"Martin Djernæs" wrote;

Ken Nadvornick:
What a great photo. The light is really soft and fits very well
to the black and white. If I have to find something to ask for,
then it would be a bit of detail in the shadow.

Hi Martin,

Thank you for both the compliment and the criticism.

Regarding the latter, you have echoed my original concern exactly. The
problem with the three shadow areas along the sidewalk was that only the
center one had any detail available in the negative. The outside two were
essentially blank. (Even with the Plus-X film rated one stop over at ASA
64.) This left me with a decision to make.

I could try to subtly dodge the center shadow in an attempt to open it up a
bit. But if I succeeded, in order to preserve a sense of reality, I would
also have had to equally dodge the other two. Doing so, however, would have
resulted in only blank gray patches in those areas. (I did try this and
that is, in fact, what happened.)

The second possibility was to let the three shadows naturally drop to their
near total black rendition. This I felt would help to key the other tones -
especially the nearby vertical, white "Retreading" sign - in the eyes of the
viewer. Since the overall area of each of these individual black shadows
was not especially large, this is what I decided to do.

In retrospect, a better solution might have been to open up the shadows
right on the original negative by using a bit of fill light. I did have in
my camera bag a GN 130 Vivitar 292 electronic flash unit which could have
done the job. I just didn't think at the time to use it. (Damn, I hate it
when that happens... grin) Utilizing the resulting additional detail,
back in the darkroom I could also have then conceivably created a contrast
mask to precision "dodge" the shadows. Unfortunately, although I have made
masks in the past with large format negatives, I have not tried them with
the much smaller 35mm negatives.

Ken