Layered

 

Tonight's post comes courtesy of my mate Steve, who pointed me in the direction of a nineteenth century photographic - I would say, pioneering - artist, of whose existence and work, I'm ashamed to say, I was hitherto totally unaware. One Henry Peach Robinson, born in Ludlow in Shropshire, and a founding member of the Birmingham Photographic Society. Obviously a photographer of a painterly sensibility, he sought to overcome the severe dynamic limitations of the chemical photographic processes then available to him by the ingenious use of multiple exposures of the same scene, each taken to expose for the different light levels throughout the subject he was trying to capture.

In the image shown, he achieved perfect exposure of all the layers of the subject from close to mid and out to the far distance, capturing shadow, mid-tone and highlight detail throughout the entire image; which, given the technological limitations of the day would have been impossible to capture on a single plate. By taking several negatives of the same scene at different exposures, he essentially collaged these together in the printing stage to achieve a dynamic range otherwise unachievable. The BBC article that Steve pointed me at rather naively and simply compared this to the ease of using Photoshop's layers to achieve this effect today, however, this rather short-circuits the real historical progress of the concept.

Long before Photoshop drew breath in the 1980s, and long before digital imaging itself was a thing, photographers across the world sought to overcome the dynamic limitations of the film medium by all manner of innovative means. In particular, in the mid-twentieth century, Minor White, Ansel Adams and the f64 group of photographers in the US developed a method of balancing light measurement, exposure and film development times - the Zone System - to extract the greatest dynamic range from each frame of film they exposed: the results speak for themselves. But Photoshop? Clever piece of software that it is - and we used to develop a plugin for it, a quarter of a century ago - pales in comparison to Mr. Robinson's methodology. The kicker is that my iPhone 16 Pro can achieve any and all of this within nanoseconds, but it still needs the input of a decent human eye to direct affairs...