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Rangefinder
Magazine Hotel del Coronado Lobby by Lynn Radeka A few years after the completion of the book project, I found myself longing to return to these grand places to photograph them in black and white. Each hotel had it’s own particular character, not just on the obvious surface of the architecture but subtly woven into the details of wood grain, textures, forms and shadows.
In 1993, I arranged to photograph the Hotel del Coronado, located on Coronado Island near San Diego, California. This amazing and endearing hotel presented some extreme challenges, mostly due to the dark wood and low light level of some of the interiors, notably the Crown Room and the lobby. My basic approach to interior photography, particularly in black and white, is to use the existing light without any additional fill lights or specially placed strobes. I believe that this helps to preserve the actual character of the place, and also forces me to be more observant of subtle details and how they are revealed by the existing light. It is also far less intrusive. I don’t require any additional lights, cords, or other equipment. Using this “existing light” method has its drawbacks, however, in terms of photographic elements such as contrast and exposure. I adopted a procedure which has worked exceedingly well for photographing high contrast and dark interiors such as these. Basically, it requires giving the negative very full exposure to secure important shadow details, then reduced development to cut down the contrast and assure a printable, full range negative. During printing, I use a relatively normal contrast grade of paper followed by a Shadow Contrast Increase Mask (SCIM) to bring the entire image to life by deepening the black shadow accents without affecting the midtones and highlights. In this shot, the lobby is exceedingly dark, lit only by the chandelier and a few other wall and ceiling lights. The dark wood reflected very little light. I set up my 4x5 camera in the appropriate spot and metered the scene with a spot meter. I knew that I wanted a negative which recorded all the intricate wood detail, which was so essential to revealing the character of this remarkable place. I placed the broad dark shadowed wood values on or around zone 4 to maintain adequate detail, but found the highlights (bright lights in the chandelier) fell exceedingly high, nearly on zone 12! With normal development of the negative, the contrast would be far too high for most photographic papers to yield a good print. I knew that I needed to lower the contrast in the negative, so I gave the negative “Normal minus 3” development (essentially underdeveloping to achieve much lower contrast).
I used a 121mm Schneider Super-Angulon lens on my 4x5 Super Cambo view camera and the exposure was very long—about five minutes. Because of the very long exposure time, I was less concerned about people moving through the photograph during the exposure, hoping that they would be so blurred, that their presence would not be recorded on the photograph. The resulting negative, however, showed ghost-like images of moving people in a few locations, but I think this added to the mysterious quality of the image since the Hotel del is known to be haunted! I made an additional exposure, designed for Normal development as a means of comparison. The exposure was much shorter and it was easier to time it so that the shot was made when people were not walking through the scene. After developing the negatives in the darkroom, it was clear that the lower contrast negative (given more exposure and underdeveloped) was far superior. The full range of values was smoothly rendered and on close inspection I can even see slight detail in the bright chandelier lights. The other negative (which was given normal exposure and normal development) was extremely high in contrast, blocking out any semblance of detail in the highlights and showing little, if any, detail in the darker wood areas. I used the “Normal minus 3” negative for printing on a grade 2 fiber-base paper. A straight print of this was just right in the highlights and midtones, but lacked some richness in the deep shadow areas, giving the print a slightly flat appearance. Moving to a higher grade paper would make the highlight values too harsh. I decided to stay with grade 2 paper and use a SCIM mask exposure to bring life into the lower values. Only moderate burning and dodging was required. The result was beautiful. The highlights still showed slight detail and the dark values had ample contrast. The overall print had a rich, silvery quality, which I feel revealed the character of the wood very well. I now use this technique for all high-contrast interior photographs such as this. I have found that using T-Max 100 or Tri-X film, developed to lower contrast using the SLIMT process (selective latent image manipulation tech-nique—a simple process requiring a pre-bleach of the negative prior to development) yields an excellent full-detail negative. During printing, the use of a SCIM mask exposure to bring life to the shadows in images such as these has become commonplace for me. This same procedure
has worked well when photographing other challenging grand hotels, notably
the Arizona Biltmore and Denver’s Brown Palace.
In addition, it is well suited for high-contrast landscapes such as deep
forest scenes or harshly backlit subjects. A high contrast subject can
at times be a photographer’s most daunting nightmare, but I think
this approach affords a workable and simple solution with high quality
results.
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