conrad_hoffman

Something seems a bit off. Can't tell without seeing the negatives, but they might be underexposed. Look at the shadow areas and see how much detail/density is there. Naturally it's all opinion and the look you want, but for me there's something flat about the images that changing the overall lightness or contrast doesn't fix. OTOH, it could also be the original lighting and some fill flash would fix it.

This is a 13 shot stack of a small part I machined. Front to back sharpness on this sort of thing is near impossible without stacking. Unfortunately, every dust particle also becomes sharp from front to back, so I do a lot of editing. Probably should clean things better! Used CombineZP.

I've always used a grey dish pan, the kind restaurants collect dirty dishes in, maybe 6-8" high. It doubles as my print wash tray with an old Kodak tray siphon.

I'm still using a D200 I bought years ago and it does everything I need, both personal and some commercial work. There's lots of free editing software. I only own a few medium sized memory cards. Ongoing costs are near zero. Older dSLRs can be pretty cheap. One could do film, but ongoing costs are a lot higher. Some decent film cameras are available for next to nothing, and darkroom equipment is tough to even give away, so careful scrounging might turn up most of what you need. IMO, the problem is time. Most people don't have the many hours it takes to do good wet process work.

Any visual effect is fair game if it does what you want. That said, I'm pretty conservative and keep my highlights under control. One thing I avoid is a white area at the edge of a print that allows the eye to "fall out" of the frame. I want to see some density, even if slight, all around the perimeter. Full paper white is reserved for specular highlights.

Too small, wrong type and the camera bag isn't sealed well enough. I keep my stuff in a dehumidified room when not in use. My older collectible stuff (probably worth $1.98 these days) lives in a plastic storage bin in the same room with a big towel that gets dried in the dryer periodically. Seems to have worked well over the years.

I doubt Panatomic-X was ever a moneymaker. I used it on occasion and got great tonal quality, tonal quality I could never get from TMAX-100. I'm happy with Ilford FP-4. The one I'd love to see come back is 4x5 Ektapan, a dual emulsion film with remarkable range and tonal quality.

I wouldn't trust a light trap in full sun with fast film. What sort of sensitivities are we talking? There's a wide range of developers and other solutions, some of which are quite benign. Maybe an ascorbic acid developer, water rinse and alkaline fixer to avoid the acetic acid stink. Heck, coffee was a developer people played with for a while, though it's not really very good.

He metered the dark and light areas at 8 and 12 EV. The range is 4 stops. Now, we place the dark area in Zone III. Depending on the calibration of one's Zone System, the light area should end up in Zone VII. Question- is a Zone a range of tones, separated by sharp dividing lines, or is a Zone a specific value on a continuum of tones? As for the percent reflectivities, some joker wrote this a long time ago- Is an 18% Gray Card Zone V Don't know if it helps or hurts.

Keep the good ones. That leave the junk ,which is worth next to nothing. Might as well keep 'em all.

I suppose one could just buy a used older dSLR and use it as a light meter. My Nikon D200 is probably a better light meter than anything else I own.

Long ago at RIT it was pretty much required to have a LunaPro. They were accurate and reliable, in fact we did statistical analysis on all the ones people brought to class. Being ever the odd man out, I had a Weston Ranger 9. I found it a much better meter because of it's narrow view and viewfinder. Unfortunately, it wasn't accurate. Only much later did I trace the circuit and do my own calibration from a lab source. The problem was no adjustment would make it accurate at the lower light levels. It's unfortunate because you can find them cheap, but they also need a mercury battery or air cell. I've got a couple Sekonic meters (248?) that work well. People praise the older selenium Westons, and they're great for nostalgia, but I find them hard to read and wouldn't trust the old cells as far as I could throw them. Best bet is get a newer meter designed after mercury cells became obsolete.

We all want full frame sensors, or maybe an 8x10 Deardorff, but one trick for getting more DOF is to go to a smaller sensor camera. I've shot some stuff using an old Panasonic FZ-20 that would have been impossible with even a DX sensor.

When you're starting out it's easy to get bogged down in rules or generalities that may not work until you get your whole process under control. You probably won't be making larger prints yet, maybe 5x7 or smaller. Enlargers are often too bright for good control at those sizes, so stop down as said above. That's stopped down beyond where the lens will perform at its best, but control over the print is more important. I don't do stepped test strips, finding I need to see more of the image to judge. There are also some paper behaviors that cause a stepped strip not to be equal to the same continuous exposure. A 1/2" wide strip, maybe 5" long is a handy size, and I just zero in on exposure one at a time. Very important- do not pull your prints from the developer based on appearance. Pick a recommended development time, say 1 minute, and do not deviate from that. Ever. Control the appearance of your print using exposure time and contrast setting (graded paper or filter or filter head) only. Paper black is important because you'll never get good blacks until you understand it and expose sufficiently to get it, but I offer one caution. True maximum paper black, the absolute blackest the paper is capable of, viewed under bright light, is too black, and makes no improvement in print quality. Getting it requires sub-optimal negatives in other regards. Use what I'd call "sufficiently black", as described above under normal (moderate) lighting conditions, but not trying for the last possible few percent.

