Photos

This is a repost of an older image that was digitized through photographing a print. This one has been scanned from the original negative. - La Citadelle, near Cap Haitien is a fortress built by Emperor Henri Christophe of Haiti, to face an attack of the French, after they had successfully separated themselves from the French motherland and become an independent Republic.
However, the attack never came, and the rusting pyramids of cannon balls are still untouched. The castle rises up in the middle of a dense jungle, filled with parrot screams. Around the castle the air was foggy and damp.
The image was taken with a 60mm x 60mm twin lens camera and a 55mm wide angle lens. The enlargement was done on special lithographic photo-paper with an extreme high gamma curve (a gamma of 8). To achieve mid-tones and highlights, the paper was pre-exposed an exact amount of time (very critical) determined by testing. The balance of main and pre-exposure is most important. With this technique the darker mid tones get reduced, and the shadows achieve stark graphic effect, in a sense a kind of posterisation. - Nowadays this can be achieved and even more controlled with Photoshop (the Shadow/Highlight control under the image adjustment menu).