The Kodak Library of Creative Photography. Print Your Own Pictures

Time-Life Books, 1985. — 112 p. — (The Kodak Library of Creative Photography).The Kodak Library of Creative Photography series is aimed at beginner photographers and consists of 18 volumes: Mastering Color, Dealing with Difficult Situations, Taking Better Travel Photos, Learning from the Experts, creating Special Effects, Magic of Black and White Photogrpahs, Building and Cityscapes, Mastering Composition and Light, Take Better Pictures, Art of Portraits and the Nude, Print Your Own Pictures, Set Up Your Home Studio, Extend Your Range, Photographing the Drama of Daily Life, Capture the Beauty in Nature, Make Color Work for You, and Photographing Friends and Family.For some photographers, pressing the shutter release marks the end of the photographic process. But for others, the moment of exposure is just the beginning. Master photographer Ansel Adams compares a negative t o a musical score. "The print," he explains, "is the performance."Just as musicians interpret a piece of music each time they play it, so too you can use the printing process to control or change the appearance of your pictures. For example, the delicate pastel portrait opposite is not a slavish copy of the original transparency. In the darkroom, the photographer took the opportunity to print the slide in several different ways, adjusting the hues, lightening and darkening the print overall, and then moderating the tones of individual areas of the picture. Thus, the image that appears here is the best of several pictures - the result of the photographer putting as much care and attention into printing the photograph as she did into taking it.The pages that follow show further examples of such darkroom creativity. Despite the apparent complexity of some of the images, none was particularly difficult to achieve, and all are within the scope of a photographer working in a makeshift home darkroom with basic equipment.