the guessing game
it's a game i've played for as long as i can remember.
it started because i wanted to be able to recognize a certain intensity of light, its abundance of photons, just by looking at it, to feel a constant light to compare to previous observations.
in order to find that constant, occam's razor came to mind. the simplest solution is almost always the best, and took the practice of slowly closing my eyelids to an art form. i'd dim the bright sun into a 'nuit américaine', or at least that's what we said in france growing up. it means the way to make daytime look like the night using density filters, 'day for night' in english. anyway,
when i turned 12 and got my first camera, a canon av-1, i realized the lens worked just like my eyes. i knew the theory but now i could touch it, look at it open and close. the blades of the diaphragm, in odd or even numbers, the f-stop, whatever you want to call it, acted like my iris. now, i have no control over my irises, they're stuck on automatic, but my eyelids have much better control as of the amount of light that reaches my rods and cones. there is no need to pick a side, no need to choose between light and obscurity, they both exist simultaneously in the back of my mind.
at first when taking pictures i would use my light meter everywhere for everything. so the game evolved, adding numbers and units to concepts, trying to visualize 5.6 or 11 as values. i would squint down to f/8 and blink at different speeds, pretending to be a roll of tri-x. i could do short, medium and long as far as pretend exposures went. i tip my hat to those with more accurate eyelids. anyway,
i shoot film, develop it and print it. it's a process that lets you see exactly how one step can affect the others, in so many possible combinations. it's a numbers game. from 5.6 to 1/125, -20% or grade 3, 1:25 etc... a sort of escapism perhaps, to imagine something before you can do it.
so the next step was to guess my exposures. i was familiar with tri-x and d-76, so i started there, with sunny days, cloudy ones and others, to see what happens. i see daylight everyday and translate it into sets of numbers all the time. so one day, i stopped using light meters altogether. could my guesses be so off that i'd lose the shot? that would be difficult since most film emulsions have a latitude of a few stops. it's a lot easier to damage film during development. the whole point of not using a light meter is, for me, a way to be more involved in the process. also i don't forget a particular light, and that comes in handy when it’s time to print a negative. also,
since light can be quantified, it can easily be categorized as well. early morning northern hemisphere winter light, high noon mid-august in the sahara desert or around a campfire deep into the night. and like anyone who's interested in light, i remember a particular light, then compare it to other lights from before. we are able to study light literally everyday, and at night as well. everywhere we look we learn about light. so i close my eyes sometimes to simply cleanse my visual palate if you will, i keep my eyelids closed until i no longer perceive any leftover color. it's also very soothing, a bit like walking into a darkroom, knowing that once you close the door the world stops, or at least slows down because the clocks run backwards. that's what i do when i close my eyes, i translate all these colors into shades of grays. well, it's more of a habit really. anyway,
i grew to like medium format film and pocket cameras, twin lens as well, but my favorite being a kiev 6c, no battery no light meter. what it means is that when using tri-x or hp5 i have a set of shutter speed / f-stop settings in mind to work with. and if it's fp-4 it's all a bit slower. a bit more light inside the camera if the subject is flat for example, a little less if it's dark. i think of the print i will make later, and have already made up my mind as how to process the negative, so i pick my exposure to make my life easier and get a negative to match the print i have in mind. i know what type of negative i need particularly for my enlarger, and for my developer to bring out a certain grayish hue using a certain grade. i like certain lights because the way they look on certain films stocks on certain grades on certain paper surfaces. that's what i have in mind when i click the shutter.
all this to say i don't believe a print starts in the darkroom, but much earlier in the process to really give it its all. as a printer i have often asked to correct exposures for on-going projects, even proposed which film/dev combo would serve the subject best to achieve a certain look if i know of the project before it starts.
my little game goes on, i never really stopped playing it. i play it with negs in my enlarger, the guessing game is on as soon as i look at a negative. the game is to guess right or as close as possible on the first try. it's either within a half a stop and/or half a grade or i lose. some negs stump me, that's how i learn. it's just for me, a little game that hopefully shows somewhere in the fibers of the prints i make, something hard to pinpoint that makes you look twice at a detail, or at the line between two shades side by side, how they blend in and interact a certain way. it feels good to be playing that game after so many years, and always, when i first turn the light off in my darkroom i keep my eyes closed for a while until i feel ready, it's a slow process but very manageable, like coming back up to the surface after going deep under water, it takes steps you shouldn’t skip. anyway,
the game is not to choose between lightness and obscurity, for they both offer their pros and cons, but to try and feel the space where they blend, the gray area that hovers around and fluctuates right in front of the eyes of those who care to pay attention. photography brings me such privileged moments, l'ombre et la lumière, keeping my brain interested in the vernacular light. in the darkroom i get flashbacks of squinting down to an approximate f/16 some sunny day, or holding my breath shooting in the rain at 1/30th before the storm. i get my own madeleine moments, complete with chills sometimes when i travel through time and recall the blinding heat near the border in texas at high noon - which is a project i'm actually working on at this moment in my new west coast darkroom - and shave seconds off my exposure after talking to zoe leonard about how bright the light was, and how strongly it reflected on the surface of the rio grande.
and the game goes on