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A guide to "Capturing Motion" in low light situations

FroFilmProjct Yes there was such a thing as FILTERS in the Darkroom

If you have never stepped foot into a darkroom you may not have known that FILTERS were actually used. These are not the same filters that you put over your lens, these were called Contrast Filters and they went in the enlarger.

Lets look at what the filters did. Filters came in different numbers, my set of filters went from 00 to 5. The lower the number the more flat and grey and image would be, the higher the number the more contrasty it would be. I LOVED CONTRAST in my prints so I would generally start with a 3 1/2 filter and work from there. Think of this as if you were sliding the contrast filter higher in lightroom to make your images go boom.

The light from the enlarger would be filtered by these filters (or gel filters as some people have called them) and they would then expose the photo paper with that light.

I can recall one of the assignments in school was to test out every filter in the pack so that we could see exactly what each one did. The best was I learned was to see how flat the lower numbers were in comparison to the higher ones.

All I can say is I loved being in the black and white darkroom making my images go BOOM.

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