[Nuno Almeida]

Those are not high contrast situations, altough I sometimes (a lot of times) like the dark mood, I usually meter the shadow area, in high contrast situations, if I want to preserve both, I try to find a balance, has I started with digital and with the excelente shadow recovery capacity of the Pentax system, this goes a little bit against nature, and I have no doubt sometimes I screw up, but not on a complete roll.
The biggest culprit is found... it's me... the "scanning" process.
I avoid PP when working with film, I'm not against PP, I use it loads on digital, but it's not what I'm looking for when shooting analogue, and so I try to correct has little has possible.

I'm not bulk loading but the film is bulk loaded, it's the first one were that appears, so no big problem, and I like the film, prefer it over HP5 to be honest.

The last one I HDR before that, just normal, this one PS, I'm experimenting stuff has I go, and agree, normal is more then enough, the range on the k1 is plenty, even if needed some heavy lifting.

---------- Post added 05-19-17 at 08:44 PM ----------

Probably was on the loading process, if it was on the camera I would have seen it in other roll, and even this roll, that was just a few sections, not the complete lenght.

Need to send my Spottie to CLA and fix, it's such a clean model, not one scratch on the outside, perfect timings, but the irregularity of the meter is becoming annoying, and just received a Chinon CE Memotron a few hours ago, anyone knows about a good place to repair in Europe?

[Heebie]

Is it possible that you're using an internal light meter, and either the battery voltage is incorrect, or the battery dying?
I know on my Canon Pellix QL (1965 vintage) the light meter is designed to use a 1.3v mercury battery. Most batteries available for it are 1.5v, and that throws the light meter off by about two stops. (originally used a PX625 battery, now can generally only get 625A batteries.. there is a company that makes a 1.3v, but I can't find anyone to ship it to Ireland, sadly!)

There are definitely some bad light strikes through the sprockets. In one of the images there, you can clearly see the outline of a sprocket from another wind of the film exposed onto the film. The black pattern along the edge near it also suggests a significant, but small, light leak in something used with the film.

I had a problem like this with one darkroom setup I had. I turned out to be me being slightly careless about handling reels in a completely dark room.. because it wasn't completely dark. There was a power strip with a weak pilot lamp under the desk, so if I didn't look down, I couldn't really see it was there, but if my film was low enough, that wee bit of light would cause those sprocket patterns and burns along the edges. I was very glad only my own stuff was affected! I've always used a dark bag for loading film spools since! Naughty, naughty, lazy me got burnt!

[Xmas]

Is it possible that you're using an internal light meter, and either the battery voltage is incorrect, or the battery dying?
I know on my Canon Pellix QL (1965 vintage) the light meter is designed to use a 1.3v mercury battery. Most batteries available for it are 1.5v, and that throws the light meter off by about two stops. (originally used a PX625 battery, now can generally only get 625A batteries.. there is a company that makes a 1.3v, but I can't find anyone to ship it to Ireland, sadly!)

There are definitely some bad light strikes through the sprockets. In one of the images there, you can clearly see the outline of a sprocket from another wind of the film exposed onto the film. The black pattern along the edge near it also suggests a significant, but small, light leak in something used with the film.

I had a problem like this with one darkroom setup I had. I turned out to be me being slightly careless about handling reels in a completely dark room.. because it wasn't completely dark. There was a power strip with a weak pilot lamp under the desk, so if I didn't look down, I couldn't really see it was there, but if my film was low enough, that wee bit of light would cause those sprocket patterns and burns along the edges. I was very glad only my own stuff was affected! I've always used a dark bag for loading film spools since! Naughty, naughty, lazy me got burnt!

I use plumbers rubber o ring and hearing aid battery in OM1s about 4 months life in your temperatures most chemists and cheap google for correct size or pm me...

