Any good tutorial on the internet on how to dodge and burn b&w?

-- herbet camerino (hbrasileiro@cihi.ca), June 21, 2000

Answers

Just practise your shadow puppetry. When you can do an African elephant flapping its ears, and a pelican eating a fish you'll be ready to try some basic dodging. ;^)

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), June 21, 2000.

I think the best advice is to stop the lens down so that you have more time to do the work. As a rule of thumb, stopping down your lens 1 stop, double the time ect. With this in mind, your burns and dodges will be less noticeable. With practice, you will be able to use faster times.

-- Scott Walton (scotlynn@shore.net), June 23, 2000.

Make the best print you can without burning or dodging. Then make two more prints, one with twice the exposure and one with half. Look at the three side by side and decide if there is an area in either of the "off" prints which looks better than the middle one. If so, print again, burning or dodging that portion. You will soon catch on about how much to do it. It takes some experience, or one-on-one with a good teacher.

-- Bill Mitchell (bmitch@home.com), June 23, 2000.

Herbert I have found through the years that I had problems controlling dodges. What I have done for a long time is make my basic exposure for the area which is the lightest (and which would require dodging) and burning the other areas. For me this works best.

Fred

-- fred (fdeaton@hiwaay.net), June 24, 2000.

I still have problems differentiating both. When you cover an area you're dodging right? But aren't you burning the other area at the same time?

-- herbet camerino (hbrasileiro@cihi.ca), June 29, 2000.

When you dodge you are holding back light from a given area and when you burn you are giving increased exposure to a selected area. Say you have a scene that with an exposure good enough to produce a decent foreground is too little exposure to give nice density to the sky. You will have to burn in the sky. There is no formula for finding out what is needed to burn the sky down. You have to test for it by using an exposure strip test. Or say you have a couple of rocks in a stream and they are too light while everything else is ok. You have to burn the rocks for an additional amount of time in order to balance the rocks density against the rest of the image. Or conversly you have the shadowed side of a building that is too dark when the rest of the scene is just right. You will have to dodge that part of te building to lighten it. I use the card stock that comes in boxes of paper and long wires with cotout cardstock on the ends to match the shapes I want for the dodges. I cut holes in cardstock to use as burning tools. I use large pieces of cardstock to make siloettes so I can burn whole sections of an image if need be. It is a very simple thing to do. No books need to be written on the subject. There are good explanations in A.A.'s book on The Print and many other books on printing. But experience is the best teacher of this technique. James

-- james (james_mickelson@hotmail.com), July 01, 2000.

Herbert,

I agree with you, they seem like the same thing. The way I differentiate is that what are you doing to the MINORITY of the print. If you are holding back light from less than half, then you are dodging, if you are holding back light from more than half, you are burning the rest. Works for me.

-- Terry Carraway (TCarraway@compuserve.com), July 02, 2000.

A good way of thinking of it is that "dodging" takes place during the initial or base exposure, and "burning in" takes place during additional exposure. I've burned areas much larger than 50% of the entire print, and I've dodged large areas as well, so the size of the affected area doesn't always apply to which term you use. Dodging is more difficult because you are constrained to the time of the base exposure. You can stop down the enlarger lens to f/11 or f/22 to increase this time, but the sweet spot aperture setting may be around f/4 or f/5.6. So try to go mostly for burning when you need local density correction.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@alaska.net), July 05, 2000.

With regards to dodging & burning, perhaps someone can make a suggestion about a problem I had last night. I was trying to print a negative of a white adobe church in New Mexico with a rustic cemetary in the foreground. I had used an orange filter on the camera so the clear sky had roughly the same shade as the foreground. When I printed for the cemetary and sky, the white church was all blown out; no details at all. When I printed for the church, the foreground and sky were dark and muddy, and it looked like night. I reduced the overall contrast of the image and reached somewhat of a compromise, with nice detail in the church without it looking like night in the rest of the scene, but I'm not happy with the low contrast. I realized the solution lies in burning in the church. I've done some rudimentary dodging by using the small pieces of cardboard cutouts on wire, but what's the best approach to burning in a small area of a print? Should I place a 8x10 piece of cardboad on the easel, trace the outline of the church, and then cut it out for a mask? If so, how should I use this mask effectively? Knowing that my cuts won't be perfect, should I move the mask around slightly during exposure so as to hide the edges on the print? Should I hold the mask above the print during exposure to soften the edges of the mask? Suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.

-- Scott Flathouse (seflathouse.pampa@celanese.com), July 07, 2000.

Or you could make a contrast reduction mask. Look in the archives for the directions. James

-- james (james_mickelson@hotmail.com), July 08, 2000.