Solarizations
by William Lulow
Note: I published an article on this topic back in May of this year, but I recently came across these images of a seated nude that I shot very early in my career and wanted to see how this technique could be applied to them. I was delighted by the way they turned out. In this case, the digital version was even better than the original, chemical ones.
Once you’ve got your technique for making regular images down pat, you can then begin to experiment with the many things that the various techniques in photography allow you to achieve. One of those image styles that I have been experimenting with for years has been the “solarization.” Now in the days of the darkroom and chemical processing of film, a solarization could be achieved by flashing a white light, very briefly, during the development of the image either in the negative or print stage, and then continue the processing normally until the print was fixed so that it was no longer affected by light. The “fixer” normally consisted of a solution of hypothiosulfate and water. This chemical, not only made the image impervious to light, but it also bleached it a little while doing so. The effects could be controlled sometimes by the length of the light exposure or by the freshness of the “hypo.” The exposure had to be very brief though or else the whole image would just be black. What happened was that some of the grains of silver which produced the image in the first place tended to migrate toward the highlights of the negative or print. This created a kind of heavy line, usually of the opposite tonality. That is, if the highlight was pure white, it might go dead black. Any tone in between, would be rendered a different tone of gray and sometimes certain portions of the image would contain both positive and negative parts of the image. This made for an intriguing image to look at, at once, not a negative nor a positive, but something in between. It was often hard to predict what would happen unless the flash of light was always constant. Since we always did this manually, this was difficult to control. I can remember making many attempts to get the amount of solarization just right.
Fast forward to the late 1980s and the makers of Adobe Photoshop as well as other software manufacturers, found a way to imitate the process digitally with the filter process. So, today, they have a filter called “solarize” that transforms the image into a positive/negative one, just like that. Here’s an example:
This is the original image shot in the studio on a black background. The tones are a bit contrasty, but that is one of the things that makes for good solarizations because there are plenty of highlights to use. So, this image was made from a scan of the original negative and therefore, I was able to increase the contrast even more. Here is the digital “solarization:”
Photoshop has reproduced the effect almost better than the darkroom version used to. With the digital one, you can vary the contrast as well as the effect itself and you can also adjust the brightness of the scene, something it was hard to do in the print tray. You often had to make multiple prints before you arrived at one you really liked. Here, you can see it directly on your screen and determine what you think it needs. You can tell that this is a digital image because of the precise placement of the highlights. Digital images are far more predictable, especially if you are doing black and white solarizations.
Color solarizations are very different because it is far more difficult to predict what the colors will be. Here’s an example:
This is the original.
Sometimes blue skies turn red, other times they turn green. You can vary the colors somewhat in the post-processing stage and you can fine tune them to the tones you wish. Another example:
There are many other filters in Photoshop as well. I will leave this discussion with one further example. This one is a 3D “bas relief” effect:
There is virtually no end to the kinds of effects you can achieve digitally. One thing I have noticed in making these images is that when you are dealing with black & white digital images you often have to bump up the contrast slightly and maybe even lighten the highlights to get acceptable images. It’s great to experiment once you know how to achieve a good original.
If you are interested in more information about this technique, leave an email. I have a large collection of these on the website and others for sale. https://www.williamlulow.com/solarizations