---------- Post added 05-20-17 at 05:59 AM ----------

Those are not high contrast situations, altough I sometimes (a lot of times) like the dark mood, I usually meter the shadow area, in high contrast situations, if I want to preserve both, I try to find a balance, has I started with digital and with the excelente shadow recovery capacity of the Pentax system, this goes a little bit against nature, and I have no doubt sometimes I screw up, but not on a complete roll.
The biggest culprit is found... it's me... the "scanning" process.
I avoid PP when working with film, I'm not against PP, I use it loads on digital, but it's not what I'm looking for when shooting analogue, and so I try to correct has little has possible.

I'm not bulk loading but the film is bulk loaded, it's the first one were that appears, so no big problem, and I like the film, prefer it over HP5 to be honest.

The last one I HDR before that, just normal, this one PS, I'm experimenting stuff has I go, and agree, normal is more then enough, the range on the k1 is plenty, even if needed some heavy lifting.

---------- Post added 05-19-17 at 08:44 PM ----------

Probably was on the loading process, if it was on the camera I would have seen it in other roll, and even this roll, that was just a few sections, not the complete lenght.

Need to send my Spottie to CLA and fix, it's such a clean model, not one scratch on the outside, perfect timings, but the irregularity of the meter is becoming annoying, and just received a Chinon CE Memotron a few hours ago, anyone knows about a good place to repair in Europe?

Normally you expose for shadow and develops for contrast Trix and HP5 and wet printing cope well with full range though a scanner won't!

Zone system Zone System - Wikipedia

I use a Weston master cause it is calibrated for zone system and I don't need to remember anything but point the meter at the shadow area I want for zone 1!

Note your spottie does not need 1.3v just a fresh silver cell for 1/3 stop accuracy!

[Nuno Almeida]

Is it possible that you're using an internal light meter, and either the battery voltage is incorrect, or the battery dying?
I know on my Canon Pellix QL (1965 vintage) the light meter is designed to use a 1.3v mercury battery. Most batteries available for it are 1.5v, and that throws the light meter off by about two stops. (originally used a PX625 battery, now can generally only get 625A batteries.. there is a company that makes a 1.3v, but I can't find anyone to ship it to Ireland, sadly!)

There are definitely some bad light strikes through the sprockets. In one of the images there, you can clearly see the outline of a sprocket from another wind of the film exposed onto the film. The black pattern along the edge near it also suggests a significant, but small, light leak in something used with the film.

I had a problem like this with one darkroom setup I had. I turned out to be me being slightly careless about handling reels in a completely dark room.. because it wasn't completely dark. There was a power strip with a weak pilot lamp under the desk, so if I didn't look down, I couldn't really see it was there, but if my film was low enough, that wee bit of light would cause those sprocket patterns and burns along the edges. I was very glad only my own stuff was affected! I've always used a dark bag for loading film spools since! Naughty, naughty, lazy me got burnt!

The Spotie F has a balanced circuit, small variations in tension shouldn't affect it, the problem with my isn't constant, it's more notorious when using the stopdown slider though, sometimes in full day light with the lens wide open at 1sec the needle goes all the way down, sometimes the exact opposite, sometimes erratic behaviour, the needle trembles, the most dangerous pattern I found was the needle stuck at middle, if the settings are clearly wrong I find it, problem is when settings are approached, usually when this happens a little bit of pushing buttons, moving things, brings it back to life, and I can see it is correct because the needle follows with a soft movement me changing shutter speed, and those times it is correct, tested. Well I bought it cheap has meter not​ working at all, so can't complain, need to find a good tecnich preferably on my country.

The light streaks are probably from the cassette loading on the store, it's the third roll that goes trough the camera and the first one it shows that, although I don't discard the revealing process, I use a bag, that I don't trust, so to minimise any chance I do it in the bathroom, it has some small light leak's, well, can be, but again, same process same conditions I used before with no light streaks.

---------- Post added 05-20-17 at 12:02 PM ----------

I use plumbers rubber o ring and hearing aid battery in OM1s about 4 months life in your temperatures most chemists and cheap google for correct size or pm me...

---------- Post added 05-20-17 at 05:59 AM ----------



Normally you expose for shadow and develops for contrast Trix and HP5 and wet printing cope well with full range though a scanner won't!

