LOL Peter... that brings back memories for me too... although I guess the sweet babe must have been the wife in my case :) I could never get the kitchen dark enough for use during daylight hours, so mine were usually all night sessions. Doing 20"x16" enlargements was a real pain... had to use one of those microsope things while kneeling on the floor and of course you couldn't reach the focus knob on the enlarger from there :)

For Bsteph and anyone else who is interested. I worked in Photoshop and started by duplicating the layer (working in RGB mode). I inverted the second layer and combined the two using the hard light option. From then on I just played around with the colour balance, contrast etc. of the original layer :) I've included the original scan in this post. If anyone else wants to play around with it please feel free to do so, I'd love to see what others come up with and I have a folder full of negatives of similar quality :)

When I was an active photo club memeber, about 15 years ago now, this sort of thing was very popular, but also very difficult to do in the amateaur darkroom because of registration problems. Now Photoshop has made it so much easier, it seems to have gone out of fashion :)

Sorry, but I seem to be having a lot to say at the moment, so I hope I'm not coming across as being too 'pushy'. I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome about 6 years ago and haven't done much photography for a while now, it just feels good to be doing some again :)

Syyd, thanks for the warm welcome, despite your cold weather problems. Hope it clears for you soon and in answer to your question... I live in Derby. Take care, Mike

Joe, the original shot was taken about 10 years ago now at a photographic club studio session, using a couple of models we coaxed in off the street :) If you know what those sessions are like... you don't get much chance to play around with the lighting. The film would be Ilford FP4 with standard home processing in Ilford chemicals.

I've attached a crop from the staright scan I used for the image. The main thing I wanted to do in PS, apart from sharpening it up, was to darken the upper corner areas. To do this I added two extra layers. I used the linear gradient tool to produce gradients from black to transparent, running from each corner towards the centre. I then used the 'dodging' tool to clean out the gradients where they ran into the models. I did this pretty hurriedly, which caused the 'halo' effect. I would guess there are ways to do it more carefully, but I'm on the bottom of the learning curve for PS :) I used Gaussian blur to soften the edges of the gradients and Gassian noise to simulate the film grain in them ..... LOL ..well you did ask :)

No problem about buggin' me... hope the reply makes sense... let me know if it doesn't.

take care,

Mike