Jean Michel Berts

[Ben Calwell]

Anyone ever hear of photographer Jean Michel Berts? Someone gave me a book of Berts' New York City photographs. If I read it right, his website says he uses Tech Pan developed in Technidol and a Sinar Norma. The photos have a unique look to them.

[altair]

I haven't, although of course I'm very very new at this. But I've taken a look at his website just now, and some of his photos. I believe you got it right, he uses a Norma with Tech Pan developed in Technidol. I agree with you, his photos look unique. I hate to say this, but they look almost HDR-ish...

[Ben Calwell]

I agree -- they do look a bit HDR-ish.

[altair]

I have to wonder now if that is a good thing or a bad thing...

[Marek Warunkiewicz]

I wonder if these are "enlarger" traditional silver prints or if they are scanned, Photoshopped and then output via something like a Lambda?

[luis a de santos]

I have all his books and I must say I like the images.
One should not dwell too much on technique ,it is the image that counts.
But since we are on the subject I simply can not believe these images are done simply by long exposures on a 4x5 camera at least not all of them. Some of the traffic has been clearly removed post exposure.
I have tried this approach with a 10 stop ND filter and it does not work the same.
Nevertheless, interesting work, nice cities.

Luis

[gth]

He does touch on his technique on his site and there is no mention of photoshop HDR manipulation. He seems to attribute his technique to film choice and development.

There would seem to be plenty of expertise here to determine if this is possible by analog processing.

[altair]

Is it possible to obtain such images via analog processing then? Manipulation in the darkroom is nothing new, but his photos are too out of this world to believe its all done in the film development and/or wet printing stage.

[PViapiano]

Well, it seems he pulls the film in development, but the 9-10 minute exposures mentioned on the site don't seem to apply across the board since many of the images have clouds that are stationary. In another section of the site he talks about digital tools/technology in a vague way. Either way they're nice photographs...

BTW, IMO, that site is a PITA.

[Brian C. Miller]

Depending on the weather, clouds can seem stationary for a while. He's changed his site to a Flashturbation (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/2011/04/26/breakout-results-example-of-bad-web-design-for-april-27-2011/) implementation from a nice HTML-only site.

He's burning and dodging, just the normal sort of stuff for post-process. The long exposure times allow things to move around a bit.