[Leica] A recipe for THE GLOW

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

Here's one recipe for "The Glow." Not the only one, but this should work for
you.

Anyone can do it. Try it, you'll see.

1. Use an older "long normal" lens--58mm f/1.4 or 1.2. Various makers made
'em and you can get 'em on eBay for a song. One nice new one is the Ricoh
55mm f/1.2 for very little money. A Noct or a Summarit will serve well
enough if you only have Leica lenses. Don't use most current 50/1.4s. If you
want a cheap sample for yuks, get an old Spotmatic and an old Pentax M42
screwmount (not Leica screwmount) 50/1.4 Takumar.

2. Use a K2 filter (Wrattan #8, medium yellow, whatever you want to call
it). 

3. Shoot in good light away from the sun, and don't provoke flare. Shade the
lens. Stay away from very high contrast situations.

4. Don't use a thin-emulsion film--stick with old-fashioned conventional
emulsions. There are a couple of these left; one is Kodak Plus-X.

5. Expose enough. Say, Plus-X, E.I. 64 (that film's real speed), and maybe a
bracket up for safety.

6. Use a conventional, traditional developer. Again, there are several, but
Kodak D-76 is one. 

7. Don't develop too much. Say, 10% or 20% less than the manufacturer
recommends for outdoor scenes, no more than the manufacturer recommends for
flat indoor scenes (giving generous exposure and not developing too much is
called "pulling," and it was common in the days before reliable light meters
and before the pernicious disease of "pushing" became an epidemic spread by
the hobby magazines and photojournalists <g>).

8. Use a diffusion enlarger. Most enlargers are somewhere on the spectrum
between purely collimated and purely diffuse light, with a point-source head
at one extreme and an actinic (cold-light) head at the other. A Durst
"condenser" enlarger is pretty diffuse, because the light source is a large
frosted light bulb. A dichroic-style head like a colorhead is quite diffuse.
Most photographers have no idea of the difference their light source makes
in the way their film looks. The selfsame Tri-X negative printed on a Leitz
Focomat IIc and a Saunders 4550 VC head make the _film_ look like it has
very different characteristics. Try it. You'll see. (Yup, I have.)

9. Use fiber-base paper.

10. Don't print with too much contrast. Most photographers print with way
too much contrast and way too light. Cartier-Bresson was always egging his
printer to use less contrast--he sent the master repro prints for _The
Decisive Moment_ back to the lab to be printed with lower contrast. With
many negatives, photographers unknowingly push past the natural scale of the
negative and they think that lowering the printing contrast will look
"flat." Actually, lowering the printing contrast brings out more gradation
and makes the print look _richer_, until you get past the threshold where a
complete range of tones is present--which most photographers seldom do.


Voilá. Le glow. Try it, you'll like it.

- --Mike