Sony black and white

[jiun_der_chung]

<p>Wayne, the difference isn't just the grain. B&W film has inherently better contrast and much larger exposure latitude.</p>

<p>I take my film to a place called Blanco Negro in Sydney. Melbourne must have an equivilent for a similar price?</p>

<p>Are you printing your negs optically? I find it much easier to convert to digital and not have to play around with chemicals.</p>

[wayne_naughton]

<p>I scan my negs, absolutely no more darkroom for me.....grin. I get my film processing done in Yarraville at a place called image frieze. It's pretty hard to get a proper hand printed process done around here. It's expensive and i've had no luck at all getting my printing done privately. So, in one sense i'm stuck with xp2. not that i mind.... it suits the type of pictures i take anyway......</p>

[jiun_der_chung]

<p>So what's stopping you from using true B&W film? Assuming there is somewhere convenient to get it developed, you can still scan it. You just have to keep the negs clean whilst scanning as you can't use digital ice. Also you'll have to do a little spotting in photoshop. But apart from that, I find the results spectacular compared to digital or XP2.</p>

[wayne_naughton]

<p>I'm not a landscape, formal portrait or architectural photographer so i don't have much reason to use slow, fine grain films..... I don't do my own developing or analogue printing, don't want to and it's expensive to outsource these days.(And I've got pretty lousy results, anyway) Traditional film negs are harder to scan than xp2. 6x4.5 and 6x9 xp2 negs give me the scope to make prints up to poster size if I want to. So why make things more difficult?</p>

<p>Finally, i'm getting more comfortable with b/w conversions, I seem to be getting a 'reasonable' result and I think I can improve using Nik plugins. I honestly think modern b/w techniques has gone past traditional analogue, what with HDR and such. So why get my knickers in a knot trying to conquer a technology that is pretty much redundant?</p>