pat_wilson1

1.5 minutes is not too short at all. If it's more than like, 4 minutes though you may want to get new fix.

 

David, I hate to critisize procedures, but there is such a thing as overfixing, and it is harmful to the "archivalness" of your negatives. 8 minutes of acid fixer is really not good for your film.

Steven, this doesn't answer your question really, however consistancy is very important. If you develop at 19C consistantly, you can modify your development time based on the results you get. Personally, I'd throw about 10% onto the dev time and see what happened. Consistancy and notetaking...very important.

People will always be shooting film, just as there are still blacksmiths, people who do stonework by hand. The following will get a bit smaller, but I think of it like I think of the people who still do oil paintings, as long as people paint, people will take photographs on film.

I am not at ALL experienced with this technique, but I was told that flashing color film to a specific color could help bring out certain colors. Like I said, though, I am not at all experienced with this.

Robert, the way I was taught to do development time tests were to increase/decrease by 33%, and use a densitometer, then make an educated guess based on that. The way we did it was to shoot a Zone VIII exposure and try the recomended development time, +33%, -33% and look for (1.2? 1.3? above FB+F, I forget exactly), to see what normal dev time was, and then see how the expantion/contraction worked. It wasn't exact. My teacher believed in testing, but, like he said, we're here to take pictures, not spend all our time doing tests.

 

So I'd say add/subtract around 33% to your times, and see what happens. Keep notes and tweek your times as needed.

Tri-X is a great film. I use Tri-X shot at 260 in D-76 1:1 @68F for 9 1/2 minutes normal development.

I recomend stopping by www.graflex.org. They are devoted, entirely, to Graflex equipment.

This may not, in fact, be the best place to put this, but the LF crowd

seems to be a well connected bunch...

 

Anyone know anything about darkrooms/photography clubs in Eugene, Oregon?

I'd use Rodinal. Just because I have found the speed in Rodinal to be around 260 for sheet film at least, but that is just for my purposes. I'd go with Rodinal 1:50.

I have used an F2 and it is a fantastic camera. Eventually (one day) I will own one, but I would say go with the Sinar, personally. It is really a versitle system, and it is a very strudy camera. I dragged one all over the place.

I don't (yet) have a scanner and have to use the ones at my school. The more dedicated I got to my printing, the more frusturated I got with scanners. I never could seen to reproduce the same thing in the scan as I could on the print. I then moved up to 11x14 as my standard paper size, and the scanners aren't big enough to scan those prints. I have not (yet) learned how to use the film scanners at school either.

 

I guess it's lazyness. I haven't uploaded any images for quite a few months, and my printing has much improved.

Keeping notes about your exposures is key. Depending on the meter you have you may not be able to meter through the filter accuratly. A Zone VI modified meter you can meter through the filter and get accurate results.

My first try I put it on backwards. All the film stuck together and it came out a almost-solid mess. I kept thinking "this doesn't feel right" but I unrolled and re-rolled it twice and it came out that way each time so I figured it had to be right, and the extra room was for 220...oops.

Red is minus-blue, this is why the sky turns darker with a red filter. Polarizer will have no effect on the sky except to act as a neutral density filter.

I've got a print in my final portfolio of a neg that accidently got reticulated because of poor developing practices when I first started out. It looks fantastic with the shot, but save yourself the trouble, and keep your temperatures pretty consistant. Dev is the important one, however keep the rest of your chemestry at the same temp. It's all about consistancy.

I use trays. At one point (very hectic project time) I did 20 sheets of film at once, 10 per tray, one per hand. Scratching is a serious problem only if you are careless. My problems were never with development but with washing. Development I was very careful, but somehow got less careful during washing. You can get a cut film washer to wash that film for 10 minutes or so by itself which makes life much easier. I have found, so far, trays to be easy, cheap, and very consistant.

How about a Neutral Density Filter or two?

I have the same problem Steve. Consequently I haven't scanned any prints forever because of this. If you figure out how to fix it let me know

I have never gotten a satisfactory scan of one of my prints, ever. Even if the print is on RC and lays flat it still looks bad. Everything looks hollow, and I don't get enough shadow detail, and the highlights look blown out. Sure I can mess with the levels in Photoshop but that doesn't give me detail. If your goal is to display your images digitally than go right ahead and shoot digital or scan in color and desaturate (that seems to work better than it does for B&W film I don't know why).

 

We do B&W because we enjoy the process, and when I see a digital B&W (even Lambda) print that beats some of the silver prints I've seen, I'll admit defeat.

Yes. They are used to take up space in chemical bottles so that there is as little air in the bottles as possible. Oxygen combines with developers, mostly, and breaks them down. Stop bath and fixer are not nearly as vunerable to this.

It takes getting used to, as someone already said. Here is how I do it. Pull both darkslides out not all the way, take some compressed air, blow inbetween the darkslides, blow each opening of the film holder, and I clean them like this every so often. Then in the dark I pull (not all the way out) one darkslide, hold the holder in my left hand, use my fingers to hold down the flap at the end, and use my right hand to put the film in.

 

I think that the scratches are coming from your development. I was having scratch issues and I thought it might be the holder because I was being very careful during development. It turns out that I was not being as careful during washing (oops) and that's where the scratches came from.

I would still argue that doing testing is better than shooting blindly. I, in no way, advocate extensive testing. Photographers make photographs, not line graphs. I still get better results using tested data than just using manufacturers iso/dev time standards. I didn't test out to perfection, for example, I did 3 tests for development time, recomended, +33%, -33% and just took a SWAG for my normal development time based on that. Then I can tweek my system as I shoot real shots instead of grey cards.

 

As with everything in photography, how you get to the goal really isn't as important as getting there. A lot of the photographers I admire the most did nothing of this sort, it was all internalized and they did what felt right, and I respect and admire their work. I just report the way I've learned to do it, and can say that I feel my negatives and prints have come out way better than the stuff I produced when I started. So I'll borrow an acronym from PERL...TIMTOWTDI. (There Is More Than One Way To Do It)

I think that a non-photographer would notice the difference between a 4x5 shot and a 35mm shot, even printed as small as 8x10. A lot of time you can look at two things and say, "I like this one better," without knowing why, and I would like to think that this would be the case with 4x5 over 35mm.

 

As far as the tones go, both films are (kind of almost mostly) the same emultion so they should capture the same pallet, however the resolution of 4x5 means more film area can be devoted to each area of the photograph, meaning more grain can go to each tone so you will get a more subtile transition. Development is also much more specalized and more care is taken in developing 4x5 than 35mm. Since development plays such a big part in a negative, I think that it is almost a given that more care in development will yield a better negative.

As I understand it, and it seems to work in practice for me at least, film is underrated because film tests are greatly linked to the equipment they are done on. I shoot TriX sheet film and it is rated, according to Kodak, at 320. I rate it at 200 because when I performed a film test using my equipment, my developing method (nothing wacky, just my hands in the trays intead of someone elses) it was at 200 when I got a density on the film that was 0.1 above the film-base + fog. I did development tests to see when a Zone VIII exposure was 1.3 above fb+f and that was my correct development time. Does this make my pictures asthetically better, well no, but when I meter I know what kind of information I'm going to get on the negative.

50 years? They'll last a lot longer than that!

 

Not to hijack the thread, but anyone try selenium on PMK negs? Does it damage the stain?