Hand Colouring
Back in the old days … before digital photography, before Photoshop … let’s say 2002 for this photographer, I retouched images using ink. Blemishes needed to be taken care of on the negative, dust spots were looked after on the print. Inks can only make something darker – you can’t subtract color or density from film or paper (unless you scratch the emulsion off) you can only add to it. So to fix blemishes, dark circles under eyes and wrinkles, I would apply dyes using a brush with only a few bristles to the negative to lighten the problem area and then go back over that area on the print to finish off. Using this method retouching a single image could take as long as a couple of hours – something that I now do in Photoshop in a few minutes.
I also used inks for saturating color or changing color on the final printed image, also something now accomplished in Photoshop in a fraction of the time. However, now that the novelty of digitally altered images has almost worn off – both for me and the population at large I think – I find a certain … charm … to images colored with ink on prints that can’t be accurately mimicked using digital methods. I find this to be true about a few other photographic effects as well. Film is film, and digital is digital. Perhaps the difference between the digital emulation and the real thing isn’t overly apparent to the average person and so ultimately my preference for one over the other is just a conceit … but it’s a conceit I will enjoy never-the-less.
In my last post I showcased some classic lingerie using the selective focus effects of the 4×5 camera to help create a vintage feel to the photos. My original plans for this shoot included having Liz hand color the photos, to deepen the vintage feel, using ink to color the photos in a way similar to the way photos were colored before color photography was in the main stream. The photo below is a black and white photo of my brother and I hand colored by the photographer. There are multiple copies of this photo in our family and they are almost indistinguishable from each other with respect to the coloring – quite a feat in my estimation.
My intent for the photos of the lingerie was something a little looser – a little more impressionistic, or perhaps because we are talking about photography I should say pictorial. Liz had a great time trying out the ink on different papers using different dilutions to find a combination that gave the result we were after, however in the end we decided that, for the photos for this shoot, coloring wasn’t the right look. Charlotte, Liz and I all felt that the coloring stole from the fashion feel of the story and made the photos look a too … portrait-y … artsy … ? We weren’t feelin’ it. However, the idea hasn’t been shelved, so at some point in the future hand colored photos of something will appear here!
