[DeaconBlues]

Hey Elsinore, as a heads up, your name is on the screen of the killed by a troll pic. Might want to do a quick blur.

[DeaconBlues]

Hey Elsinore-

My third image also suffered from a flickr hiccup. Would you mind reinstating it?

How are you, Z, and the little ones doing?

[DeaconBlues]

the poor man’s way of doing this is to hold your flash in your hand, set your camera to iso 100, set your camera to b, and use a cable release or remote to just hold the shutter open until you are pleased with the amount of swirls, then pop the flash test button on your flash, then let go of the cable release. since you are using the flash, and you are doing a long exposure, you won’t need a really high iso (assuming the same holds true for digital as it does for film, i do all of my long exposure work, and shots like this, with 100 or 400 speed film.)

if you don’t have a handheld flash, you can get a cheap one for thirty bucks or less at your friendly local camera store, used. that is all you need.

it goes without saying that you should be on a tripod for this. also, it helps if your background is as dark as possible so the swirls really pop, and ask the twirler to do so as slowly as is safe.

[DeaconBlues]

i would visit, as long as the bugs and staplers were doing it in black and white.

[DeaconBlues]

+2

This is awesome. I think it will be a boon to Farktographers everywhere. Thanks to all of y’all, especially the folks that did the heavy lifting of rewriting the rules 🙂

[DeaconBlues]

you might also want to put a clause in the contract that would get you an additional bonus in the event that the cd is reissued down the road by a bigger label in bigger numbers, or something to that effect.

[DeaconBlues]

Nutkick42- between the power of TotalFark and the power of the Almighty Pipe-Wielding Dobbshead, you are now UNSTOPPABLE.

[DeaconBlues]

My vote is for a UV filter. Since the lens is brand new, take it to a photo shop this once to get them to clean it, just to ensure that it is spotless. Then screw on a good quality UV filter on and NEVER take it off. Neither my father or I have ever broken a filter, so unless you are INCREDIBLY rough with your gear, that is not a concern. A UV filter is a useful filter to have on your lens in nearly all situations, as well as the fact that it protects your investment. It also creates a seal that keeps dust off of your front element. Also, if you were to somehow screw up while cleaning, a filter is a lot easier and cheaper to replace than a lens. If you need another filter, just screw the second filter straight on to the UV filter. Unless you are shooting with a fisheye, you won’t have any vignetting from having two filters stacked. I have a couple of lenses that have UV filters on them that have not been removed since the mid eighties, and the lenses are still perfect. I have never regretted having a UV filter on a lens, and it even saved one of my lenses once while i was out in the middle of nowhere and had a bit of an encounter with a tree. The filter got scratched to hell, but the lens was not affected.

[DeaconBlues]

I see what you guys are saying, and they’re all good points. I just hope we don’t lose sight of the fact that Farktography has always been about accessibility to everyone, from the snapshooter to the prosumer to the pro. And yeah, the composition or the funny or the boobies will probably always mean more than the fact that you lightened the sky. I just don’t know. I fear large scale change. Somebody hold me… 😆

I think a bit more flexibility in the rules would make it more accessible to everyone. IMHO, more flexibility yields more diversity, and more diversity equals the environment for creating a bigger tent which can bring more photographers in to the mix. Look, for instance, at the number of one hit wonders on the FSM page, and think about the various potential farktographers that have, for one reason or another, participated briefly and then stopped. Perhaps these proposed tweaks could serve to make things more accessible to a broader swath of the photographic population.

/ I would hold you, but Zeke would splat me. Anyone who can pull a 747 is a scary mofo in my book 🙂

[DeaconBlues]

SO where does this workflow cross the line, if in fact it does, in your opinion? For Farktography, I usually stop at the LAB sharpening & color step. I picked this photo simply because I thought it would be a good one to illustrate the various concepts. Fire away!

Under the current rules, you cross the line when you blend layers in anything but normal mode.

