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Is it worth shooting in B+W?

A

antiochus66

Guest


i have only been processing b&w film myself for 6 weeks and i love it.
i would never give my film to a lab again,my method is self taught slapdash,sometimes idiotic but always fun. you will find great stocks available even 15 year old ebay out of date film will work...shooting black and white is just so cheap as well.
a couple of dollars for film,the chemicals i reuse all the time,you can even ue coffee and washing soda..
 
P

pfigen

Member
"That is my problem. I "properly" underexposed the K-14 slides and they look great to the eye, but the scanner can't seem to punch through them. I'll work on it some more."

K14 Kodachromes can have a real d-max of up to 3.8 and your scanner only can capture about 2.8 d-max, so it's no wonder you're losing the bottom three or four stops of detail on your scans. The ONLY way to scan Kodachrome is with a sensor that can record all the way down to a 3.8 or higher d-max and that, of course, means a photomultiplier tube and a drum scanner. There simply is no CCD scanner, no matter what the claims, that can scan anything above about a 3.0 d-max, even the much applauded Imacon.

"But maybe I'm more picky now."

Undoubtedly. That's a good thing.
 
Z

zzyzx

Guest
Why are you scanning at all? Why not just large format film and contact print at the size of the negative? It is still viable and results in excellent prints and a controlled, inexpensive workflow.

A few excellent prints are much nicer than bins of 'OK' work.

Keep it simple and concentrate on the image rather than the process.
 
S

Stuart Richardson

Active member
Contact prints are not for everyone. In fact, they make very little sense for most people. You need large format cameras (and ULF if you want anything bigger than a postcard), which do not lend themselves to all types of shooting...they don't do street or documentary, sports or anything that requires you to be spontaneous. And if you want to do larger print sizes, the camera cost goes through the roof, you are bound to a car or a studio, and film becomes a very specialized and expensive product to obtain, process and even load.
Contact printing also forces you to set the image size before you have taken the image -- there is not flexibility in that sense. Also, there is not nearly as much that you can do in a contact print workflow -- all contact prints are more or less straight prints. At the smaller sizes they are unpractical to dodge and burn with. And no scanner means no digital copy for the web and archival purposes, or any way to print it on an inkjet if that is the way you want to go.

Contact prints do have a beautiful look, but they are a very specialized process that does not suit 99.9% of photographers.
 
F

Francois_A

New member
Stuart Richardson said:
Contact prints are not for everyone. In fact, they make very little sense for most people. You need large format cameras (and ULF if you want anything bigger than a postcard), which do not lend themselves to all types of shooting...they don't do street or documentary, sports or anything that requires you to be spontaneous. And if you want to do larger print sizes, the camera cost goes through the roof, you are bound to a car or a studio, and film becomes a very specialized and expensive product to obtain, process and even load.
Contact printing also forces you to set the image size before you have taken the image -- there is not flexibility in that sense. Also, there is not nearly as much that you can do in a contact print workflow -- all contact prints are more or less straight prints. At the smaller sizes they are unpractical to dodge and burn with. And no scanner means no digital copy for the web and archival purposes, or any way to print it on an inkjet if that is the way you want to go.

Contact prints do have a beautiful look, but they are a very specialized process that does not suit 99.9% of photographers.
Click to expand...
Scanning an enlargement (or a contact print) made in the traditional darkroom is far less demanding from the scanner than scanning the negative. Even a cheap scanner would do the job. I have made 8x10 prints on an Epson 3800 from scanning 8x10 enlargements made from 4x5 neg; they are almost indistinguishable.

Even a bigger print could be scanned in sections and then reassembled in Photoshop. To extract all the information from a negative without having to do much manipulation in the darkroom, contact prints (or enlargements) could be made at various densities, then scanned and put on separate layers in Photoshop for creative control, HDR, etc.

With the use of RGB filters, colour photography is possible from exposing three B&W negatives, scanning the contact prints and importing the resulting images as RGB layers in Photoshop.

The point I am trying to make is that not only to ULF produces beautiful images when contact printed (especially on chloride paper like Azo), but they can be used also in a digital workflow.
 
P

pfigen

Member
I know I'll be shooting black and white film for as long as I can still get it. Digital B&W still doesn't look as good to my eye, but then I've only had about forty years of looking at prints. Living in L.A. there are still several labs that do good black and white and my preference is Schulman Photo Lab, where Russell Adams really caters to fine art shooters but welcomes all. I could process in my darkroom by for me it's more a matter of convenience to have Schulman process and proof. Got a package from them today and spun up a couple from last year. Yeah, sometimes I take a while to get around to sending the film in. These are both T-Max100 processed in T-Max and drum scanned on a Howtek 8000 with Trident. Mamiya 7. Probably a 50 on the Highway 6 and definitely an 80mm for the Station Fire plume.
 
P

pfigen

Member
I scanned a couple of old RZ Plus-X frames of Utah Phillips this afternoon and was thinking just how sad it would be if we couldn't get film anymore.
 
S

Stuart Richardson

Active member
Lovely shots! I particularly like the first one. Great tones...that is what I find most difficult to replicate on digital, it is more than just the characteristic curve..it really resists convincing replication.
 
G

gsking

New member
pfigen said:
"That is my problem. I "properly" underexposed the K-14 slides and they look great to the eye, but the scanner can't seem to punch through them. I'll work on it some more."

K14 Kodachromes can have a real d-max of up to 3.8 and your scanner only can capture about 2.8 d-max, so it's no wonder you're losing the bottom three or four stops of detail on your scans. The ONLY way to scan Kodachrome is with a sensor that can record all the way down to a 3.8 or higher d-max and that, of course, means a photomultiplier tube and a drum scanner. There simply is no CCD scanner, no matter what the claims, that can scan anything above about a 3.0 d-max, even the much applauded Imacon.
Click to expand...

