Pro Techniques

Natural History
When Steve Gottlieb took this picture in 1985 he’d been practicing law for 10 years. Photography was his hobby, and his hometown, Washington, D.C., was his favorite subject.

I have always been fascinated by a photographer’s ability to turn a common subject into a work of art. Being a photographer means seeing the artistic potential in the elements that surround us on a daily basis. I travel all over the world seeking out amazing things to shoot, but I also find them at home—in the kitchen, in my backyard or even in my office. It’s always an exciting discovery to work with a subject to which I never gave a second thought, and then one day it turns into something that is visually arresting.

The image color of even a conventional black and white silver print is rarely black, white and grayscale shades. It may be warm (golden) or cold (blue) neutral or toned (sepia, magenta). Over many years print makers and chemists developed paper and developer combinations, as well as after-printing toners, to add additional color to monochrome silver prints. For example, using a warm-tone paper such as Agfa Portriga and a warm-tone enhancing developer, such as Selectol Soft, could alter image color. This yielded brownish blacks and creamy whites. A cold-tone paper could be developed in Dektol and after fixing toned in a mild dilution of rapid selenium toner for added “snap”, resulting in a “harder” bright white/deep black effect.

What is “stock” photography, and how can it be a source of revenue? First, let’s define some terms. In most cases, rather than selling an image in the stock photo market think “license,” as stock images are not really sold—they are licensed for a particular use. The larger agencies all license Rights Managed (RM) images and many Royalty Free (RF) agencies will offer a “removal from market” option if an exclusive license is needed by the client.

The skies have been a source of fascination for humankind since our earliest days. But only in the past 100 years or so has photography provided tools to enable people to capture, view, and enjoy the astonishing images astronomers were privileged to see in their elaborate telescopes.

The print completes the creative circle you began inscribing when you first viewed the image and snapped the shutter. The beauty of black and white printmaking is that you can share that vision through interpretive techniques that include expressive use of tonality, artful contrast and exposure control. Yes, digital images can be viewed on a screen and shared through the Internet to a worldwide audience. But nothing quite matches the intimate beauty of a carefully produced print, one that can be hung on a wall in your home or a gallery.

Given that the physical and perceptual experience of making a photograph is shaped by technology, and that technology is also embedded in the resulting images, one of the chief and perhaps most profound changes in how we make an image has been the changes in focusing—and recently autofocusing—technology. There’s a reason that the documentary photojournalism of Lewis W. Hine (shot with a ponderous 5x7 view camera or a 4x5 Graflex SLR) has a qualitatively different feel from that of Alfred Eisenstaedt or Henri Cartier-Bresson (shot with pocket-sized 35mm rangefinder cameras). It’s not only framing—it’s responsiveness, spontaneity, and, perhaps, repose, that underlies what these image-makers showed us.