Black and White Photography

If the conditions are not right, create them by positioning your dark subject
against a light background or your light subject against a dark one.
Subject lighting. The light conditions are often more important than inherent
subject contrast. Pay close attention to the type, direction, and quality of light
around your subject. Lighting contrast is not always predictable. A bright,
sunny day generally produces high contrast, for example, but if you photograph
in the shade of a tree on a bright day, you may get somewhat lowcontrast
results. On the other hand, if you photograph on a cloudy day by a
window indoors, there may be a lot of contrast between what’s inside and
outside or even between shadows and highlights within the room.
Beyond subject contrast and lighting, there are several methods of achieving
high-contrast results in the darkroom, either by making a high-contrast negative
or using a high-contrast printing technique.
Negatives. Possibly the best way to reduce an image to just blacks and whites,
with no grays, is to make a copy negative on high-contrast film—then print
that negative. Such films are called litho films, because they were originally
made for the offset printing (lithography) industry. The procedure is somewhat
involved, but not really difficult, and you can use this technique for a number
of other darkroom manipulations described later in this chapter.
Basically, you use litho film in sheet form and treat it like photographic
paper. Put your negative in the enlarger and expose it onto a sheet of 4" x 5"
or larger litho film. You can use safelights to handle litho films; you don’t need
total darkness. Develop the film in trays, using special litho (high-contrast)
developer or regular paper developer. The result will be a film positive—a sheet
of film with a positive image. A positive is useful for making negative prints,
prints with a reversed image, but usually you’ll need to contact print your positive
onto a fresh sheet of litho film to make a negative. Note that each time you
copy the image you will get increased contrast.
You also can achieve relatively high contrast in your negatives by manipulating
film exposure and development. Underexpose the film slightly, and then
overdevelop it. This technique is not likely to yield a totally black-and-white
result, but it does produce a higher-contrast negative than you could hope to
achieve with standard exposure and development—especially if your subject is
high in contrast to start with.
Printing. You also can use basic printing techniques to increase image contrast.
The simplest and most effective is to use a high-contrast filter with variablecontrast
paper—preferably #5. (If you use graded papers, use the highest grade
available). On its own, this will probably not eliminate all the gray tones in a print. But it will increase the contrast significantly—and if your original negative
is high in contrast, you may just end up with a totally black-and-white
image, or close to it.
Your choice of print developer also can affect final print contrast somewhat,
particularly when you are using fiber-based printing papers. Some brands of
print developer produce greater contrast than others. The dilution of the developer
also can affect contrast slightly. The greater the concentration of developer,
the greater the print contrast. So if you normally mix stock developer
with water in a 1:9 ratio (1 part stock developer to 9 parts water), increase the
strength—perhaps to a 1:4 ratio.
Extended development also may increase print contrast a bit, most likely
with fiber-based papers. If you normally develop prints for 2 minutes, use 3 or
4 minutes instead.
Solarization involves reexposing printing paper or film to plain, white light
during development, then completing development to produce a partial image
reversal, an effect that causes the positive print to look somewhat like a negative.
A successful solarization has an eerie, silvery appearance, often characterized
by distinct white or light edges separating light and dark areas. These lines
are called Mackie lines. You won’t get strong Mackie lines with every solarization,
but they can have a striking effect when they do occur.
The basic procedure is to expose the paper or film and begin to develop it
normally. Before the image is fully developed, briefly reexpose the paper or film
to light, and then continue the development—followed by stop bath, fixer, and
a wash. The effects of solarization are mostly seen in lightly exposed areas
(print highlights and film shadows), since these are areas that have a lot of
unexposed silver available for reexposure. Denser areas (print shadows and
film highlights) have been heavily exposed already, so the additional exposure
won’t affect them as much.
The following is a basic step-by-step process for solarizing prints. As always,
experiment for best results.
1. Expose your paper, just as you would to make a normal print. Put a negative
in the enlarger, make a test strip to determine exposure, and expose a
full sheet of paper according to the time indicated by the test. For best
results, use a slightly shorter exposure time (by 10–20 percent or so) than
you would if you were not planning to solarize. For example, if the test
strip suggests 10 seconds as the correct exposure, use 8 or 9 seconds instead.
Varying this initial exposure time can produce dramatically different
effects.