Cameras have always lied. you are viewing a narrow slice of reality frozen in time. this slice has been carefully constructed by the author to show a specific thing. What is the author not showing, what was deliberately left out of the slice? The biggest lie is that there is no lie.
When I was in high school, I was taught basic darkroom techniques for altering film postfacto -- even doing so without doing a negative transfer -- by an old artist friend of mine.
If you're willing to do some basic home chemistry, you can do quite a few things to film during development that will alter in predictable ways the outcome; a favorite of mine is that adding a small amount of buffer solution into your developer and stop bath at the right time can adjust the light curves, which can turn a nighttime photo into a daytime photo if you do it right.
Do you remember or have a link to what buffer you use, and how much? Which paper developers it works with?
I skimmed _The Darkroom Cookbook_, and saw cold/neutral/warm toning paper developers, but didn't see any mention of adding a buffer solution to modify an existing paper developer like you mentioned. I might have missed it.
That sounds like an interesting effect, and I still print from time to time if I can convince myself to drag my enlarger upstairs. (I also have a lot of poorly exposed nighttime shots I'd like to see if I can recover.)
Comments
Cameras have always lied. you are viewing a narrow slice of reality frozen in time. this slice has been carefully constructed by the author to show a specific thing. What is the author not showing, what was deliberately left out of the slice? The biggest lie is that there is no lie.
https://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
When I was in high school, I was taught basic darkroom techniques for altering film postfacto -- even doing so without doing a negative transfer -- by an old artist friend of mine.
If you're willing to do some basic home chemistry, you can do quite a few things to film during development that will alter in predictable ways the outcome; a favorite of mine is that adding a small amount of buffer solution into your developer and stop bath at the right time can adjust the light curves, which can turn a nighttime photo into a daytime photo if you do it right.
Do you remember or have a link to what buffer you use, and how much? Which paper developers it works with?
I skimmed _The Darkroom Cookbook_, and saw cold/neutral/warm toning paper developers, but didn't see any mention of adding a buffer solution to modify an existing paper developer like you mentioned. I might have missed it.
That sounds like an interesting effect, and I still print from time to time if I can convince myself to drag my enlarger upstairs. (I also have a lot of poorly exposed nighttime shots I'd like to see if I can recover.)