Though I love B&W wet process, color and digital were made for each other. Digital has raised the bar so far that you could waste both your fortune and the rest of your days and not get as good a result. I can see merit in scanning color film, especially for larger formats, but maintaining and getting good results from a color printing darkroom is for people with way too much time and money on their hands.

I do a lot of macro and am convinced that a pure manual focus is almost essential. That said, you're at the mercy of simple optical laws. DOF will be limited and you have to arrange your shot accordingly. Ben mentions diffraction and IMO not enough people think about that. It really does degrade image quality at small apertures. Remember that as you extend a lens out for close focus, the effective aperture gets smaller, though with our complex modern zooms I don't know how much of a factor it it. I sometimes put up with some blur just so the quality of the sharp areas is higher. You might try one of the programs for stacking images having different focus points. They work surprisingly well, though I usually find the technique too much of a pita. There are some excellent examples on this site. You use what you have, but I noticed that I can sometimes get better DOF using a point 'n shoot having a very tiny sensor and short lens, rather than my normal DX setup. Conversely, if you were working in 4x5, DOF would be essentially zero for the same shot. This is a plain DX camera shot, with the thing of interest (a small motor) kept reasonably parallel to the camera. Blur works to advantage to highlight what's important. It's not essential to have everything in focus, and if you did, the photo might not be as interesting.

Well, I certainly wouldn't run one dry! Too apt to seize up forever. I could suggest 37 varieties of grease that would only confuse the issue, but instead offer an observation. Original Nikon greases didn't offer much, if any, damping. They also had no real tendency to drift- focus stayed where you put it. Grease is a mixture of base oils and a "soap" of various types. It's the oil that does the actual lubrication. Nikon grease had a fibrous feel to it, isolating any metal-to-metal contact, but imparting its own texture. Silicone (not silicon) grease is good if it doesn't creep, and many silicones have a tendency to do that. Dow, Nye and other higher tech products are good. Almost anything from the auto parts store is bad. Some will turn almost epoxy-like years down the road. OK, I'll suggest something specific. Try just a couple drops of Superlube 51004, a synthetic with a bit of Teflon. I use that in Micro-Nikkors where grease drag is a huge issue. They also have a light grease if you need something heavier.

Overdevelopment will also exaggerate pain- in the darkroom when you have to print it!

The 55 f/2.8 Micro Nikkor is the sharpest lens I own and I use it constantly at all distances. It never disappoints. As above on the thick grease- don't wait until it won't move! There's a how-to on service on my web site.

As above! You just keep trying, using minimum (zero) force and trying to keep things perfectly square. If you mess up the entry surfaces, it may never to together again. It's a Zen thing. Then it will be wrong, but that's a clue as to where the next attempt should be made.

This is a huge problem with instant gratification digital. Back in the days of film I'd have a half dozen or more wonderfully composed and perfect "shots of a lifetime" on a roll. It was the greatest feeling in the world, and would last right up until I finally developed them, seeing all the missed timing, bad exposures and blurs from shaky hands and slow shutter speeds.

I just tried to post a response to something and the entire site started flashing at me and went inactive. Not sure about that, but after reading a few forums this sure isn't the photo.net I remember.

Like John said, mix directly from syrup, don't make up the stock solution. Get a syringe that's marked in cc and calculate the dilutions. No doubt there's already a table for that somewhere.

+1 on what John says about HC-110. What I'm going to say is probably heresy, but the differences between developers when film is developed to the same contrast, are very small. That also assumes we're within its correct temperature range and the rest of the process is done properly. Choose your developer based on convenience or any other thing that makes you think highly of it, then put your time into establishing the right exposure and developing times to get the results you want. I'm not a Zone System user, but the calibration done for that, or even making some "ring arounds" will go a long ways towards success. There are developers that can make a larger difference in grain and other properties, but they aren't off-the-shelf.

Hey Bill, we both joined in '99! Alas, Dewey has been gone for many years, but he was one of the best things that ever happened to us. FWIW, my film background put me way ahead of the curve when things turned digital. I know how to do pretty much everything when it comes to the technical stuff, but how to take a good picture still eludes me much of the time.