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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-23-2017, 08:56 PM
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The point is, you can toss a bunch of prints into a shoebox under the bed and they will last for centuries if properly processed silver halide, many decades if they are colour photographs, and probably decades if they are common inkjet (though the jury is still out on that one). The same cannot be said of digital. I have CDs from 15 years ago that stopped being readable ten years ago, hard drives will stop working if not run for a while, etc.
Real photographs can survive benevolent neglect, digital media needs active and relatively frequent maintenance.
Obviously tossed images are gone forever, but that is not the fault of the photograph.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-20-2017, 09:35 AM
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One hopes the prerequisite can be waived. If a person is doing pure silver image photography, there should be absolutely no reason to need digital anything. We certainly didn't have anything digital in 1970 when I first took up darkroom work.
If your lab is printing on anything Epson, they are, of course, working from a digital file, whether you give it to them or if they create it themselves from your negative.
I understand the desire to leave some sort of image legacy behind, and I am fully aware that for most people, digital makes this impossible. Kodak (may they rest in peace) had an advertising slogan at one time that said, more or less, if you didn't have a print, you didn't have something that would last. I expect this was early in the days of digital. It was true then, and it is just as true now.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-20-2017, 07:57 AM
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Look carefully at the scans you get back from the lab. If the deep shadows appear to be blocked up, you will need to raise your ISO. If the highlights appear to be washed out, you will need to ask them to give less development (presuming we are discussing B&W), which may necessitate lowering your ISO. I do think, with digital and it's rather easy ability to lose out in highlights, that it might be more critical to control them more than the shadow areas. It seems easier to dig detail out of shadows than to tone down burnt out bright areas.
There is nothing quite like watching an image appear before you under a safelight. It is far more satisfying than having an inkjet spit out a greasy little print.
I didn't become a photographer because I liked photography. I became a photographer to feed my passion, which was working in the darkroom.
I decided very early on that roll film wasn't where I needed to be, since I couldn't fully control every step of every image. I used roll film where I could control everything else to the point that I didn't need the process control. Roll film became my studio film very quickly, since I could control the lighting to match the film.
Sheet film became my outdoor film for landscapes (though I did shoot a wedding portrait session on 4x5 for a very special friend one time), because I couldn't control the outdoor lighting. I could shoot at the best time of day to make the light as attractive as possible, but the real controls had to be done during exposure and film processing.
Even though photography, per se, wasn't my thing, I did manage to win several awards for my images, I did a few gallery shows, and sold enough prints and portfolios worldwide to support my hobby very nicely.
Your journey should be pleasurable, but to be honest, I don't see much point in shooting film, developing it, getting scans done, and then making inkjet prints. I've given up the darkroom now. The 50 or more pounds of gear that I humped around when shooting sheet film is too much for me. Shooting a 35mp digital camera seems to make better quality images than shooting film and digitizing it.
My latest project is digitizing some of my old 35mm slides and negatives using the DSLR (I use a Pentax K1) and a bellows and slide copier. The digital-film copies in no way match the quality I was able to get either from the darkroom with film or with a pure digital process. I do think one is better off sticking to one process or the other, and not trying to make the film peg go into the digital hole.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-19-2017, 08:46 PM
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Do remember that scanners have much more tonal range than photographic paper, and probably film as well. If the range of the scanner is longer than that of either, there is far greater tolerance within the system, and the degree of precision required to drag as much image as possible out of the film might not be required. One of the things I've found about digital is that it is incredibly tolerant of sloppy or imprecise technique compared to silver based photography.
Having said that, it would still be a good idea to run a similar set of tests as what I outlined to ensure you are staying within the limits of your scanner.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-17-2017, 08:49 PM
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The concept was that by matching the film to the paper, it was possible to make the best use of the rather limited range of the paper without compromising the range of the film. Starting by finding the BD+F of the film and translating that to the paper D-Max ensures that anything just over that value (Zone I) will still show detail. After that, finding out what exposure/ developer combination is required to secure Zone IX allows you to ensure that highlights won't burn out.
