![]() ![]() So I wanted to push the half that was shot by firelight. A TriX 400 film could be pushed to 1200 ASA with the developing technique. Pushing is a special development technique where we use special developer and higher temperatures so we can get more sensitivity out of the film. Anyway the roll of film in the camera was half exposed already and I wanted to push the firelight pictures to the max. I tried taking some pictures by firelight once as an experiment. You keep repeating until the dust spot disappears. So the technique is to dab it on and leave it sit a moment and then wipe off the excess. Also the longer you leave a drop on a spot the darker it becomes. You can't just put water on it and wipe it off if you get to much on a spot. Once it is applied to a print it becomes a part of the print. We all thought that was pretty strange but apparently it isn't toxic. ![]() I had a professor who used to just lick his brush until it got to the shade he wanted. One of my bottles had dried up while sitting in the desk and I just added water to it and after some shaking it was good as new. Since it is a water base dye if it dries out all you have to do is add some water. Just dip the brush in the little bit in the cap. I often just used the cap of the spot tone bottle to get enough dye. It takes a surprisingly small amount of spotter to do a print. So you end up with a series of drops each lighter than the other. The normal way to do that is to have a small amount of water in something like a bottle cap and then just dip the brush in it and try it on an old piece of photo paper to check the shade. To get lighter shades you thin it down with water. There is only one shade of each color of spot tone. I checked on line and Spot tone is still available and is still pretty reasonable in price. If you did color prints spotting was a whole different process with multiple dyes. There are several colors of it, an olive one for doing sepia toned prints, a blue black one for blue colored prints and a black one for regular black and white. When you make a mistake your print is ruined as there is no way to undo the dye process so practice until you can do it correctly if you want to try it. I used to save a lot of the "mistakes" that I printed partly so I could practice spotting. If you try it, don't start out with a good print. But it does take a lot of practice to learn how to do it correctly. The brushes and the spot tone are pretty cheap. If you want to do film work today spotting is something you should know about. I went back into my storage boxes and dug out some of my examples of spotting and also pulled out my old SpoTone and brushes so I could show you how it is done. If you turned in a print for a grade that was not spotted the best grade you could expect for it would be a C. The college photography classes that I took years ago required all prints to be spotted. We used special anti static brushes to try and help with the problem but in the end most pictures had to be spotted to remove those specks that got through. Static in the film causes every bit of dust in the air to stick to it and when you print it all those little dust specks show up on the print. With film dust was and still is a real problem. Now it is easy to digitally retouch a picture and with digital mediums you don't even have the problem of dust anymore. ![]() Good retouching was an art in itself in the past but now it is something people have not even heard of. ![]() Before we had digital retouching if there was a flaw or dust spot in a picture the way to fix it was with a brush and spot tone dye. ![]()
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