Because I only have the one new picture to post, I'll take this opportunity to open up the vault and take out a bullion bar of insight. I use words like source, effects, and masks as ways of organizing my own mind, but for anyone who doesn't know what I mean, here's what I mean... More when we get back from the break.
I've been told that my negatives were as much works of art as anything else. I would agree, they take as much time and work as any other element that goes into making one of my images. Making them are probably the most intimate part of my process, my face is usually buried in a light table surrounded with art supplies and tiny brushes. Here are the negatives that went into the production of this image.
Above is what I would call a "source" negative. A source is typically a negative that was exposed in a camera and usually sports a recognizable person, place, or thing. I usually apply a myriad of materials to change the original look of the source to something more my style. On this source I used a fracturing goo that left those cool cracks in the final product.
When looking at a source I have to keep in mind the different zones ranging from transparent to opaque. When inverted the transparent zones will become solid black, and the opaque zones will become solid white, and everything in between will become a respective gray. This is important because I usually will be mixing another negative with this one, so I will be adding light. On photo paper you can't get darker than black, so transparent zones can't be added. Gray zones can, and opaque zones are the same as adding zero.
This is an example of what I call an "effects" layer, or texture layer. I usually make these myself on blank film or film with very thin exposures. For this one I took a soldering iron to it to melt and bubble it, then I went over it with ink to contrast the burns even further. When using heated tools like irons and lighters there's a strong chance of putting a hole in the negative, a hole is obviously transparent which leaves black holes on the final image. This can be cool, but they can quickly take over an image and it's hard to undo a hole. But it is a great way to get cool textures such as tiny bubbles, random ranges in opacity, and interesting shapes.
When both these negatives are added together onto one sheet of photo paper, all the grays will mix and result in hopefully a pleasing, somewhat random final image.
However if I were to combine these two negatives as is, it would more than likely result in a mess. It might be cool, abstract or whatever, but I would like to preserve some of the original source image while at the same time surrounding the source with the effects. To do this I make a "mask".
This is the layer mask for this image. This isn't a third negative, this is stacked on top of the effects layer to block some of the light that will be going through the enlarger during the printing process. Like I said anything opaque is adding zero, so wherever I mask off will not hit the photo paper letting the source image expose to the paper unmixed. So for this image I made a mask in the same shape of the figure using opaque acrylic paint, the clear plastic around the mask will let the effects continue to the paper as normal.
The end result is the figure is exposed onto the page as normal, and the area around the figure is exposed twice, from the source and the effects. This not only gets that random mixture of light, it also darkens the area around the figure leaving the figure light and ghostly.
That's pretty much a rudimentary breakdown of what I do. This is an older picture and my masking and effect building techniques have become a bit more refined, but hopefully that helps anyone who might have been interested or just lost on the made up terminology.