The difference in technique is that now you are metering for the brightest parts of the scene rather than the darkest. This puts your meter operation in it's sweet spot rather than close to the edge of it's metering range where it may be less accurate, and also tends to obviate the possibility of the meter giving poor readings because of colour failure (the really bright things in a scene tend to be clouds, for example).
Believe me, I spent the better part of a year perfecting the Zone System, and when I travelled I had about 8 empty film boxes to put exposed film into to ensure that they got correct development.
I adopted Picker's methodology after some experimentation that showed me just how much easier it was, and how much better my negatives and subsequent prints were with far less effort. I was selling limited edition portfolios at the time, so ease of repeatability was always something that was a concern to me. The method I outlined diminished dodging and burning in the bulk of my images tremendously.
If you have a spot meter, go out and meter various scenes. For the most part, nature falls into a 7 or so stop range. If it didn't slide film wouldn't work. Certainly you are going to find outliers. The longest tonal range scene that I photographed was somewhat over 15 stops, but generally, scenes that are over 8 stops are backlit and ugly anyway. You will be surprised just how short the tonal ranges of most scenes in nature really are.
Picker's technique takes the Zone System and improves on it.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-16-2017, 06:16 AM
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Fred Picker's method was geared towards landscape photography, and presumed that the photographer would keep half a brain about him.
If you can find his newsletters, I believe the technique was outlined in Issue 80, published in December 1994.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-15-2017, 09:08 PM
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I think a lot of people inadvertently get it
backwards, and try to match paper to negatives.
I think it best to match negatives to paper.
Film is much more responsive to control than
paper.
Figuring out how to expose a film starts in the
darkroom.
Take an unexposed piece of the film you want to
use. Process it as per the manufacturers
instructions.
Set your enlarger head to a height that will
give a nice magnification for the print size you
want to make, most of the time.
Default to 8x10 if you can't decide.
Focus the lens and set stop it down 3 stops or so to its best aperture if you know it.
Do not change these settings for the duration of
the procedure
Put the processed film into the neg carrier and
make a series of exposures to find the time it
takes to make D-max.
You now have your stock exposure time for that paper, aperture and print size.
Now it's time to figure out your ISO.
You can set up a test target. or just go out and make pictures. What you are doing is finding out how your film speed/ developer combination handles bright areas. I like sunlit clouds for this, as it's about as bright a white you will get in nature.
Shoot a negative or series of negative and process the film however is normal for you, and expose it to your chosen paper using the settings you calculated for the D-Max paper test.
If your clouds are blown out, you need to shorten your development time, and will also need to lower your ISO. After a couple of exposure tests, you will probably know where you have to go, and how far until you get a suitable ISO/developer time to retain detail in the highlights. If you find your shadows are getting murky, you might find you need to adjust your base exposure to the paper, especially if you have had to shorten your film development time a lot. You might have dropped the base density + fog.
This technique is far better with sheet film, but will help quite a dit with roll film as well.
Now when you go shooting, you are metering the highlights rather than the shadows, as St. Ansel recommended.
---------- Post added 03-15-17 at 10:09 PM ----------
You aren't capturing less tonal range, you are capturing the tonal range in such a way as to allow the paper to see it.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
03-14-2017, 05:43 PM
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I didn't shoot much colour when I shot film, but I shot thousands of rolls and thousands of 4x5 sheets of B&W.
Film speed is something that the user needs to figure out on an individual basis depending on the paper they are using and how they process it.
Paper has far less dynamic range than film, so it is best to match the film to the paper.
When I started doing this, I found that my film speeds dropped significantly.
I shot mostly Ilford FP4 and HP5, FP4 was very nice at ISO 40, HP5 was best (for me) at ISO 80.
If you like, I suspect can find a short essay I wrote on the subject. It was something a learned from Fred Picker at Zone VI studios.
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