Re: [Leica] B&W with no darkroom

[Dante Stella <dante@umich.edu>]

Having been forced to do it in law school, I can suggest that the most fun
way is to grab a ton of T400CN (or XP2 super, as your preference may be)
and blast away.  Take your film to a C41 place, have them print them off
on color paper, black and white, whatever (this is a cheap, high quality -
at least for the digital age - proof).  Get ready to scan the negs.

Put a SCSI card in your G4.  Buy an old Sprintscan 35SE (500-600).  It'll
do 2700 dpi both ways.  Scan away.

You can do your own negs without a darkroom, and I'm sure some people
would gripe that you should use "real" B&W film, but in reality, this is
the least messy, most fun way.  For scanning, T400 and XP2 have nice range
and very very fine grain.

Dante

On Sat, 13 Jan 2001, Adam Bridge wrote:

> I'd like to explore B&W with my Leica but I have no dark room and, I have to
> admit, really no interest in having one.
> 
> What's the alternative? I guess I could process my own film, that doesn't
> really take a darkroom does it and then scan the negatives into photoshop.
> 
> Can I reliably send out B&W to a lab?
> 
> What sort of film scanner should I be looking for given that I'm a novice. I
> have a Mac G4/450/MP that is my video editing system so I have tons of
> horsepower and about 200 GB of disk along with lots of archival storage, the
> least of which is CD-RW. So storing and managing images isn't an issue.
> 
> I'd love recommendations about how to procede. I'd like to become good
> enough to make a quality B&W image.
> 
> I plan on doing most of my color work with a digital camera at this point.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Adam Bridge
>