Originally Posted by
Ulophot
Thank you all.
Nothing "special" with the plane of focus; a healthy front tilt, essentially along the top of the violin, and an aperture (22, I think) to bring the score in front into sharpness up to about the fourth staff from bottom.
I can add two notes that might be of interest to some. I used a single light source and got everything pretty much set up, but the sharpness of some of the shadows and the arrangement of light and dark wasn't quite what I wanted, even after hanging some sheets of diffusion gel to create some additional shadows. I took a large piece of patterned lace fabric and hung it in front of the light to break it up, which, with a little adjustment, made all the difference in that respect. Nice to have a powerful LED light for constant viewing ability, sharp shadows when wanted, and without the heat of halogens.
I'll post in The Setup ad Shot for anyone interested.
The second factor came in printing. I got to a print that pleased me pretty well on my standard paper, Ilford WTF, but I had brought my Fomatone to the darkroom also. Although in earlier testing the two papers had seemed to be very close in most of the scale, my first print of this image on the Foma immediately showed a significant difference in the rendering of the lower middle tones that I felt improved the composition. Back in the days of many papers, serious printers often tried various ones to see which best suited a given image. The choices are fewer now, of course, but this experience reaffirmed my decision to keep the two papers on hand.
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