The photographic news

• Bandzählung: 12.1868
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1868
• Sprache: Englisch
• Signatur: F 135
• Vorlage: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
• Digitalisat: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
• Digitalisat: SLUB Dresden
• Rechtehinweis: Public Domain Mark 1.0
• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-db-id1780948042-186800009
• PURL: http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id1780948042-18680000
• OAI: oai:de:slub-dresden:db:id-1780948042-18680000
• Sammlungen: LDP: Historische Bestände der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
• Sammlungen: Fotografie
• Strukturtyp: Band

• Digitalisat: SLUB Dresden
• Strukturtyp: Ausgabe

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. Vol. XII. No. 529.—October 23, 1868. CONTENTS. PAGE A New Aid to Harmonious Printing 505 A Photographers’ Relief Fund 505 The Proportion of Salt Employed in Albuminizing Paper 507 Failure of Photographing the Eclipse in India 507 Uneven Drying of Sensitized Albuminized Paper 509 On the Application of the Camera-Obscura to Harbour Defence 510 Modes of Lighting the Sitter. By John Heattie 510 Photographic Printing in Silver, Theoretical and Practical. By W. T. Bovey 511 A NEW AID TO HARMONIOUS PRINTING. The importance of skill, taste, and judgment in printing, especially in portraiture, is, we believe, but imperfectly appreciated amongst many photographers. To print a negative fairly, so as to do full justice to its good qualities, as well as its defects, without suppressing or exaggerating either, is not such a mechanical task as some imagine. To get all in the print which is in the negative is one element of good printing, but it is by no means all that is required, nor all that is possible for the printer of artistic taste and skill to secure. By the exercise of a little judgment con trast may be decreased or increased, defects modified or sup pressed, shadows deepened, and spotty lights toned down or removed. In short, by skill on the part of the printer, ‘a good picture may bo produced from an indifferent negative. Mr. Samuel Fry has just communicated to us an import ant aid to artistic and harmonious printing which he has for some months past employed with very great success. It depends on a system of masking in which he has most ingeniously employed existing means to a most important end. Let us, before proceeding further, explain the circum stances under which this aid becomes of special value. Every photographer is familiar with a class of negatives in which there is a slight excess of density. All the detail and modelling are there, but from the unexpectedly non- actinic colour of the deposit when dry, or from the tempta tion, so strong to some operators who love brilliancy, to give just a moment too long to the intensifying, the lights are slightly too opaque. The consequence is, that the shadows arc bronzed before the modelling, due to delicate half-lights, is sufficiently impressed on the sensitive paper, and, if the portrait be printed sufficiently deep to do this modelling justice, all detail in the shadows is buried, and blackness and want of transparency is the result. The use, in print ing, of paper and bath giving little contrast, sun printing, and shading the deeper parts of the image during the pro gress of printing, arc remedies each of which affords some advantage in such cases ; but the expedient we are about to describe is simpler and more efficient in many cases than any of them. The mask Mr. Fry employs is a transparency from the same negative. It will be seen in a moment how this ope rates. The transparency or glass positive is in all respects the reverse of the negative. Where the latter is opaque, the former is transparent; where the negative is transparent, the positive is opaque. When the paper print from an over- dense negative is sufficiently printed in the shadows, the lights still remaining chalky and without detail, the trans parent positive on glass is brought into use. It is placed outside the printing-frame, of course, because the print could not with advantage be disturbed, and because extreme gharpness in the printing of the mask is not required. It page Print-Washing Aided by Osmotic Action. By W. J. Land 511 On the Relation Between Intensity and Tone. By Nelson K. Cherrill 512 To Swing, to Tilt, or to Level ? By Prof. John Towler, M.D. ... 513 Correspondence—Cleaning Old Plales—Amount of Salt Used in Albuminizing Paper—Distortions and Perspective 514 Talk in the Studio 515 To Correspondents 515 Photographs Registered 516 will be seen now that the deposit forming the shadows of the transparent positive protects the print in those parts which are already sufficiently deeply printed, whilst the whites, being transparent, permit the rays of light to pass freely, and so to continue to print through the dense lights of the negative, and thus t» secure in the proof all the delicate detail in the lighter portions of the picture without losing transparency, burying detail in the shadows. ■ It will be seen that this kind of mask suits itself to the precise degree in which the excess of contrasts exists in the negative, and must, if used with judgment, inevitably tend to produce harmonious prints from dense or hard negatives. Where special effects are required, such a mask may easily be manipulated a little. For instance, it may be necessary to preserve the extreme purity of some few points of light, whilst it is desirable to reduce, or get detail into, many others. In such a case it would be easy to stop out in the transparent positive the points where further printing in the lights is not desired. -Modifications of this kind will doubtless suggest themselves to the judicious printer as the occasions arise. In some instances, instead of taking a glass transparency, a paper print, made transparent by means of varnish or wax, might be employed as the mask ; but it would not be so efficient, as the registration of gradation would not bo so perfect, and the amount of light obstructed by such a paper mask would make the final harmonizing operation some what slow. As every new aid to artistic printing is of great value in securing the progress of portrait photography, photographers are indebted to Mr. Fry for an ingenious and useful method of obtaining harmonious prints from over-intense negatives. A PHOTOGRAPHERS’ RELIEF FUND. We have received several letters of late on the subject of a photographers’ relief fund, all of which, with some diversity of opinions on points of detail, agree in the general idea that “ something ought to be done.” Some few think that the time is not quite ripe for such an experiment; and that it Would be a pity to try it and fail. This view was forcibly put to us by one of the oldest and ablest of our artistic photographers, who recently called upon us. He suggested that photography, as a profession, is undergoing a weeding process ; that many who took it up hastily, be cause of the promises of profit it seemed to hold out a few years ago, but who did not, in a legitimate sense, belong to photography as a profession, were forsaking it again for their own respective legitimate callings; and that it would be better to get this weeding process completed before establishing any benefit fund, the existence of which might tempt them to remain longer in a profession which, for their own sakes, they had better abandon.