Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/09/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Your suggestions about the _brick of film testing_ are right - nothing else is going to give you peace of mind, unless you find out _the true behaviour_ of your negative material! What was right about _old_ (not at all _bad_) films (like Tri-X), is not necessarily true about the new generation films (like T-Max, Delta), so I think you should go ahead with your experiments, find out the right dilution/graininess balance. After all, graininess is a matter of taste. And printing (not scanning) your negatives will give you all the proof you need! (In order to make the whole process shorter you may even try printing your b/w control stuff on colour paper in some regular commercial photofinishing lab that allows the customers (you) supervise the process (stand behind the operator and instruct him about your needs). Only then you should be able to know the behaviour of colour paper used in the process, too. Martin Could those of you who do a lot of darkroom work talk to me about this dilute developer thing? I was sort of under the impression that longer developer times resulted in a general increase in the size of film grain. Generally I'm looking to push grain size down as much as possible. I tend to be using Delta 100 and Delta 400 (shot at 200) and Delta 3200 (shot at 1600) and processing in XTOL. Over the weekend I shot TMAX for the first time and I'll be interested to see what happens with it. I figure using its own developer is the best trick for it, right? I know these are probably pretty basic and old questions but I'm trying to grapple with the science that's involved here Best regards, Adam Bridge PS: This is probably my own cheapness at work but it bugs me to have to do tests on 24 exposure rolls. I know that I should be processing test shots in the same way that I'll be doing my real rolls - but everything screams: wasting money wasting money at me. Sigh. I assume to do my own tests I should buy a brick of film (which I assume will all be from the same production run - is this assumption correct?) and then create a standard test scene that has a generous dynamic range to it, shoot it the same way every time, and then process the film in a variety of different ways (making careful notes along the way.) What I'm not sure about is how to then evaluate what I'm seeing in the negatives. Okay - now I've revealed my true inexperience at this - but hey - how else do I learn? <grin> Thanks for your answers. Adam Bridge - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html