Jennifer by an old horse barn.

Shot on Kodak Tri-x, scanned on Epson 4990. Increased contrast on PS.

I think too much grains due to too much agitations.

Hi Jeff

 

Congratulations on a great endeavor, one that will greatly add to your experience of being a photographer. Processing the film yourself will allow you to have great control over the print, which is where I hope you are headed. Exposure, film processing and printing are a beautiful threesome, all three of which are wonderful experiences. There are a great number of books available to help you understand what you are doing while processing film, and I would very much recommend a good text to help you understand what you're doing. Ansel Adam's "The Negative" and "The Print", are two books that will help you understand how the system works.... the choices you make exposing the film, developing the film and printing the negative need to be understood so you aren't working variables against each other.

 

As to this negative, I don't see abnormal grain. I do see a lack of any real sharpness on any plane, so I would suspect camera movement to be the culprit. It is quite possible to hand-hold a camera such as yours while shooting with shutter speeds that are quite slow and still have sharpness, but you need to think of the camera as a rifle, and exercise the same principles to keep the thing steady. Breathing, not using your arm muscles to hold it steady etc... A tripod is a sure bet for stability, but you lose the freedom. You can always lean against a tree, or, better yet, touch the body or lens barrel of the camera to anything that is solid.

 

Like I mentioned, I don't see anything wrong with the grain. It looks quite smooth to me, moreso than the Tri-X I'm accustomed to. What is your developing agent? I think that the film type/developer combination plays a greater role in grain type than your agitation frequency. For sure, agitation can control contrast and grain, but not to the same extent as the chemistry itself and how it works upon the silver in the emulsion.

 

Also, please don't think of grain as bad. It simply is what it is. For some people it's a bad thing and that's too bad because some of the best work ever printed is very "grainy". If the visual effect of grain wasn't available, photography would be a much duller realm...

 

Nathan

Welcome! I'm sure you'll find great rewards in developing and printing. I agree with the previous comments as far as sharpness. The tonality range looks good you have blacks and whites. Other than the sharpness this is a really good picture. Just pay a little more attention to the focus. 5/5

I like the expression of this photo. The division of black and (almost) white on the background is wonderful, gives deepness and make the work very intressting. Congrats.

Thanks for the commends!

 

I use Sprint Record to develope my film. It was taken on Hasselblad 503CXi under F2.8 and 1/15 sec. Man, was I overconfident about my holding-still skill. I will try to bring my tripod when it is 5 PM in November. :)

Hi Jeff, I was thinking about this photo this evening..I agree with the comment above that this is a nice photo, or at least the potential for a future one that is. My view is that, by pulling back a bit, going to a wider angle or dropping the camera, you would add some dimension and added context to the bottom of the photo. You're close to really good stuff. Great textures on the wall, both in the shadows and highlights. Get a sharp negative and a little bit of breathing room at all the edges next time you shoot something like this, ok? Feel free to shoot this one again, please. Absolutely great light. That thing on the wall behind her is really great, whatever it is. It plays with her lovely face, very well.

 

This is sort of what I would call a work print, straight, from the negative onto the medium, viewed digitally. If I saw this work print on my tray in the darkroom as a result of some test prints, I'd be less than happy because it's very close to being something really worth printing... but it isn't sharp. Pisser.

 

Now, to be fair to the impressionists, this could have been what was on your mind, this not sharp thing. I'd need to see a bit more than this, to be convinced. If you had inspiration, you could do it. This is the work print, and at the printing stage, you can leave it here,or you can print on to something else. You could re-shoot it to capture some sharpness somewhere, and refine your composition.

 

Some negatives/papers/chemicals/photographers/artists/gallery ownersandpatrons/publishers/reps/designers appreciate crisp details with the most they can get out of the straight print, glowing highlights and growling shadows and all. Others go for lower keys/suppressed/altered/skewed/enlarged/reinterprated moods/focus points shifted with all kinds of techniques from the enlarger to their final toning and washing processes. But whatever the final print effect a photographer goes for, there is nothing as important as a good negative. Get a good negative, make a very good print. Get a good negative, make a very good print. Get a....

 

In a wet darkroom, if I saw this come up on my paper as a first showing of a work print, and I had gotten over the not sharp thing, I'd feel pleased that the negative had captured a range of brightness values that the film/developer combination I had chosen then developed to what seems to be the proper point. This proper point would be to a density that, when I put the neg into an enlarger and exposed a positive onto the enlarging paper, the paper would receive the exposure ( from the enlarger lamp, through the negative and its varying density values) and be left with something called a "latent image". This latent image is, in my minds eye, a potential for a silver image. I think of it as light energy stored in the silver that's on the paper. The paper developer then releases this energy, this latent image, according to its own particular flavor of chemical ways and, voila!... a print is born.

 

What you're trying to accomplish with the exposure and development of the negative, is a negative that gets into the enlarger and can match up well with a paper/developer combination. The paper cannot come close to holding the range of values that the negative can, so you have to choose exposure and development combinations to compress/expand these values onto a negative that can be then expressed by the paper in whatever way that we all want you to...

 

good luck dude.

 

Nathan

isn't a digital output that is ever gonna be that can replace the silver/platinum/palladium/bichromate etc... processed prints when viewed in person. If they ever are able to, I still won't want one.