Irving Penn is simply fantastic! Please tell me anything you may know about the techniques he used to make his black and white images. In particular, how did he do his lighting (was it natural)? What films, developers, and papers does he use. Thanks.

-- Rob Gertler (gertler.r@ghc.org), November 28, 2001

Answers

Broad-source soft lighting, either from large natural skylights (sometimes using a specially designed tent on location) or large strobe softboxes in the permanent studio. Massive exposure, full development, enlargements on normal papers resulting in high contrast prints. Quite a lot of his fine-art work is printed in platinum from enlarged negative

-- Carl Weese (cweese@earthlink.net), November 28, 2001.