Holiday greetings and best wishes for a Creative 2019.   This month’s Blog will be an ambitious attempt at weaving what I’ve learned about the creative mind and how it leads to another discovery in silver printing that I have never heard spoken about in a public forum.   

    As a young boy, I spent much of my childhood playing in and exploring the Rocky Hill Meadows, and those memories from 50 years ago have proven to be a valuable resource for my photography today.  I’ve passed this stand of trees scores of times looking for possible photographs but never really paid attention to this composition until the diagonals of tree branches appeared contrasted against the white snow, outlining their intriguing shapes.  In hindsight using the larger of my two cameras and a longer lens requiring a multi-second shutter speed to give adequate exposure simply did not record the falling snow, even in a streaking manner. Rocky Hill Trees in Snowstorm was made during heavy falling snow. I have long wanted to make a photograph with blurred snowflakes falling to create a sense of stormy winter New England conditions.   In that sense, the photograph was a failure; it was, however, a gamble that proved to have a silver lining.   Besides the heavily falling snow, what attracted me most to this scene were the numerous triangles the tree branches created in the composition.   Triangles and diagonals create a sense of tension and drama, by my count 5 or more triangles and diagonals everywhere lured me to subject my prized 7×17″ Phillips camera to endure 15 – 20 minutes in wet, snowy conditions.  

    I was eager to see the negative, so I wasted no time in processing the film.  Once the film was developed, it was clear that there would be no blurred snowflakes, yet the composition was still very intriguing.  In the first printing, it was apparent that the falling snow, while not visible had a distinct and adverse impact on the Mid-Tone contrast in the final print.  It was difficult to get any kind of contrast and rich detail in the foreground tree bark due to the white falling snow, while not visible on the film.  I systematically kept lowering the amount of green-colored light used in the printing process, see the following paragraph for an explanation on why.

    Modern-day Silver Gelatin “Multi-Contrast” printing papers now have a unique feature with three different emulsion protocols incorporated into a single emulsion coating. One emulsion responds primarily to green-colored light and affects a lower contrast band of grey tones, a second sensitized layer responds primarily to blue-colored light and affects the deep and dark contrast band of tonalities. The third sensitive layer serves to help ease the transition between the green and blue-sensitive layers and needs no further technical explanation here.  Generally speaking, my negatives are designed to require as little green-colored light as possible to reproduce the lightest of grey tones on the print. This, in turn, allows for more blue-colored light to be used thus enhancing the Mid-Tone relationships and contrast.  This intuitive understanding of these two differing emulsions respond to their respective colored light is clearly what lead to my discovery.   The green-colored light typically diminishes Mid-Tone separation and contrast. Modern multi-contrast type of light-sensitive silver paper provides a powerful tool for photographers to alter reality and depart from a literal rendering of the original scene.   Many casual observers of Black and White photographs may not be aware that, at least with my work, the final photograph as presented is, for the most part, a departure from reality in an effort to convey the emotional response I had at the time I decided to make the image.   Let me digress here for a moment and revert back to my original focus of this month’s Blog, unlocking the creative portion of our brain.   

     Several years ago I accepted an invitation to present a program to the Photo Arts Collective in New Haven, Connecticut.   For me, the film process and printing skills necessary in the Black and White genre of photography were not providing the challenges they once did, so I decided to go outside my comfort zone, which I’m told artists should do to mature and grow. I decided to present a program about the Mystery of the Creative Process.   I accepted the invitation around mid-March for a June 1 presentation and began to prepare for the 90-minute program. My general approach was to be centered around my area of expertise in Black & White film photography. Wet darkroom printing was becoming second nature and, therefore, easier for me to think outside the box so to speak, with regard to making B&W prints.  

    With only one week to go before my program on Creativity and its slideshow already in place, I hosted two gentlemen from New Jersey who came in for a private weekend workshop on film processing.   During our time together we spoke about my program on Creativity.   One of the students told me he was reading a book entitled The Net and the Butterfly and I should check it out.      

