It is estimated that nearly 4 trillion photographs have been taken in all of history and, of those, close to 10% were taken just in 2016. Today, we take more photographs every two minutes than were taken in the entire 19th century. Thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous camera phone, 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily; digitally disposable, shot, shared, and shed off with machine-like efficiency. With such a surplus it begs the question: is a picture today worth a thousand words?
Some time ago, I wrote about how this disconnect with the photographic process is what brought me back to analog cameras and led to my late discovery of the darkroom. I was reminded that speed and convenience need not be the primary, nor even the requisite, characteristics of value in any worthwhile endeavor. I began to take pictures as if they mattered again. Along the way, I was reminded, too, that a most wonderful and effective way to learn and improve is through failure. When something is at stake, when there is investment, and one fails to execute or achieve, the lessons consequentially tend to acquire indelibility. This is learning the hard way.
A basic tenet of photography is exposure: the amount of light falling on the sensitized film or sensor is inversely related to how long it is exposed to the light. More light inversely requires a less time to properly expose it while less light requires proportionally slower shutter speeds. Once exposure is established, decreasing the time of exposure by half can be achieved by doubling the area of the aperture to bring in twice as much light and vice versa. This is reciprocity.
Film emulsions, being a concoction of light sensitive chemistry, do not however follow the rules when light levels and exposure times extend outside of standard conditions. With long exposures of more than a second or two the rules fail to provide adequate exposure. For a given scene, a light meter may calculate a shutter speed of several seconds but, in fact, this will not be enough time; the film will be underexposed. This is reciprocity failure.
Returning from my assignment at Cloud Cap Inn, I developed my film only to realize that I had made one major mistake. The interiors being quite dark required long exposures. I knew about reciprocity failure and that my calculated eight or ten second exposures would need compensation but I failed to realize just how much. I applied about a fifty percent increase in time. It should have been around 300%. So all my negatives were underexposed by at least two or three stops.
The choice of chemistry, temperature, and time all affect film development and are useful tools in the darkroom. After developing the first negatives and realizing the problem, I was able to switch to a compensating developer (in this case Kodak Xtol) to help with the underexposure for the remaining negatives. One of the amazing things about silver halide film as an analog technology is its tolerance and ability to capture usable detail. My negatives appear ghostly transparent but, with a little effort, scans and prints show that there is detail contained in the shadows. These are no ideal pictures by any measure but, lucky for me, they still captured the scene. And I'm not likely to make the same mistake again.
This is me learning the hard way.