[pure-silver] Re: fence row project negatives
----- Original Message ----- From: "Shannon Stoney" <shannonstoney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 6:04 PM
Subject: [pure-silver] fence row project negatives
My only comments are that the visual impression of contrast is mostly right. Also, for B&W one must learn to ignore color contrast because it will be lost in the picture. Old time photographers used a viewing glass to help the eye seen scene contrast. About a two stop neutral density filter will do or looking through a scrap of fogged and processed film. After a while you will be able to see in B&W and won't need this. Metering can be tricky. You can meter shadows and highlights separately and find the range but the setting in between is mostly a matter of judgment. This is where an incident light meter can be helpful since it assumes uniform distribution of gray values in the scene and will give you a read out based only on the light. This can be way off for some scenes but will give you a good middle value for most. I don't know what to suggest for the undeveloped film. If you are getting full detail in all parts of the image going to higher grade paper may be a better solution. As far as negative contrast simply increasing development time will increase contrast but there is a limit because at some point the fog will begin to come up. I think the same rule that applies to pushing film probably applies here. When pushing the increase in contrast is about one paper grade for each stop you push. About three stops is the most you can get. Higher contrast developer might help but I think might cause other problems. One can use a print developer like Dektol on film or a medium high contrast developer like Kodak D-19. D-19 was originally formulated for microscope images and metalurgical images. It is higher contrast than a normal developer but much lower than lith or process type developers. Dektol will give you higher contrast but is very fast in action on film. In the days of yore newspaper labs often used the same developer for both prints and negatives. Speed was much more important than quality, nonetheless the stuff works. Try high contrast paper before you modify the negative processing. Also, decreasing the dilution of the print developer may help a little. For Dektol, for instance, try 1:1 instead of 1:2. It won't do any harm and will last longer. 

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Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



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