James G. Dainis

[MEDIA=dailymotion]x6u3qzi[/MEDIA] For some reason the show seems to have been copied as a mirror image. Everything is backwards left to right..

There is something strange about those 18 stops shown above. If the exposure was set to get the face tones on zone 6 then snow on the background would normally be on zone 9 which in the diagram above looks like gray to me not white with some detail. We have all seen this: Q - When I shoot a photo of my son in a white snow suite building a snowman on a white field, the photo comes out gray. what should I do? A- The camera meter is "fooled" by all that white and darkens the scene down to middle gray, zone v. You should open up about three stops to get the correct exposure. According to the 18 stops shown above the answer would be: A- The camera meter is "fooled" by all that white and darkens the scene down to middle gray, zone v. You should open up about nine stops to get the correct exposure. I don't think so.

Ansel Adams when formulating the Zone system said that the useful zones on film that could be transferred to paper were zones 1 to 9. Anything above that results in blocked highlights. Take a photo of a bride in the shade. If a band of sunlight falls on her white dress creating a sunlit triangle on that dress. the dress might be in zones 8 and 9 but the triangle might be in zones 12 and 13 for the cloth and lace shadows. When printed the lace and cloth zones 8 and 9 will look good but the zones 12 and 13 would just look like a white triangle. If one tried to burn in the blocked highlights one would just get a white blob on the dress. I enjoy looking at my large 8x10 inch negatives. There is a beauty there with the higher blocked zones that I can see on the negatives that can not be captured on a print.

18 stops? So if you start with an exposure of a gray card zone v at f/8, 120 sec, to get zone 18 or 13 stops, would use an exposure of f/8 at 60 seconds. to get pure white. Most people get pure white, zone 10, by opening up 5 stops, f/8 at 1/4 sec. If a normal snow scene exposure might call for f/8 at 1/125 sec, if I wanted to raise the snow to pure white I would give a 60 second exposure at f/8? I rather fear everything else in the scene would also be blown to pure white, people's faces, etc.

For an early attempt to build an enlarger for my 8x10 inch negatives used an 8x10 camera and a homemade light box. A fan was put on the side to keep things cool while aligning and focusing the image. It would be shut off for the actual ~10 second exposure. I later used a large studio camera which was much more stable (and better looking). I was mostly happy with 8x10 inch contact prints, and gave it away when I moved. In his early days, Ansel Adams used his view camera as an enlarger mounted in a basement window for the light source. He said he got very good results on overcast days. I hope you don't think it presumptuous of me to emulate his endeavors.

It hadn't been long since a 6cm square image (2 1/4 x 2 1/4) was considered a "miniature" format (compared to 4x5" etc.) Maybe 50 or 60 years ago. That's what happens when one gets old. Past decades seem very recent. Interesting thread.

My first Unicolor E-6 attempts for 8x10 inch Ektachrome sheets gave me magenta results. I discovered that putting 6 sheets of 8x10 inch film at room temperature into 101 deg developer dropped the developer temperature down to 98 degrees. I later started with the developer at 103 deg and got good results. I suppose a pre-wash of the film with 101 deg water would be good.

If you look at the negative of the night sky you will see that the film part of the sky is clear except for base color. It will have no more effect than if you laid a sheet of glass on top for the double exposure print..

Note from Moderator: Let us be bit more careful about posting personal attacks.

I agree. "Candid" is the word.

An earlier photographer, Henry Cartier-Bresson, took a photo of a man leaping over a puddle. It was termed the "decisive moment".

I also have a 1910 Seneca view (field) camera. One can feel like a real photographer when taking the time to compose a scene on the ground glass, setting the aperture and shutter, inserting a film holder, removing the dark slide, etc, etc. And, some people are amazed when I tell them that a photo they admire was taken with a 100+ year old camera (and Nikkor-M 300mm lens.)

This thread answered the questions posted by the OP for the first 8-1/2 posts. Then it shifted to a bit trollish as my friend in post 10 can attest to. I have no problem with a thread going off topic as long as there is useful information posted. I am not much into the 21st century. I did learn here that when my wife takes a picture with her iphone and sends it to friends on Facebook, that picture gets saved on line somewhere (in the cloud?). I never thought about that. Some of these post seem to be getting a bit personal. Let us not get into name calling or insulting.

