COMBINATION PRINTING
In the early days of photography the material of the time was not sensitive to red; it was highly sensitive to blue, and therefore blue sky was rendered in a very light tone. Most of the photographs taken in the 40s and 50s were usually of foreground landcapes with blank skies - very little detail (if any) in the sky. Roger Fenton, an architectural and landscape photographer and one of the fine photographers of this period, did a lot of experimental work on this. The solution he adopted was to make negatives a little thin in the foreground and then to over-expose when making the prints. This however was not an ideal solution, and it was the problem of this attempt to record sky that led photographers to probably one of the most interesting early concepts in photography which we now call "combination printing."
Combination Printing is the term given to the technique of making pictures from
more than one negative or print. It can take various forms:
- printing two or more negatives, one after the other, on the
sheet of paper;
- superimposing two negatives, printing them both together;
- cutting out parts of a number of prints, and arranging, perhaps
pasting them on card or photographed background, and then photographing
the finished result (montage).
Hippolyte Bayard
was the first to suggest that separate negatives of clouds be
used to print in the skies.
However, others, particularly William Lake Price,
began to explore the idea of using combination printing to produce
compositions. The most famous of the early combination prints
is "The two ways of life", by Rejlander,
who masked all areas of the photograph other than the area being
printed. Rather different is the technique by Henry Peach Robinson,
who made photomontages; his classic example is "Fading Away."
© Robert Leggat, 1999.
