Causes, not effects

On a real set nobody writes “make the freckles stronger”. They write down what is there and what was done: the camera, the lens, the light, the film, the chemistry, the paper. The look of the picture is a consequence of those facts.

The model learned from photographs in which those facts and their results always appear together. Give it the causes and it rebuilds the result coherently. Give it the effects and it paints them on the surface of the image, literally.

The orthochromatic test

Orthochromatic film does not see red, so lips and freckles render darker than in life. We asked for the film and also described the effect: lips almost black, freckles strongly accentuated. The model drew black lipstick and dark spots on the skin.

When we removed the description of the effect and kept only the film and the setup, the lips and freckles darkened slightly and naturally, the way they would on a real sheet of film.

The same thing happened with “print edges burned darker”: the model added a round digital vignette, like a phone filter. One bare bulb in a dim room produced the dark edges without being asked, because that is what one bare bulb does.

The prompt

Partly tested, aspect ratio 4:5. An earlier version gave the right tonal effect but drew the film border and the brand name; this one uses a plain film description and a full-print instruction to prevent that.

Photograph a head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman with freckles,
dark hair pulled back in a low bun, wearing a plain dark knit
sweater, standing in a glass-roofed daylight studio before a grey
painted canvas backdrop that fills the frame from edge to edge. The
camera stands at eye level about two metres away. The picture is
made on a 4x5 wooden view camera with a 210mm lens at f/8, lit only
by soft overcast daylight falling through the glass roof from above
and slightly to the left, on orthochromatic sheet film developed in
ID-11, enlarged onto fibre-based paper and selenium toned, the image
filling the whole print.

The rule

Every sentence in a prompt is one of three kinds. The brief says what kind of picture this is. Set facts say what is in front of the camera and what was used. Effects say how the result should look. Keep the first two and leave the third out.

One line sits close to that boundary. Describing the subject’s real features is a set fact: a woman with freckles. Describing how the process should exaggerate them is an effect: every freckle strongly accentuated.