At our Burlington Photographic Arts Group meeting last night, John Price gave a 15-minute presentation on the technique he uses for dodging and burning large-format negatives that I’ve not seen before.
John cuts a 4×5 piece of mylar – the translucent material that draftsmen use to trace drawings – and places it on top of the negative when he places the carrier in the enlarger head. The mylar acts as a diffuser, so exposure times can be slightly longer, though the diffusion helps to avoid dust marks on the print.
After making some initial exposures of the paper to give a broad assessment of contrast and tone, John can dodge portions of the print as follows: he removes the carrier from the enlarger, places the negative on a light box, and then lightly traces the outline of the area he wants to dodge on the mylar using a soft 4B pencil. He’ll then fill in the area to be dodged by shading it in pencil (first removing the mylar from the top of the negative to avoid damage to the negative itself). The 4B pencil lead is soft enough that one can smudge the borders of the shaded area to ensure that hard lines on the print will not appear.
Burning-in is straightforward, by shading the areas not to be given additional exposure.
I thought this idea was simply brilliant; of all of the reading I have done on black-and-white processing I haven’t come across this technique before. Because the shaded areas are drawn by hand, it’s much easier to perform on 4×5 negatives (or larger), but even medium-format negatives can be processed in this way.