Adjusting Development For Summicron Code 11116

<p>I recently bought a collapsable M mount Summicron 50/2. The lens is clean with no haze or coating issues and has a hood. I'm finding many images are wonderful using FP-4. The lens has fabulous Bokeh and tonality in bright light. However, if shadows are weak, overall tonality is too flat. <br>

Are my observations typical for this lens? <br>

Is it effective to increase development by 10% to add some sparkle? <br>

</p>

<p>A beautiful lens indeed in fact I'm on the hunt for a real clean example as we speak. About 30 years ago I had a 50 col. summi m mount and used a 3 grade paper to compensate for the lack of contrast so I'm sure adding 10% dev. would help a lot if Your using just one lens or lenses of that vintage. Hope your using a lens shade, BEST OF LUCK!</p>

<p>Not sure what other lenses you're accustomed to using, but it's not unusual for a 50 year-old single-coated lens to seem low-contrast in comparison to modern glass. Even back in the day, Leitz lenses were known for emphasizing resolution over contrast versus their Zeiss (& later Japanese) competition.</p>

<p>I might suggest increasing exposure by 1/2 stop and maintaining current development. Increasing development time will tend to blow your highlights and not help the shadows much. <br>

I never found the lens "flat" but it will have gentler contrast than a current lens, as mentioned by previous posts. <br>

Best wishes<br>

Dan</p>

<p>Here's what to do: Increase your exposure by about a full stop, then "pull" the film BEFORE the normal development time is reached. This will give you a highly detailed negative, with less grain. All that you need to do at this point is to print the neg on a higher contrast (Grade 3) paper for the "sparkle" you're looking for. Sort of like an Ansel Adams experience, only with a 35mm Leica instead of an 8x10 field & view camera.</p>

<p>The lower contrast highly detailed neg will have plenty of shadow detail and the highlights won't be blocked-up either. The ONLY reason to extend the "normal" development times in B&W developers is to gain an increased film speed rating. This is also known as "pushing" the film, which always yields an increase in both contrast and grain. Notice that I said "rating" and not film speed by itself!</p>

<p>Using a "polycontrast" type of paper will give you an infinate number of paper grades using the magenta portion of a dichroic color head or similar device. Or just use regular polycontrast filters that have 1/2 grade steps.</p>

<p>Hope that this helps.</p>

<p>Dave</p>