I tried Dwaye's K-14 scanning...useless at under 2mp.

I ended up shooting them with my 12mp APS DSLR using a slide duplicator with decent results. I tried shooting them on my digital back, but couldn't get the image sharp for some reason.

I'm going to try sending some to Scancafe to see how they do as well.

Greg
 
P

pfigen

Member
I can't remember what scanner scancafe uses (I did call them once) but it's not a drum scanner, so you're going to run into the limitations of every ccd device - not being able to see into the shadow - about two f/stops worth compared to a vacuum tube sensor.
 
rayyan

rayyan

Well-known member
If you mean as opposed to color and covert in pp..Yes, Yes, Yes. imho opinion of course

Regards.
 
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R

ReeRay

Member
Stuart Richardson said:
Thanks ReeRay. Well, I tend to try to get exposure spot on and then control things in processing. A lot of people try to overexpose and then underdevelop, as the less time film is in the developer, the finer the grain. But overall I think you have the nicest negatives if you expose properly and give a full development using the right chemical. If you are worried about contrast, I find using a semi-compensating or compensating developer to be a good choice. If you are not careful, they can compress the tonal range, but in scanning this can actually be useful in getting a full dynamic range that the scanner can use.

Examples of compensating developers would be highly diluted rodinal (1:50 or greater, but seeing more of an effect at 1:100), diafine, diluted FX-39 or Xtol and so on. Basically you just want fairly low quantities of developer and fairly low agitation -- this allows the developer to exhaust at the highlights...highlights develop more quickly than the shadows, so a compensating developer evens things out by making the highlights slow down (they run out of "juice") while the shadows keep developing. This gives you good shadow detail without blowing your highlights.
Click to expand...
Just picking this up again.

I'm limited with developer over here and shipping in chemicals these days is nigh on impossible. However, there are a few sources.

I intend to use Acros 120 mainly and subsequently scan it on my Minolta Multi Pro. On this basis I wonder which developer you would recommend from this listing http://www.procolorlab.com/chaemical_1.html

Thanks in advance
 
S

Stuart Richardson

Active member
Of those chemicals, DD-X is probably the best choice. I can't read the site, but I am guessing it is also the most expensive as well...it is a very good developer though. If you don't want that, Ilfotec HC is probably your next best choice. Most of those other ones are paper developers though, not film developers. But anyway, Acros is quite a flexible film, so either should develop it rather well.
 
R

ReeRay

Member
Stuart Richardson said:
Of those chemicals, DD-X is probably the best choice. I can't read the site, but I am guessing it is also the most expensive as well...it is a very good developer though. If you don't want that, Ilfotec HC is probably your next best choice. Most of those other ones are paper developers though, not film developers. But anyway, Acros is quite a flexible film, so either should develop it rather well.
Click to expand...
Thank you so much for that - really appreciate your advices.

The DD-X is actually half the price of the Ilfotec HC i.e. $20 which I guess is OK.

Once again many thanks
 
A

Alan Fairhurst

Guest
Stuart Richardson said:
Thanks Scott, glad you liked them!

Greg -- Well, this is good news in a way. Your film should not look like this, so if things are fixed, you should be able to get good results. I am not sure exactly what is wrong here, but part of it may be sharpening in the scanner. When scanning, you want to make sure that all the sharpening in the scanner program is turned off. Scanners do not sharpen well, certainly not as well as photoshop. So it is best to turn off all processing tools that the scanner software may have.

Try to scan as flat as possible, while still setting the black and white points at the edge of usable information. (i.e. don't set the black and white points at 0 and 255 if the information only starts at 25 and stops at 215, but don't clip black and whites yet...you can do that in photoshop). Make sure that all dust and scratches programs and ICE are off with black and white film -- the silver clumps can interfere with the IR beam, and lead to weird effects.

Another possibility here is that your films have been reticulated. This can occur when there are large temperature changes during processing. It has the effect of exaggerated grain in subtle cases and an actual cracked appearance in extreme cases. What happens is the emulsion of the film swells and becomes very delicate when it is wet. If the temperature changes a lot (say 10 degrees or more) rapidly, it can rapidly shrink the film base, thereby cracking the emulsion. An easy way to do this would be to process your film at a normal temperature (or even a warmer than normal temperature) and then wash it straight from the cold water tap. Depending on where you live, this can be much colder. For example, I process at 68 degrees, but the cold water from my tap is around 50 degrees. If I were to wash my film in the cold water, direct from processing, it would result in reticulation.

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/photomicrography/bwprocessingerrors.html
This page is a good reference of black and white processing problems.

I have a feeling it is probably more the scanning technique than the negative though. If you have a microscope or strong loupe, you might be able to verify if the negative is finely grained. A better thing to do would be to find a friend or lab that you know does good black and white scans, and see if when they scan your neg, that the results are good.

Finally, the easiest thing to do is probably just to go to your lab and say and tell them you are concerned that the negs might be processed improperly, and would like them to tell you how they process (what chemicals etc) and if they have a scanner or system where they can verify that they are done correctly. If you are using a professional lab, they should have no problem doing this. Just don't make it accusatory and they shouldn't have a problem with it.
Click to expand...
I also feel that the problem here is reticulation. Try adjusting the temperature of the developer, fixer and wash water to fairly close limits. Also scanners can give peculiar effects with grain and lose much resolution. I would recommend going all analogue. The effect is a revelation - similar to the effect on me when a tutor at College prepared some prints using a 15" x 12" plate camera - mind blowing, you look at the most expensive 35 mm camera with a jaundiced eye!
 
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