Bill Brandt - Britain's most successful black and white photographer. "I try to convey the atmosphere of my subject by intensifying the elements that compose it," says Bill Brandt, who for nearly half a century has been one of Britain's most inventive and successful black and white photographers. How well he has managed to achieve his aim through his deliberate control over both negative and black and white print can be seen in the darkly foreboding black and white photograph at right. One of a series that Brandt did to illustrate the architecture and landscape of Britain's literary past, this black and white picture has as its subject Haworth, where the Brontes lived. In 1945 it was nothing but a sheepfold and a plaything of the winter wind. To convey the atmosphere of the wild-Yorkshire moors that had inspired Emily Bronte to write Wuthering Heights, Brandt purposely chose to shoot his black and white picture on a dreary February day following a storm. The wind was blowing so hard that, to avoid the blurring of camera movement, he had to shoot at 1/100 second, even though his twin-lens reflex was mounted on a tripod. High-speed black and white film (Tri-X) made up for relatively brief exposure in dim light, and let him stop down the lens to a fairly small aperture, f/11, for the great depth of field he needed. Brandt printed his 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 negative on a glossy grade 4 paper so as to achieve sharply defined contrast. This gave deep blacks and brilliant whites to suggest the gloom and mystery Brandt was after. But such contrasty paper seldom registers delicate differences in tone; the black house could turn out as deep a shade as the dark clouds and disappear from the scene completely. To register the house, he carefully dodged the sky, keeping it light enough so that the bulk of the house is clearly defined, yet not so light as to dissipate the power of the storm clouds rushing over the snow-patched hillside. Such a delicate operation requires time; Brandt stopped his enlarger lens down to a small aperture, f/22, so that the black and white printing exposure became extraordinarily long-seven minutes-giving him plenty of time to dodge the clouds as much as was necessary.