Dave: I haven't actually gone to the trouble of plotting the results of my latest tests to be honest. It's a good idea though.
I learned a lot about sensitometry from the following books, roughly in this order:
Ansel Adams's books such as The Negative and The Print
The Practical Zone System by Chris Johnson
Platinum and palladium printing, by Dick Arentz
Beyond the Zone System, by the late lamented Phil Davis
Also I learned a lot from the BTZS.org forum, and from this list!
Working with different alt processes taught me a lot too, for example the concept that different emulsions on different papers have different scales. When I was just a silver printer, paper was just paper. I thought it was all the same and had always been the same. I took multigrade paper for granted, as just the way god intended photographic paper to be. It never occurred to me (before my alt process days) that before VC paper, each paper and emulsion had its own scale. I didn't even know what a paper scale was. I had a vague idea that you could change the scale of film though.
Seeing the Stouffer step tablet printed on different emulsions (cyanotype, pt/pd, POP, Van Dyke, and now silver) was a series of visual learning lightbulb moments. I remember particularly that the Van Dyke paper scale is very strange: it sort of falls off a cliff after just a few steps. I think it is very valuable for photographers to re-enact the history of photography in their own learning, to understand what it is: not just silver or color paper and modern coated lenses and Dektol and D-76, but rather a whole range of chemical reactions on light-sensitized paper, involving iron even, and not necessarily involving lenses even! It is literally drawing with light, in all kinds of ways.
I guess what I'm saying in answer to Becky's question is that I learned from books, from trial and error, and from talking to people, asking a lot of questions, and trying different papers and processes. Just reading Beyond the Zone System wouldn't have worked for me. In fact I find that book to be almost indecipherable. But when I started actually using Phil's testing procedure for film and paper and plotting the results in the Plotter software, a lot of lightbulbs went on. Maybe this is being a visual learner. I think most learning is not just visual, or just aural, or just book larnin'. It's a combination of experiences of different kinds. You watch somebody, you try to do it, you often fail, you go back and watch and ask and bother people some more, you read a book, you email the author, you read the book again, you do an experiment, and little by little, you understand more.
I couldn't have learned about sensitometry just from watching people because nobody I know around here is interested in it. They think I'm really geeky and too technical about all this, even the professors of photography, or especially them. Clay Harmon is the only other techno-photo-geek I know in Houston. But he lives an hour away. Once I watched him hot sync his palm pilot, though. That demystified the palm pilot and liberated me to use ExpoDev along with Phil's plotter program. (Which, as somebody memorably put it on this list not too long ago, is a quick and easy way to cock up a perfectly good negative. On further reflection, though, I realized that this is true of zone system theory generally, if applied too literally, ie "meter and include everything including those tiny patches of sky in between the leaves of the trees.")
I heard in a photo history lecture that Emerson (Peter Henry or something) abandoned photography when he found out about sensitometry. He thought sensitometry made a romantic, artistic process too scientific and rational. I thought that was extremely silly. But in another way he had a point: sensitometrical obsessions do give you more free rein to cock up perfectly good negatives. So, that's when I go back to the Holga. And do little dances holding it over my head, even.
--shannon
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On Nov 10, 2007, at 11:19 AM, Dave V wrote:
Becky, I'm sure I'm not typical of those that read this post. I have more science background than photographic (trying to fix that in retirement). I have a masters degree in Image Science from RIT and spent 36 years at EK from building photographic test systems to introducing new B&W papers. I have taught the science side of photography to thousands of people (most at Kodak) but also in 5 countries. You can't imagine how trilled I am in retirement to finally shoot images for myself rather than test targets or Shirley's. (Whoops! I just let a Kodak tidbit secret out of the bag. The first Kodak female model's name was Shirley. Every time someone needed model images, Shirley was called. And we called the process ....get some "Shirley's" on this new film or paper. When a new model came along, with a different face, she was still called Shirley. After almost a hundred years of shooting tests and models there have been a lot of Shirley's. ) You won't believe how boring it is to look at Shirley's.
The things Shannon is doing is using an instrument to measure density and a pencil to plot the results. A great learning experience and a lot more precise than "looking " at an image.. Some people have listed the books printed that describe the process. That said. Before Kodak introduced sensitometry and densitometry does anyone know how the manufacturing coating process was tested and controlled????
Dave
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I know this is a little OT but I read some of the posts on here and just wish I could sit and watch! I'm a visual learner so sometimes I don't catch on to what is being shared on the list. I need to SEE things done. Am I the only one on here that feels lost sometimes? How did all of you learn the things you know? Did you go to school, workshops, sit and watch someone that would let you watch?
Yours wanting to sit and watch all of you do your thing,
Becky Lynn
