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This photo dates back to the late 60's...I had become obsessed with the idea of producing a front-cover shot for the Amateur Photographer and as I had acquired an early Miranda SLR, I had at last the means to produce a high-quality photograph, if not the ability to realise my full conception of what the photograph should finally look like.
The shot above is of Liz in front of a plain-paper background that was pinned to the wall. I used two light sources, one towards the lower right side of her face and the other from the upper left, which was angled to strike at the highest point of her forehead.
So far so good...the finished print was very bright and contrasty and the eyes were rather too dominant which caused the mouth to be somewhat overlooked on the final viewing. Not only that - the white paper background was crossed with shadows and Liz's hair seemed to be a little untidy...
...So I purchased a sachet of Farmer's Reducer, and mixed it into a solution as instructed (a wonderful lemony yellow sherbet smell)
I then set about painting out the shadows on the background and tidying up the hair...
The result was too stark. The background lacked any definition or sparkle because it was simply b
lank photo-paper. Farmer's Reducer bleaches quickly and tends to leave a faint yellow stain unless great care is applied...
...Well there was the slightest yellowing, but I was tired of all the darkroom hours I had spent and decided that I had printed (with all the dodging and shading and burning involved) the best result possible. I duly sent it off to the magazine, only for it to be returned some days later - together with a rejection slip.
(pause for 40 years)
Last weekend on my Sunday break from rehearsals for Whistle Down the Wind, I decided to distract myself, by going through my 60's black and white collection which Liz has kept safely in a drawer since that time. Viewing the picture forty years on found me understanding why it had been rejected: I had overbleached, not only the background, but also the whites of the eyes. Liz suggested cropping in close, to remove my slipshod work on her hair, but even with that done, the portrait still looked stark and unreal. I promised to not blog it, but I could not follow her advice to leave it alone and get on with other things. That night I sat up late and tried everything I could, via Photoshop, to make the portrait look like it had done before my bleach experiment - without success.
It took a further two weeks work, in between rehearsals and late at night, to produce the result above:
I recropped the image on Photoshop CS3, then rendered the forehead in soft focus and the mouth and lower face sharp, using the 'soft-focus' tool in Picasa 3
I then used the brush and crosshatching effects in Photoshop to simplify the image and to give it a slight 'painterly' appearance.
I then tried the Picasa sepia effect, but found it too rich. The Photshop 'sepia' seemed too cold, but I eventually found the rose shade I wanted by using both photo-editing programmes and combining the effects.
The eyes were the greatest problem, but I eventually found a solution by removing the reflection of one of the light sources on the pupils of the eyes and then extending the soft-focus effect over them. Usually a portrait requires sharp focus on the eyes, irrespective of the other features - this portrait was the exception.
A note on the cropping:
The original print had the eyes placed exact centre, which further emphasised them and also made the composition seem oddly unbalanced. The original negative has long been lost and so I re-photographed the mounted print, re-cropping it with the eyes positioned to the right. This had the effect of drawing the right cheek and chin into emphasis; leading the eye down to her smile.
A mix of analogue and digital, the portrait now looks as I imagined it, forty-odd years ago.
(and I have permission to blog it!)
"Thy eyes are the betrayal of bells, comprehended through incense"
EE. Cummings
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