Today’s featured photo of the day! Obscure Darkroom Magic

Here is today’s featured photo. I am featuring an extra special event of featuring a reflection of my favorite part of being in the darkroom…making art out of a regular photo! Here is a set of photos of the classic and unchanged Holiday Inn Sign that was staple until the 80’s! Date – 1981.

A work of art!! I first exposed the shot on an 8×10″ photo, Exacto-knife cut 4 templates out of canvas for the portions to be colored in with each successive color. In the darkroom, I exposed the black-and-white paper normally then stop bathed normally, and flash fixed it for only 1 second. Then to do the colorization, completely in the darkroom, I masked with the pre-cut stretched floating piece of canvas pulled up with tension using a frame of ball bearings, crimping it with claps to pull it fully and systematically on the outside perimeter of the photo onto the edges of the stencil and used food coloring as a toner and used a paint brush to apply the toners. I then finally fixed the photo after all 4 colors were applied with the normal black-and-white process finish. The print is on fiber paper print using the Kodak Professional “warm-tone” enlargement paper developed with Kodak Dektol chemicals onto a 8X10″ matte-gloss RC print.

This is the original shot with no embellishments.

Photo taken with a Nikon EM-through a Nikon 26 mm lens, filter=Polarizer, Aperture=22 f/stop, shutter-speed 1/125th second, loaded with Kodak Tri-X Black & White 135 Negative Film ISO (ASA) 400 (raw grain) processed with D-76 Processing Chemicals, and a fiber paper print using the Kodak Professional “warm-tone” enlargement paper developed with Kodak Dektol chemicals onto a 3½x5″ matte-gloss print.

See you tomorrow with another fine darkroom magic photograph!!
© 2020 Versatileer

PHOTO OF THE DAY