As to where the line should be…I don’t know. That just seems like a *lot* of post processing, and as schnee mentioned, part of the justification for the rules was to even the playing field a bit between people who do and don’t have access (or money) for that level of photo editing.

I concur with soosh, and also wish to add a couple of points. GIMP is available for windows (and perhaps mac as well) these days. Also, in the not free but not 92834756 bucks segment, you have programs like lightzone. Also, you can always find a college student, buy em a case of beer, and get em to score you an uber cheap copy of photoshop cs3, as it is heavily discounted for college students. There are a number of other programs out there, like aperture and lightroom, that i am not familiar with, which don’t carry the 1000 dollar plus price tag of adobe creative suite cs3.

SilverStag- great work on that carnival shot. You took an image that needed a little help, and made it in to a much better image. It is still fundamentally the same, just a bit brightened up. Excellent shot.

[DeaconBlues]

“Imagine if every painter used the same brush and paint set.”

This.

[DeaconBlues]

elsinore- not really. You don’t dodge and burn a negative, at least not without potassium ferricyanide, which would be the same thing as photoshopping someone out of a picture. You only dodge and burn prints. In the darkroom, dodging and burning is accomplished by using different amounts of light on your printing paper (through the negative) in different places on the print, to make some parts darker or lighter.

I have mentioned both scanning finished darkroom prints as well as scanning negatives and doing post on a computer. Both methods generally use the same basic manipulations, just performed differently (obviously).

As far as darkroom dos and donts go, here is an “alpha test” list”

Allowed:
Dodging and Burning in
spot toning of dust and scratches only
toning (selenium, sepia, etc) or tinting (blue, red, tea, etc) only if applied to entire image

Disallowed:
using multiple negatives
removing compositional elements from negatives or prints with chemicals like potassium ferricyanide or farmer’s reducer

Questionable (things i am just not sure about)
cross processing color negatives
solarizations
moving the enlarger head during print exposure
torn borders on prints
infrared film
this list is by no means exhaustive, it just represents the things that popped in to my head on the spot. It is basically a first attempt at creating a list of practices that are and are not used in making your average standard photographic print as opposed to a graphic design/printmaking print that uses photographic elements. This list is also just for black and white darkroom techniques. I have never done color darkroom work, because it ceased being anywhere near cost effective some time ago, and the results arent generally better enough in my opinion.

I know that for people who never shot much or any film, and/or never did any darkroom work, the extra steps involved in film photography instead of digital can seem a bit weird when you are used to basically going straight from taking the shot to making the print, but having that negative to deal with in the middle when using film definitely shifts things a bit.

[DeaconBlues]

sorry, double post due to lousy rural internettery.

[DeaconBlues]

I’ll take these excellent points one at a time, if possible:

Elsinore- The only adjustments you can really do in a darkroom evenly across the image are to increase or decrease the amount of light hitting your paper and to change your contrast filter (or paper grade if you don’t use variable contrast paper). While these things are extremely important, 99 percent of the time these only serve to get the images ‘close’ to a semblance of correctness. You cannot make adjustments like you would with a curves tool across an entire image, mainly because the contrast filters are not that fine. I could not, for instance, make everything on the print in zone III a half stop lighter without changing everything else as well. That is what dodging and burning are used for in the darkroom. You get the image as a whole as close as possible, and then you decide where you need more or less light to yield a finished print.

staplermofo- i assume by ‘anything you could physically do to a negative’ you mean ‘anything you could do in a darkroom?’ If so, there are a couple of things to watch out for, such as stacking images in the darkroom, solarizatioins, and a couple of other obscure tricks. Take Jerry N. Uelsmann, for instance. His prints are done entirely in the darkroom, using multiple negatives and multiple enlargers, and was doing “photoshoppy” tricks in the late seventies/early eighties. (His work is absolutely amazing, and if you aren’t familiar with it, you should check it out.) That sort of thing would obviously not be desireable.