"And where do you think all that digital junk gets stored? " I save my photos on SD cards, an external drive or in the computer. I've never used the cloud or a data center to save anything. The pictures my wife takes with her iphone are saved on that device. She doesn't upload them to the cloud or data centers. When her device gets full she deletes old pictures. Maybe I am missing something here.

Save the photos on your computer. On this page at the bottom next to "Post Reply" click on "Upload a File" then click on "Browse" and click on the picture that you want to use.

Back in the good old days people would grab their film camera at Christmas time to use up the last of the 12 exposure film that they started with back in July. Now-a-days I see people taking digital pictures of the food they get in restaurants to show on Facebook. There are umpteen times more pictures taken with digital than were ever taken with film. Still, can't see that as having any impact on the environment. BTW, I use the word "pictures" rather than "photos" advisedly.

"And why, oh why, are people being taught to use film in this day and age?" My friend here says it is because film is better.

If you shoot in larger format you will have less noticeable grain per size print which will make the photos appear sharper. I would shoot on 8x10 inch negative and only make 8x10 inch contract prints. The top photo is an 8x10 inch photo made from an 8x10 inch Plus-X negative. The bottom photo is a section of the same negative. You can easily see the far side of the East River and even some seagulls in the water. If the top photo had been made from a 35mm frame the seagulls on the far wide would have been about the size of the grain on the negative. If most of your prints are going to be around 8x10 inch then medium or larger format will look sharper.

At one time my wife took photos of two dozen teachers at her school. She wanted me to make an 8x10 inch print of each one for display in the school.. She used a Kodak Instamatic camera and the exposures were all over the place. Doing test strips would have taken a good deal of time. I had an enlarging meter and took readings off of the faces. Most prints came out well on the first print and saved me a lot of time, paper and chemicals.

"No numbers or anything appeared after development." Even if you took the film directly from the film box, never put it in a camera, and developed it you would get blank, clear film but the numbers would be on the edges. No numbers does mean you messed up in the developing.

"'even if I see 72ppi on the JPEG picture, tI just need to make some calculation to show the OPTIMAL print dimensions per ppi?" Right. The "72ppi" means nothing.

You can advertise the image as 5184x3456 pixels with 72dpi. It doesn't matter. If the person wanted to make a 17 x 11.5 inch print he would just print it at 300 ppi. or what ever ppi he chose to make a given size print. The correct terminology is ppi not dpi. You are dealing with pixels not dots. Since a small pixel looks like a dot ignorant people started to call it a dot. If you are talking about how many dots per inch a printer spits out then that is it dots per inch.

PPI is just a useless tag. It is what you will use only if you are making a print. A 5184x3456 pixels image printed at 200 pixels per inch would equal a 5184 pixels/200 pixels per inch = 25.92 inches by 3456 pixels/200 pixels per inch = 17.28 inches a 25.92 inch by 17.28 inch print. A 5184x3456 pixels image printed at 300 ppi would equal a 5184/300 ppi x 3456/300ppi = 17.28 x 11.52 inch print

"As well as I know, machine printed negatives are normally adjusted based on an average over the negative." Which means you shouldn't worry about the correct exposure when taking the shot for if you send the film out to be printed, the printer analyzer will decide what exposure it will print at no matter how careful you were with the taking exposure. I once took some photos of some surfers. I had the camera set on manual and based the exposure on an incident light meter and checked with the "sunny 16" rule. It was a sunny day and the light condition didn't change during the time I took the shots. I sent the film out and when it came back I checked the negatives. (The first thing that I do) to see how well I did. All the negative exposures looked good with equal density for them all. The prints were much different with some light, some dark and some okay. If there was a lot of white water in the scene the printer analyzer would think, "Way to light I had better darken down," and I would get a dark print. If there was too much dark water, the printer analyzer would think it was too dark and lighten up the print too much. Being super critical at the time of the film exposure would be a waste of time it the film was to be sent out for prints. I sometimes would take a photo of a gray card for the first shot and tell the tech to set the printer for that for all the prints.

I never liked dealing in percentages; they can be misleading. An item sells for $10 and years later is worth $100. It is now worth ten times as much - a 1000% increase. Most people would agree with that. But no, that is a 900% increase. An item sells for $10 and is later valued at $20 - a 100% increase not a 200% increase. A stock sells for $10 a share and drops to $5 a share, a 50% decrease. When it goes back up to $10 a share that is a 100% increase. You have made 50% profit by doing nothing. Maybe hanging the 18% value into a real number would clarify matters but I don't know how.