One-Minute Reads about Film Photography

Get a dramatically darker sky for a more impactful image.

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Most film photographers at some point become aware of the benefit of filters to enhance the impact of images. These may include circular polarizers (CP), particularly for color pictures, that can make colors more saturated and darken the blue sky. Shooting at a right angle to the sun is important to get maximum effect with a CP.

For black and white pictures, the go-to filters are usually a light yellow, which will help increase contrast in bright sun, and a dark red filter which will dramatically darken bright blue sky without regard to the angle of the sun.

But how to really get that maximum black to dark gray gradation? Stack ’em up! This architectural picture was taken on a bright sunny day. It is always helpful to have some clouds in the image, even thin, light wispy stratus as shown in this image. To get this effect, the picture was taken with a dark red (25) filter stacked on a CP filter, with the CP adjusted for maximum darkening of the sky.

For handheld shooting (as was the case of this photo), be aware that the filter pair adds 5 stops! On a bright sunny day shooting Tri-X, typical exposure would be 1/1000 at f11. In this instance, opening the lens 5 stops would be at f2 which is the lower limit of the 80mm lens. Likely this was shot at 1/500 at f2.8.

• gregory gammon / http://www.vinylfye.com