiple attempts. But after doing this for the last year, I've noticed two changes in my photography: I'm technically much more adroit (reshoots are rarely required now), and somehow magically I'm now starting to define my own compositions with increasing success. Learning what make classical compositions "tick" will inevitably rub off on your own work; I now have a dawning (although still primitive!) awareness of what to look for to achieve a dynamic image.
Anyway, these are my long-winded thoughts. Hang in there, it will only get better!
So I still have a hope, too? What a relief.
Try something different. Shoot color. Have your good transparencies printed on a Lightjet or Chromira. It's fun.
Darin, what is happening to you might not feel as a good thing , but it is.
Your creative side is pushing you to learn , because is craving to express himself.
I love the posting of Patricia, the importance of having a mentor is of capital importance.
Buy books, magazines, look at images, go at museums and use the quality of those images as magnets where your craftmanship has to grow towards to.
You will find lots of depressing moments. But I have found those times of depression useful , I realized that in those seemingly unproductive moments something was brewing inside.
I also would suggest to find your own way; it is oK to learn the techniques of the masters, but you might want to abandon them to find your own voice. Keep working man, discontent is the spark of change.
www.dfoschisite.com
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