FD10 and fuji Neopan 1600 indoors

[aqualarue]

Hallo everybody,

 

I am new to this forum and have been searching for almost two weeks for advice. 5 sources and 7

different answers! I lost one film and have not developed two others completely well. So I am posting my

question here because I have another film in similar circumstances and refuse to mess this one up.

 

To cut an extremely long story short I will simply begin by asking for your experiences on this hopefully

not too ambiguous situation.

 

I took a roll of film (fuji neopan 1600) indoors with not too much light coming from outside (Extremely

overcast day) Average acceptable settings at AV 1.8 -3.5 at 1/60 - 1/125. (trying to give as much info as

possible). Lots of dark areas extremely moody interior and of course people involved. There was plenty of

contrast between very bright and quite dark even to the point of two halves of the same face being so

different. Mostly natural light filled the rooms.I am aiming for drama in the shadows and midtones. I

exposed using a lastolite 18% grey card for the most part simply because I refused to trust my own

judgement in this particular situation.

 

Problem, should I stick to a mid field average dev time of 10 minutes to play safe?

 

I know it is a simple question but your advise will help me to compare what I did wrong with my other 2

contact sheets. i do not want to use this film to experiment since this particular one would be hard to

replicate.

[jtk]

One might want to use an incident meter (eg with dome) rather than spot meter (suggested by grey card) for this situation, which sounds like it might vary from place to place...that's assuming you don't have some kind of reliable TTL meter...

[aqualarue]

Not in a position to invest in an incident meter John. Photo taking in general is not a

problem, but in this particular case I am interested to know how others might be developing

their neopan 1600 negative after this sort of shooting in the FD10.

[jtk]

It sounds as if you're not concerned with subtlety so much as with saving shots you've already made.

 

What specifically was wrong with the earlier contact sheets?

 

Do your contact sheets really tell an adequate story? Do the earlier negs scan or print conventionally or are they difficult?

 

If your exposures are consistently OK (doesn't sound like it), normal development (standard time) might be the best bet.

 

If you've got plenty of detail in shadows but your highlights are blown out, you might shorten development time by...say...2 minutes.

 

If your earlier negs lack shadow detail totally you won't get it back by extending development. But extended development would add zip that overly thin negs might not deliver.

 

What do your earlier contacts look like...specifically?

[jim_gardner4]

We could spend hours here talking about zones, scales and all sorts of other things but I assume the scene has gone and cant be repeated. If the shots are very important to you but you could afford to loose one or two, you could cut a third or a half of the film and dev that at the recomended time and see how it looks. If contrast is much to high, do the next third at a lesser time and look at that (when dry).

[jtk]

Jim's suggestion is fine...assuming you're up to doing the snip test he describes. However, it might be helpful if you described specifically how your earlier proof sheets or film appeared.

 

Obviously, both a meaningful description of previous results and our response wouldn't take "hours," it would take moments.