Text ENG: Diffused light enlarger and condensed light enlarger
Hi everyone and welcome to this new video.
Today I want to show you the differences between a condenser enlarger, which is this one, and a diffuser enlarger, which is this other one, further away from me.
Specifically, these are the Leitz focomat 1C and the Leitz Focomat 1A.
What changes between the two?
Apparently they look like identical enlargers. But the difference is the way to spread the light.
What does it mean?
The condenser enlarger is the first type born in the history of photography, because, the history of photography begins with the simple emulsion of black and white… and only after, many many years later, we had the colour photography.
So this is the first difference, because black and white was the first need, condenser enlargers, are specific for black and white prints.
How do they work?
So a condenser enlarger inside has a condenser that works to condense the light itself, making as a result an hard light.
This characteristic helps us a lot in black and white photography, because black and white photos don’t have the colour information, and usually they do not replicate, a real condition, happened in reality… but in somehow, with the black and white we are ... abstracting ... the whole image from reality, to make it, please accept this vocabulary, kinda "poetic" in some way.
So let's imagine some examples: can be some geometric patterns, or an alternation of lights and shadows, or maybe even, let's imagine a nice portrait, but in black and white we are deleting the skin tone, the colour of the eyes, here let’s talk about the eyes for one second, removing the eye’s colour, we work only with the concept of how deep that look is, going to lose the idea of " oh, what blue eyes!" so the message to communicate changes and to realise something like this we need a strong difference of something, which is usually given by the contrast.
The best black and white photos are those ones that manage to reach the black point and the white point and then, in between this two points, put a huge range of greys.
Photos that contain only grey, therefore look very soft, somehow disturb us and we are not fully attracted by them.
So by condensing the light, what we do, is to be able to make the shadows and lights harder to easily reach black and white points.
In the diffused light instead ...
Diffuser enlarger, on the other hand, were born for colour prints and are the ones that instead of concentrate the light, they just go to spread it making it softer.
For example, thinking about a flash. If I use a flash without any other equipment, it will have a very harsh light, while if I use it with the diffuser in front of the light, the result is softer, my shadows are more delicate and the whole image appears, let’s say, more “innocent”.
What a diffuser enlarger does is just this.
So, because we in the colour photography, we work with the 3 layers of the colorur, which are cyan, magenta and yellow.
If we used a condenser enlarger we would have a result too strong, colours would be too vivid and we would completely loose that real tone that we want to entrust to our photos.
To get those very harmonic lights, no harmonica is
used in music, anyway those lights, very delicate,
we
need to have a different diffusion of
the light, more tenuous. softer and therefore, for this reason, another type of
light is used which is controlled by a different condenser inside which
precisely diffuses the light instead of condensate it.
This type of enlargers, however, can also be used for black and white photography, not just colour photography.
The only difference is that our photos will be softer and will lose a little that typical touch of black and white.
In any case, similar or even equal results can be achieved, only, we have to work harder to get the result of a condenser enlarger. It’s a process that requires a little more time, a little more attention, maybe a specific type of paper that is a little more contrasted by its nature, or maybe we are going to mix our developer in the container differently and therefore we make it slightly more energetic, or we work on throught agitations,
Shortly, there are different solutions by working with a diffuser enlarger to obtain a result even equal to a condenser enlarger, it is more tiring but it can be done.
So this is to tell you, that if you are looking for an enlarger, and you don't know which one to choose, also because you don't really know if start the colour process as well in the future, and you don't want to have many objects… because as you see, they occupy a significant space, you can easily work with a diffuser enlarger.
Buy this type, work with this type, and if in the future you want to try colour photography, he is already with you.
I hope the video has been helpful to you, that the information has been understandable.. and that's all.
See you in the next video.
Byee
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