Zone system Zone System - Wikipedia

I use a Weston master cause it is calibrated for zone system and I don't need to remember anything but point the meter at the shadow area I want for zone 1!

Note your spottie does not need 1.3v just a fresh silver cell for 1/3 stop accuracy!

I am aware of the zone system, but I still lack a enough understanding of it, something I hope to improve has I go along.

[pathdoc]

The Zone system becomes easier to understand when you grasp that

1) Each of Ansel Adams's zones is one stop apart, with total black in zone 0, and zone X being absolutely white (in actuality, the same white as the paper you're wet-printing on; film can actually record more).

2) Generally speaking, your camera's meter wants to make whatever it's looking at zone V ("middle grey", 18% grey).

These two things are the things which completely demystified the zone system for me.

At the extremes, this means that if you're in the Greek islands where you have all those whitewashed buildings with the summer sun blasting the walls to blazing white, that's zone VIII or even zone IX, and if you trust the meter in your camera you will be underexposing that wall by three or four stops. If you are taking a picture of Darth Vader (or someone dressed as him at Halloween), his cloak and armour are zone II or III, and trusting your camera's meter for a close-up will produce a two or three stop OVER-exposure.

The full zone system was developed in line with large-format cameras, where every shot was a negative you handled individually and could process, push or pull to taste - like digital in many ways, but a lot slower to set up. It is not as applicable to roll film, but it was and remains a very good way for B&W photographers not to be led astray by the peculiarities of reflective metering - as built into all TTL-metering SLRs and many handheld light meters. (Matrix metering does a better job of trying to average everything out than do centre-weight or spot systems, but ultimately is dependent on the number of matrix zones in the frame and the perceptiveness and skill of the people designing the algorithms/circuitry.)

[Xmas]

The Zone system becomes easier to understand when you grasp that

1) Each of Ansel Adams's zones is one stop apart, with total black in zone 0, and zone X being absolutely white (in actuality, the same white as the paper you're wet-printing on; film can actually record more).

2) Generally speaking, your camera's meter wants to make whatever it's looking at zone V ("middle grey", 18% grey).

These two things are the things which completely demystified the zone system for me.

At the extremes, this means that if you're in the Greek islands where you have all those whitewashed buildings with the summer sun blasting the walls to blazing white, that's zone VIII or even zone IX, and if you trust the meter in your camera you will be underexposing that wall by three or four stops. If you are taking a picture of Darth Vader (or someone dressed as him at Halloween), his cloak and armour are zone II or III, and trusting your camera's meter for a close-up will produce a two or three stop OVER-exposure.

The full zone system was developed in line with large-format cameras, where every shot was a negative you handled individually and could process, push or pull to taste - like digital in many ways, but a lot slower to set up. It is not as applicable to roll film, but it was and remains a very good way for B&W photographers not to be led astray by the peculiarities of reflective metering - as built into all TTL-metering SLRs and many handheld light meters. (Matrix metering does a better job of trying to average everything out than do centre-weight or spot systems, but ultimately is dependent on the number of matrix zones in the frame and the perceptiveness and skill of the people designing the algorithms/circuitry.)

Simpler to get a Weston and meter zone1 as 'U' but you need to set EI at stop slower than film ISO!
Nothing to remember in field.

[Nuno Almeida]

The Zone system becomes easier to understand when you grasp that

1) Each of Ansel Adams's zones is one stop apart, with total black in zone 0, and zone X being absolutely white (in actuality, the same white as the paper you're wet-printing on; film can actually record more).

2) Generally speaking, your camera's meter wants to make whatever it's looking at zone V ("middle grey", 18% grey).

These two things are the things which completely demystified the zone system for me.

At the extremes, this means that if you're in the Greek islands where you have all those whitewashed buildings with the summer sun blasting the walls to blazing white, that's zone VIII or even zone IX, and if you trust the meter in your camera you will be underexposing that wall by three or four stops. If you are taking a picture of Darth Vader (or someone dressed as him at Halloween), his cloak and armour are zone II or III, and trusting your camera's meter for a close-up will produce a two or three stop OVER-exposure.

