Back to the Hudson River School

An old, even antique, lens shows me how to do it.

This is a follow-up to my first post on the idea of painterly photos. I’ve found a new tool to take the idea further. It’s called halation, and occurred sometimes with film that had a transparent backing. The flight would hit the film, and the bright areas would go through the emulsion and bounce off the back substrate of the film.

Since the light coming back has traveled a larger distance, it’s out of focus, and the net result is softer focus in brighter areas.

Halation can be added digitally as well, and that’s what I’ve done in the above photo. To my eye, this results in what I’ll call a painterly look—just what’s needed to take painterly photography to the next level for me.

I haven’t added a lot of halation; just enough to give the highly detailed areas a softer look. Painters often reduce detailed areas to softly textured to suggest the details without actually painting them. Halation somewhat does the same thing.

Detail of photo - WITH halation.

The cropped image above is modified by adding halation. Focus looks soft, and very fine details a blended together. This makes the sharpest details stand out a bit, and ‘relaxes’ the level of detail so that the background and out of focus elements are softer, more like how a skilled painter would render them.

Same detail, but without halation effect.

The cropped image above is from the original image, before halation was added. You can see that the lens (a rather vintage Mamiya 55mm f/3.5 from more than 50 years ago) is very sharp in the plane of focus (lower right; trunk is just slightly behind ideal focus but still sharp).

I’m not sure what the ideal level of halation is. A modest amount seems to do a very good job of smoothing the smallest details, and allowing the structure of the scene to become clearer. For now, that’s my opinion and I may or may not stick to it over time. ;)

In many ways this is just an ordinary creek in winter. But the results above show what a good camera lens can do: lend feeling to a scene. That feeling is what painters go for, and I’m excited to see that I can reach for the same things as a photographer. Though without all that time painting in the cold air, not a small advantage…

The above got me thinking about what halation might or might not do for a black and white photograph. Here’s the result:

It sort of ages the image, makes it look like it was taken a very long time ago. Which makes me wonder: how much of modern photographic improvements are, in fact ‘improvements’?