tim_bradshaw1

<p>Zelph: I suspect the requirements of someone whose images were going to be published in a newspaper in terms of sharpness are probably rather lower than that of someone aiming to make relatively large prints like me. I also think that people doing the job professionally tend to get very good at it, which I likely won't. Sorry: I should have made both those things clear in my original question!</p> <p>(I've also always assumed that the point of 'f/8 and be there' was 'unless you are there you will not get the picture, so be there and stop fiddling with the camera', not 'use f/8'.)</p>

<p>What John says is correct in my experience: if you make things (either at scan time or later) so that the thing you want to be black on the neg <em>is black</em>, and the thing you want to be white <em>is white</em>, then you are most of the way there. After that you just need to adjust the response curve to make it look like paper.</p> <p>This is remarkably similar to how you print in the darkroom in fact, especially with a fancy modern enlarger: the one I have used most recently has a sensor which you use to tell it the black and white points on the neg, and then it will tweak the contrast on the paper so they are indeed black and white.</p> <p>(Not all images have true black and true white in them of course, but very many do, and picking one which does to start is easy enough.)</p>

<p>It's not clear if you have tweaked the parameters after scanning at all. You <em>need</em> to do this or you will get terrible images. I am not an expert on this (I print in a darkroom), but you need to at least set the black and white levels properly and adjust the curve between them. Negatives don't have enormously deep blacks or enormously bright whites (ie the film is never completely clear nor completely opaque): adjusting the black & white levels means that your blacks will be black and whites white, and you then need to adjust the curve (really the gamma mostly, I think) between them to correspond to what paper is like.</p> <p>More serious people than me will adjust the black & white levels of the scanner, but I have never been very good at that (it can obviously help the scanner get more bits of dynamic range from the neg).</p>

<p>Thanks for the various replies. I think I will try to find an MPP (I'm in the UK, they are pretty common here). </p> <p>(I must guiltily confess that I have realised that I want one partly out of a combination of GAS and not wanting to break my lovely Chamonix, which are not good reasons: I should just use up the existing camera).</p>

<p>Bob: sorry, I was trying to make a play on words on the group f/64 people: I don't think I even have a lens which goes to f/64 and don't often stop down below f/22 as you say (in desparation in bright sun without an ND filter perhaps). My only aim with a rangefinder is to make focussing much quicker while still being acceptably accurate, so I don't have to get people to wait for ages while I faff around with a dark cloth.</p>

<p>I've done a fair bit of work with a conventional 5x4 field camera & I'm reasonably comfortable with that way of working, which typically (in my case anyway) is very slow indeed. I've recently been inspired by Richard Renaldi's work, made with a 10x8, to see if I can work more quickly with an LF camera. The thing that really makes me slow is the whole focus / dark cloth / film holder saga. So, I've noticed that there are at least a couple of families of 5x4 rangefinders -- Wista made one, and MPP made a whole series and there are probably others. it seems to me that I could use one of those with the filmholder in place, then just pull out the dark slide and take a picture, which would be relatively quick (the emphasis being on 'relatively').</p> <p>The question is: is the focussing accuracy of those cameras good enough to get reasonably reliable results without having to stop down to f/64 all the time? Obviously I'm not going to use the thing wide open, but I'd like reasonably short exposures. My guess is that it must be, since they existed, but I also wonder whether people didn't just burn a lot of film with them to get good results.</p> <p>Any other tricks for working more quickly would be welcome (other than 'don't use LF': I know that one!).</p> <p>Thanks</p>

<p>The advantage of Polaroid for a professional was that you could chimp: rather than waiting at least hours to see if you had got the lighting right you could see an image immediately. That must have revolutionised studio photography.</p> <p>For an amateur or for home use it was also being able to get an image instantly, which I hear people like to be able to do, although in this case it was more often the final product than a prequel to it.</p>

<p>Since you've used the K1000, I'd suggest getting a Pentax, but not the K1000. Instead get an MX: they're cheap, very well-made (I have owned one of my MXs for 26 years and it's just fine), and a much better camera than the K1000, which has an entirely undeserved cult status about it, simply because many students learned on it (so, lots of good-looking young people carried them in the 90s). The MX was the pro/semi-pro option, the K1000 never was.</p> <p>If you feel brave get an LX: this was Pentax's serious pro camera, and is a really lovely thing. They can go wrong in elaborate and expensive ways however, and sometimes do.</p> <p>Don't get an ME or an ME super: they are fine, but setting exposure is by two buttons not a dial, which is a pain. I think the Program A / Super Program have the same system.</p> <p>If you can find the Pentax 50/1.4 lens (lots of MXs were sold with this as a kit I think, and probably all LXs that were part of a kit were) then get that: it's all the lens you really need. The 40mm pancake lens is not as good and has a slight culty thing about it so tends to be expensive, but an MX with this will pretty much go in your pocket, and if you can find a brassed black one, well, it looks seriously cool.</p> <p>I have all of these, and the MX/50mm 1.4 is probably the thing I would keep in a fire.</p>

