Reinvent an old processCase study 151

« D

igita

l im

agin

g C

ase

stud

y E

xerc

ise »

Many fine-art photographers are opting to work with old or obsolete chemical or printing processes. Their working practice is built around a chosen technique. This becomes part of the compositional process, as it may be important to consider strong shapes and forms or tonalities, for example, that work well with the medium or technique of choice. Visualizing the end result when composing the picture in the camera is important.

Traditional silk-screen printing gives photographers a way of graphically simplifying images. An image is reduced to simple shapes and tones – each of which is printed in a solid ink colour through a mesh screen. The results can be bold with the substitution of strong colours but there can be a loss of image detail. Silk-screening also requires skills and equipment that some photographers do not want to acquire. As an alternative, image-editing software offers a similar technique, giving bold graphic results while retaining fine detail.

Start with any black-and-white image having strong graphic shapes and a full range of tones. [1] This could be scanned from a darkroom print or be a black-and-white conversion from a digital colour scan or capture. Use the Threshold command to create a series of bitmaps representing tone bands in the image. Each resulting 1-bit bitmap stores only black or white information. Save each file separately. The three bitmaps created for this print represent the light grey, dark grey, and almost black tones of the image. [2, 3 and 4].

Colorize the bitmap images using the Hue Saturation and Lightness command. To create the final image the individual files [5, 6 and 7] can then be printed as solid colours on a single sheet of paper in three passes through a printer. Slight mis-registration between the colours can be a bonus but you have to fight hard to achieve that given the repeat accuracy of modern ink-jet printers.

Filling station An old filling station in the far north of England, a digitally printed ‘silk-screen’ image composed of three colours chosen by personal associations with the colours of fuel company logos and rust, based on an original black-and-white darkroom print.Photographer:

David Präkel.

Technical summary:

Nikon FE Nikon 50mm f/1.4, exposure not recorded, Ilford FP4 Plus ISO 200.

1

2, 3, 4

5, 6, 7