    His explanation of how the book mapped out the creative process and how it can be accessed was very interesting to me.  No sooner did the workshop end on Sunday and by sundown that night I had perused the internet to find out as much about the book as I could and ultimately ordered a copy for myself.  The reference to the Butterfly is its 4 wings, each one symbolic of the four different types of creative “Breakthroughs”, known as the Eureka, Metaphorical, Intuitive, and Paradigm breakthroughs, fascinating to say the least.  With only a few days left until my program for the New Haven PAC, I was determined to integrate the new information I’d gleaned from The Net and Butterfly into the main focus of my presentation on the Creative Mystery.   Without going into deep details, the book explains there are two “networks” in our brain, the Executive Network, which has charge of the day to day goal-oriented parts of everyday life, occupational skills, functioning at work and generally staying on task.  A second network, known as the Default Network and is a lesser accessed part of our brain. Nevertheless, we each have this brain function, just not as easily accessible for many.   This network is most accessible when we are doing mindless tasks, such as taking a shower, driving a car, or drifting off to sleep, actions that are simply second nature allowing the mind to drift into this Default Network.   The book goes onto sight scores of famous discoveries as a result of allowing the mind to drift into this Default Network, possibly the most relatable to this audience is a little-known story about Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones band.   Back in the mid-’60s the Stones were struggling and nearing a breakup, hold up in a cheap motel in Florida, famed guitar player Keith Richards had a habit of keeping a tape recorder at his bedside.  After a lost night of drinking Richards goes to bed, during the night he awakens, turns on the tape recorder and picks up his guitar, and plays three simple notes several times.    He wakes up the next day, having no memory of playing the guitar during the night, he turns the recorder on and hears the guitar riff of Can’t Get No Satisfaction, arguably the greatest guitar sequence ever written !!

    I share this story about the Default Network in each of our brains because I have experienced it with significant results twice in my photography career. The first I’d call a Eureka breakthrough with the discovery of a repeatable method of Minimal Agitation with modern-day thin emulsion films, and the second an Intuitive breakthrough because of this month’s Rocky Hill Trees in Snowstorm.   Very simply, the Black & White film and darkroom wet process have become so second nature to me that this first time attempting to print this month’s photograph I was not able to create satisfactory Mid-Tone contrast even when I lowered the Green colored light exposure down to only 1 second.   To be clear, the lack of Mid-Tone contrast in this particular photograph was due to the falling snow that cannot be seen in the print, nevertheless had an impact on the resulting contrast in the tree bark which I was now left to deal with if the image was to be successful in my mind.  

    To further explain my Intuitive breakthrough, there is a generation-old technique in darkroom printing to lower overall contrast known as Flashing whereby “non-image-forming light” is “flashed” onto the paper, but does not create a grey tone by itself. This technique simply brings the paper’s sensitivity right to the threshold of the first hint of grey tone.   I decided to eliminate the one-second exposure of green-colored light through the negative and instead to allow a tested and measured flashing time of green-colored light to fall on the paper in the hopes of creating the appropriate grey tone in the high values of the snow.   Viola, the high values reproduced with adequate and appropriate detail while the Mid-Tone contrast of the tree bark was noticeably enhanced.  Again, without getting too technical, understanding characteristics and how the Green sensitive emulsion worked allowed for an Intuitive breakthrough and problem solved the lack of Mid-Tone contrast in the tree bark.   Generally, flashing is a technique used to lower overall contrast and impart subtle detail in the lightest grey values in a Silver print.   When used in the context of eliminating or reducing the amount of green-colored light “projected” through the negative, this same flashing technique results in enhanced and higher Mid-Tone contrast !   In the world of black and white wet-processed silver printing, Mid-Tone contrast is easy to diminish but a much more difficult trait to maximize.

   As an aside, my presentation to the Photo Arts Collective drew a number of unexpected compliments, one in particular from a psychiatrist I’d never met before who said, great presentation, I’ve never heard the brain explained that way, Wow !!   With apologies for how many times I used the word um, here is the 55 minute Creative Mystery presentation, and a special thank you to the band Madison Rising for granting me permission to use their terrific version of the Star-Spangled Banner as the backdrop to my slideshow of images at the end of the PAC video.