<p>If the first few frames were black then you know that the developer is working, since those frames will have been fogged heavily in the usual way when loading the film. If the remaining frames are essentially clear then, assuming you didn't do something extraordinary involving managing to only get chemistry on the first few frames (which would be hard), they didn't see enough / any light. So the problem is with the camera, almost certainly: either the shutter is not opening, you did not load the film properly so it never left the spool, or you misjudged exposures catastrophically.</p>

<p>Charles: the silver plating out would make sense if this was not new fixer and so had silver in it. It's because it is new that I don't understand what is happening!</p>

<p>I use Hypam 1+4 for film, and typically make up 5 litre batches. I am not as careful as I should be about checking whether it has worn out: I don't do the time-to-clear-film thing, but instead rely on a combination of fixing for a long time (9 minutes) and tracking about how much film has been through a batch. This has always worked fine for me.</p> <p>My chemical hygene is reasonably good (ie I rinse and dry things pretty carefully and generally am careful about contagion). I use Rodinol and a stop bath, so it should not be contaged with dev.</p> <p>Last August I made up a batch, which was the last litre of an old stock bottle (so the stock had had air above it for a while), and which then did not get used very much until April this year. At that time I found a strange thing: the working solution bottle was <em>black</em>, which turned out to be not because the fix itself had gone dark, but because something had plated out onto the bottle. It's stored in a cupboard (so fairly dark) in a flat without stupid variations in temperature. The fix certainly smelt OK, and it seems to be working fine. However it is filling me with even more fear than fixer usually does (I hate it because everything can seem to be fine, but only later turn out not to be, unlike dev where you immediately know if something is wrong).</p> <p>So, is this a known thing that can happen, should I worry (dispose of the fixer) and how can I stop it happening again?</p> <p>Thanks</p>

<p>Stuart: not a completely serious reply, but the thing to do with B/W is get access to a darkroom and make prints. Obviously this is not practical if you aren't somewhere where there is a shared darkroom or willing to dedicate significant space and money to one, but making B/W prints is <em>extremely</em> satisfying, at least for me.</p>

<p>Another vote for Peak Imaging. I've used them for ages and have just rung them about processing some E6 4x5: one of their comments started 'most of our customers ...' -- if they're in a position where they have <em>more than one</em> customer sending in E6 4x5 in 2016 I think they clearly know what they're doing!</p> <p>I am sure other labs are also fine, but Peak Imaging definitely are.<br /> <br />PS if you are planning on processing a substantial amount of B/W buy a tank and a few bits and do it yourself: it really is easy and very cheap if you use something like Rodinal which lasts for ever.</p>

<p>This is a belated followup in case anyone finds this thread in future.</p> <p>I've now used the tank to process film for the first time (don't take much 120 nowadays), and it's fine. The trick is that you can just slide the film into the spiral (there's no clever move-the-two-halves-against-each other as, for instance, with a Paterson tank). It helps if everything is extremely dry of course: the mistake I make is (a) to sweat and (b) to touch the edge of the film with my hands. You can avoid (b). It's no harder to load than any other tank though.</p> <p>You can't agitate by inversion which is what I do with all my other tanks. I fashed about this and then decided that the spin-the-spiral thing was equivalent (ie 10s of one was 10s of inverting). This seems to be right, or right enough: the negs I have look fine.</p> <p>It's light-tight enough: I didn't use it in daylight but under LED lights which have a lot of blue in them as such things do, and there's no fogging at all.</p> <p>The 300cc of chemistry it suggests is fine.</p> <p>It's a fine tank if you want to process single rolls of 120.</p>

<p>Glen: it looks to me like it loads from the outside – there are little notches which look like they're intended to 'start' the film (kind of like the Paterson spirals have special places which pick up the film). But the two halves of the spiral (top and bottom) don't move against each other, so there's no obvious way of working the film in like there is with other spirals I've used that load like this. So I'm guessing it will slide round the spiral if you push it, which I can see could work for 120 if everything is very dry.</p> <p>I think what I am going to do is to take a roll of film, and then try and load it into this tank with a paterson tank to hand, so if it's obviously hopeless (and I've not trashed the edge of the film too badly) I can reload it into the paterson tank.</p> <p>(As an aside: the reason I got this was because I have a really lovely and extremely tiny 3M tank which takes a single roll of 35mm: its spiral is plastic and loads from the inside with a magic winding attachment. It's the easiest tank I've ever loaded, and I've always wanted an equivalent (single-reel: easy-to-load is a bonus) for 120. Next I will look for something which lets me do a single sheet of 4x5...)</p>