schnee- i’ll save the best for last 🙂

jpatten- I agree wholeheartedly. Fixing a blown out highlight does not significantly alter any major compositional element in a shot, it just makes sure that your viewers arent blinded.

sleeping- The big area where film scans suffer over digital camera files is in that lack of on the spot review i mentioned in the first post. As i am sure you know, sometimes, even with meticulous metering, an element of a shot can be a bit off, and with film, you have to work with it. With digital, you just adjust and reshoot on the spot. Negatives, especially black and white negatives, also have different properties than digital shots, and generally (in my experience) require a bit more attention to detail than is allowed within the scope of the rules.

schnee-

1. What in the self portraiture theme would be cost prohibitive with a dslr?

2. I completely understand and agree that farktography should be about photography and not image editing, but some image editing is always necessary. The question is the line between photographic practices and graphic design/printmaking practices. For instance, I don’t think anyone would consider Ansel Adams’s “Moonrise, Hernandez New Mexico” anything other than one of the world’s greatest photographs, but it would be highly illegal under the current farktography rules. Hell, almost everything Adams ever did would be. The same could be said for the works of Weston, Capa, and Cartier-Bresson (who almost never printed his own work, he left it up to assistants), as well as pretty much any other photographer you can think of. I just feel that there is a difference between image correction and image editing. I am certainly not advocating letting people edit elements in and out of their photos, but I have no problem with people being able to, for instance, save a print where one compositional element in the shot appears to be a couple stops off.

3. Dodging and burning in have been crucial elements of all photography since it’s inception, and i agree that we would indeed see some very nifty stuff. Another pleasant side effect is that allowing people a little more freedom in their post processing would probably make it easier to determine where people are violating the letter and spirit of the rules. It would be less “i can tell by the pixels and because i have seen a number of shops in my time” and more “dude. your pomeranian does not have tusks.”

3. As far as changes to the rules go, I wouldn’t be the best one to attept to codify that on the photoshop/gimp side, as I very rarely use either program, and I dont necessarily know all of the correct terminology. I could certainly work up a list of darkroom dos and dont’s though.

By the way, thanks to everyone for their responses. I didnt know that a group of farkers could be so reasonable. Not one person has told me to eat a bag of dicks. 🙂

[DeaconBlues]

correcting value refers to correcting how light or dark it is in the image. This would be common in bringing down blown out highlights, which I am sure everyone who shoots digital is familiar with. It is also involved in lightening shadows. When you drag a contrast or brightness bar back and forth over an entire image, you are watching the values change.

color correction, to me at least, more have to do with changes in hue (turning someone’s skin green would be an extreme example).

Adjusting saturation falls between the two to me.

You can think about it in terms of painting: adding black or white to blue gives you lighter blue or darker blue, but adding yellow gives you green.

As to your second point, the issue i was trying to point out when referring to the post processing on the back of a camera was mainly meant to point out the fundamental difference between beginning your post processing seconds after you snap the shutter and hours or days after snapping the shutter. With a viewscreen on the back, you know if everything but the left side of timmy’s face is overexposed immediately, and you snap another shot of timmy. Without, you have to work with what you have. Either one is a perfectly valid photograph, regardless of whether it takes you two minutes in photoshop or ten. If i machine gunned 10 rolls through my seagull at the exact same subject, i would have a much greater chance of getting that elusive straight black and white print that requires no dodging and burning, but that would cost forty bucks. If anyone rolls their eyes at this, i challenge them to go out in to the field with their lcd screens taped off and a 16 meg card in their camera and see how they do.

I do not mean this as an insult toward people who use dslrs, in fact many of my best friends do. I have a digital camera myself, although i only use it for editorial shots. I simply prefer using film, and I prefer printing in a darkroom. None of the changes I suggest would make anyone’s dslr images worse, it would, in fact make them better. It would also level the playing field for people who prefer to do something a little different, or don’t have the money for a 40d and loads of L glass.

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