Light Trails

Always looks good and adds a sureal edge to a picture. Light trails are created by leaving the shutter open for a few seconds. Usually about 8-10 sec's but it depends on the subject matter. Car lights are a favorite, the red and white streaks they paint on the picture make for a trully amazing picture. Try and get some stationary people in the shot to add to the surrealness of the photo. Or use a static landmark like a statue or waterfall as a focal point to the picture.

This was taken with a Canon EOS 300 set to Bulb. It was held open while I was driving along about 400 meters trying to keep everything steady.

Hyper Focal Focusing

Tea Staining

A cheap way to get a reddish tint to your black and white photo's is to use tea staining. After you have printed your photo leave it to soak in a bowl of water with a tea bag in it. Any type will work but some produce better results than others. Leave the print in the "tea" for about 15 minutes then rinse. Leave to dry and you should have an interestingly toned picture.

I will put up an example as soon as I can as well as any notes on which tea bags produce the best results.

After a failed attempt using resin coated paper I will have to wait till Iget some fibre paper. I left several prints to stain overnight and only managed to stain the sink.

Enlargement Metering

One handy little purchase was a projection print calculator scale. It is basically a piece of acetate split into 8 segments. Each segment is a different shade of grey. The idea is that you lay this over your first print and expose the print for 60 seconds. When you develop the print you can see the best exposure time to use. It only cost a few quid and is used on every print run I do.

Again I will put up an example when I get my scanner back on-line.

Dodging & Burning

When you are printing your first black and white prints the fact that you can see a picture appearing.

Chemical Chart