Low contrast scenes

[Steve Sherman]

Originally Posted by bowzart

You may find this interesting, or just plain weird. A friend of mine had a studio sale to simplify his life, and probably about 100 people came. One fellow came up to me and handed me his card. I don't remember his name, but under it was his "profession": "Refrigerator Developer". The story was that he kept his developer in the fridge, and whenever he loaded a roll of film into a tank, he'd pour the developer into it, put it back in, and leave it for weeks. He described the results. They sounded like fun; lots of Mackie lines, bromide streaks, etc. I've never tried it, but maybe I will! Well, back to topic.

Was your friend's name William Mortensen? Mortesen was known to have done such an exercise, however I don't think it ever became a working technique for him.

I can tell from experience that semi-stand / stand Dev. can produce results which alter the micro contrast to such a degree that the results no longer look photographic.

Cheers

[jgjbowen]

Very interesting thread. Thanks to all

[timbo10ca]

Originally Posted by sanking

Tim,

No problem. In fact, as I recall there was a similar thread over on the LF forum that started about the same time as this one.

I thank Steve Sherman for his generous comments. He gives me a lot more credit than I deserve for the practical application of this highly useful film developing technique to low contrast scenes.

Curiously, most of my work with reduced agitation with very dilute developer solutions is at the other end of the scale, i.e. scenes of very high contrast. This method really seems to work for everything, if you have the patience to test your materials and learn from your experiments.

Sandy King

Yeah, that was me...