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Selected Negative Carefully: One obviously excellent use for Flexichrome is in the production of expensive color portraits. The Flexichrome process has the advantage that it permits the photographer to make a number of black and white exposures in the ordinary manner and at the ordinary film cost, then have the selected negative carefully retouched before the print is made, resulting in a much more flattering picture than a straight portrait shot on regular color transparency film. Ordinarily, color retouching by any of the other processes can be done only by an expert and at great cost.
An extraordinary series of photographs of Victor Hugo living in exile on the island of Jersey were taken in 1853-54 by his son Charles and his friend the poet Auguste Vacquerie. An eerie romanticism pervades these pictures; details seem selected for their symbolism: Hugo's favorite rocks or his resting place under the flowering vines of the conservatory. A series of just hands—Hugo's and his wife's—was made; a novel idea in photography, it was a portent of the close-up. Hugo was greatly interested in these photographs, and even made a drawing based on the negative of a gnarled and twisted barnacle-clad breakwater—an astonishingly early recognition of the beauty of the tone reversal of a negative image.
This method will give you, contrary to a widely held belief, exactly the same perspective which you would have gained with a longer lens which covered the full negative with the same area you selected for enlargement. It is viewpoint, not the choice of lens, which determines the character of perspective. |
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