Possibly a stupid question - HDR in the darkroom?

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mattl

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HI,

I used to do quite a bit of digital photography and I quite liked the outcome of using the HDR technique.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to do this in the dark room with B&W film?

Matt
 
You can HDR from scans, but darkroom, don't think so.

I'm not sure you'll get much on here as it's a digital technique. Film has a higher dynamic range anyway, and it actually looks good.
 
The only way that I think might come close to the idea of digital HDR is split-grading in the darkroom on variable contrast paper - i.e you expose the paper for half or something of the total exposure time on a soft contrast grade (usually grade 0) to create the highlights (probably not the best way of describing it) and then for the remaining exposure time use a hard contrast grade like grade 5 to establish the shadows so contrasty negatives can be printed much easier.

Of course dodging and burning increases the dynamic range of a print and theres always the old way of using two negatives with different exposures for the sky and land for example and then only exposing half the paper for one negative before exposing the other half for the other negative.


I have not tried this BTW, in fact I've not even ever done any wet printing but I read about it in a darkroom printing book and it came across my mind.
 
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Film has a higher dynamic range than (most) digital cameras anyway so you're already getting HerDR.
 
Dodging and burning a print perhaps?

edit: never actually done a print (noob) but I think it has a similar outcome if you were to do it enough, right?
 
HDR is originally a darkroom process, there's a potted history on the wiki page for HDRI. That will give you some names and techniques to research.

But what do you want to do? increase the dynamic range of a print, or get the "hdr look" to a film image?
 
Loads of options, zone theory or dodging and burning prints.
You can also bleach areas of prints or tone to increase the density.
Have a look at some of Salgados prints if you want to see what can be achieved from a neg.

Done well it will never look as bad as digital HDR.
This was done in 1985, http://tralfaz-archives.com/coverart/D/Damned/damned_phant.html from 3 negs :)
 
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