Making a Negative from a Cell Phone

Pretty much everyone now a days has a smartphone. It seems like every time you turn around there is a new and improved cell phone being offered. With the increase of smartphones comes the controversy of phone photography, is it fine art? Should it be used professionally by photographers? All of these questions aside, a camera is a camera and if you want to shoot with it we say go for it! We even have options for you. Recently we created a LVT Negative from a digital file shot with an iPhone SE and then printed a 16x20 fiber print in the darkroom. Here is how we did it:

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STEP 1:

Download the file at FULL SIZE to the computer and import into Photoshop. We made all adjustments here (cropping, levels, curves, dodging/burning, etc.) It is important to make the image in Photoshop the way you want the darkroom print to look. If you know you want a certain area in your image to be brighter make that adjustment now in Photoshop. It will save time and frustration later on in the darkroom!

Our print ready file:

STEP 2:

Because our machines take 8x10 film, we can put multiple images on one sheet of film. We can do the same image a few times (with different contrasts for printing) or we can pick completely different images to be on the same sheet of film. It also depends what size you want your negatives to be. If you only have a 35mm enlarger there is no sense in making a medium format negative! We can either prep the LVT file for you or we can send you the specs and you can prepare the file on your own and send it our way to be made.

For this example we made both roughly 35mm negatives as well as medium format sized negatives:

STEP 3:

Get in the darkroom! We used the 35mm sized negative and made a 16x20 fiber based print. We were able to hold detail and tone in the print while maintaining the sharpness . A note about using camera phone files: just like all cameras the higher resolution and bigger files you have to start with the better the output will be. Thankfully the camera phones keep going up in megapixels which makes the photographs higher quality to work with.

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If you are interested in this process and have questions please call the office (781-740-1300) we would love to help walk you through it.

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Dodging & Burning

While we use photoshop on daily basis to create beautiful digital images we also love using traditional darkroom techniques to create the best fiber or RC print we can. Almost every print we make requires some dodging and burning. Here is a brief explanation of dodging and burning:

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BURNING IN

This is where a portion of a print is too bright after the main exposure. The majority of the print looks good, so additional exposure would make it too dark. To fix this you add additional light ONLY to the bright area. To do this you cut a hole in cardboard or use your hand in a cup shape to project a beam of light back onto the paper AFTER the main exposure. This happens a lot in skies or if a heavy flash has been used. We also use burning to add a vignette to an image.

Some of our burning tools

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DODGING

This is where a portion of a print is too dark in the shadows after the main exposure is made on the enlarger. To fix this during the exposure you hold back or shade the problem area with a dodge tool (a piece of dark cardboard or plastic on the end of a thin metal wand). The time using the tool varies depending on how dark the problem area is during the main exposure. It is very important to keep the dodge tool in motion during the exposure, this helps feather the effect and makes it blend into the rest of the photograph. We usually use dodging in shadows to bring out texture in the print. You want to have a rich black but you do not want to block up all of the shadows in the image to achieve the rich black!

Some of our dodging tools

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An example of darkroom dodging and burning from Fstoppers

If you want to learn more about darkroom editing we recommend checking out this post on FStoppers Website

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Staff Intro: Paul Sneyd - Captain of the Ship

Paul Sneyd has been a Master Printer for over 35 years. His darkroom career began in 1977, when he joined Jet Commercial Photography. During the next 10 years, Paul was the sole printer for Jet's five commercial staff photographers. In 1987, Paul became the master printer for Panopticon Gallery of Photography, one of the oldest photographic galleries in the United States. He would spend the next 20 years printing for Panopticon's many reputable artists and exhibitions before becoming the owner of Panopticon Inc. in 2007.

Throughout the last 35 years, Paul has printed for and worked with many local and national photographers including : Harold Feinstein, Isa Leshko, Stanley Forman, Agnieszka Sosnowska, Paul Ickovic, Asia Kepka, Bradford Washburn & Ernest Withers, among many others.

He has produced images for and has working relationships with a large sum of New England galleries, including the Boston Public Library, Focus Gallery, Griffin Museum of Photography, Harvard Law School, Museum of Fine Arts, North River Arts Center, New Bedford Whaling Museum, Panopticon Gallery, and the South Shore Arts Center.

Paul has been happily married to his lovely wife Patty for 24 years. They have two wonderful daughters and many dogs. He is an avid fisherman, red wine drinker and all around great guy!