Techniques

Dodging and burning

Dodging and burning was a dark room technique which was new to me during this project. I was aware of what the technique was but had never really needed to use it in previous dark room work. 

The reason i used burning in my work is because i found that the perfect exposure for the buildings and objects in a lot of my images was not the same amount of time i found the sky needed to be exposed for. 

This image was the image i came to find i needed to use burning for.

The struggles i had with this image were that any exposure with brought out the clouds and suited the sky well, made the buildings and especially the white bill boards far too dark. 

My tutor told me to try using a 0.0 filter, which is a filter that only effects the highlights in an image. 

i found through creating test strips that the exposure i needed to use for the full image was 25 seconds. I experimented with using the 0.0 filter and exposing the image for different amounts of time in order to find out what length of exposure would best bring out the sky with this filter. Unfortunatley by using this filter, it meant that although the sky was beginning to look more and more dramatic and successful in my work, the white billboards which were of course supposed to be the focus of my work, were becoming far too dark in the prints. 

Inorder to resolve this problem i figured out what exposure i needed to expose my whole print to, what exposure best suited the sky and image using the 0.0 filter, forgetting about the billboards. once i had worked this out i then used a piece of card which i used to cover up the billboards to the right side of the image, to avoid them getting any darker. I constantly moved the piece of card in different directions whilst covering the billboards to ensure no lines were created on the print.