The full zone system was developed in line with large-format cameras, where every shot was a negative you handled individually and could process, push or pull to taste - like digital in many ways, but a lot slower to set up. It is not as applicable to roll film, but it was and remains a very good way for B&W photographers not to be led astray by the peculiarities of reflective metering - as built into all TTL-metering SLRs and many handheld light meters. (Matrix metering does a better job of trying to average everything out than do centre-weight or spot systems, but ultimately is dependent on the number of matrix zones in the frame and the perceptiveness and skill of the people designing the algorithms/circuitry.)

Thank you, and great explication, helped a lot making sense of it.

Had another run, with that roll, changed a few things and payed more attention, most of them are almost fine straight, it does have a good bit less contrast at 200 then at 400.

[imagesfromobjects]

Difficult to answer because there are so many variables to consider. Your negatives look fine and the jpegs look just a tad dark, but the details are there across the gamut. The many variables you are working with - film iso, spotmatic metering, home developing, scanning using a digital camera with its own needed exposure/dr tweaks... make anything impossible to isolate as an issue. To my eye, your stuff looks 95% there, but if anything I'd wager on the issue being on the scanning side - negs look great.

---------- Post added 05-21-17 at 10:45 AM ----------

edit - I'm new to the forum, so didn't see the last few responses prior to posting that, so apologies for redundancy. The only suggestion I have at this point would be to get a more reliable meter - these days I'm mostly using an app called Lightmeter in conjunction with wonky cameras, which is a lifesaver!

[pathdoc]

Just to add a couple of details here that I made note of in another thread, I was doing some negative scanning experiments with constant illumination last night, and I found that for most negatives I cared to pull at random from the last year (various cameras and films, both Ilford and Kodak chemistry), using aperture priority with f8 and +2EV, B&W and colour inversion filters gave me a pretty good monochrome pic SOOC most times (K-1). They still had to have the excess framing cropped and the rotation cleaned up a little, but it's no hassle to run through all 24 or 36 heavily downsized, look at them quickly as if they were a proof sheet, note where EV changes might improve the SOOC exposure and contrast, and then go back and scan the best/chosen ones at high-res for photoshop work/turning into prints. For social media and smaller prints, the in-camera processing and a mild crop in even the simplest editing freeware might be all you need.

[Nuno Almeida]

Just to add a couple of details here that I made note of in another thread, I was doing some negative scanning experiments with constant illumination last night, and I found that for most negatives I cared to pull at random from the last year (various cameras and films, both Ilford and Kodak chemistry), using aperture priority with f8 and +2EV, B&W and colour inversion filters gave me a pretty good monochrome pic SOOC most times (K-1). They still had to have the excess framing cropped and the rotation cleaned up a little, but it's no hassle to run through all 24 or 36 heavily downsized, look at them quickly as if they were a proof sheet, note where EV changes might improve the SOOC exposure and contrast, and then go back and scan the best/chosen ones at high-res for photoshop work/turning into prints. For social media and smaller prints, the in-camera processing and a mild crop in even the simplest editing freeware might be all you need.

True, and I used flash has you described, good results has well, a bit of extra button pushing, has I have to switch to live view to align the negative between each shot, but good results, and the negatives before converting to bw got a pleasant brownish colour, a bit sepia like

What I use to hold the negatives is a prototype I did, using foam paper, basically it's a square pipe with 100mmx100mm diameter, 350mm long, around the middle a slot, were between 2 sheets with holes at the middle the negative goes trough, the lens goes a good bit inside the pipe, painted black in the inside to avoid reflections, at the other end tracing paper.
Say prototype, because Im tuning it, so when I have time at my work, I do a definitive model, some parts in nylon, some maybe aluminium, maybe some Teflon sheet were the negative slides.... Or I can end up buying a slide copier....

1st SOOC of the problematic roll
2nd SOOC of the same mischievous roll
3rd SOOC of another roll, same film iso 400
4th ....I'm going to get colour working, next project