[Leica] Re: Pulling film plus a brief self-introduction.

[mark_wilkins at yahoo.com (Mark R. Wilkins)]

On Jun 12, 2005, at 3:15 AM, Mark Rabiner wrote:

> If you were discussing Nuclear physics I'd say "fine" but I happen  
> to be
> into photography specifically the printing aspics of it and I  
> understand it
> fairly thoroughly AND Ansel whose books I've read every version of  
> decade by
> decade and this just doesn't register to me at all as being on the  
> map.
> I think what we are doing here on the LUG on such topics is making  
> a real
> effort to make sense.


Well, sure.  All I was doing was pointing out that pulling is the  
same as the stuff you can find in "The Negative" about increasing  
exposure meaning increased shadow detail and decreased development  
meaning thinner highlights.

(Ansel doesn't exactly talk about "pulling," he just talks about  
picking exposures and development times that have no relation to the  
film's data sheet and give plenty of shadow detail and moderate  
contrast.  Same difference.)

Of course, Ansel's techniques (like developing by inspection) don't  
work too well with 35mm, and the people you see asking for a one-stop  
pull at the lab or trying to do it at home with tanks in the bathtub  
probably aren't controlling their process well enough to give good  
results.  Enough bad results and it starts to seem like meaningless  
voodoo.

Anyway, this is one case where thinking of developing film as a  
chemical process gives hints about how one might make things work  
better (like pulling by lowering development temperature instead of  
shortening the time), though they're only hints and there are plenty  
of reasons why they may not work.  Even so, pulling film is pretty  
much guaranteed to make it much harder to control the process, which  
is reason enough to move on unless you're highly motivated to get  
extra shadow detail at any cost.  And, it's also why trusting many  
labs to do it might not be a good idea unless they do it all the time.

I apologize for not laying the groundwork for that before throwing it  
into my message, and also for getting too verbose to follow easily.   
However, just because reducing development to a chemical process  
isn't on the map, so to speak, of most photographers, that doesn't  
mean that it isn't a valid way to think about how to make exotic  
processes work well.  Because it's difficult and relatively uncommon,  
I'd call pulling development an exotic process.

Obviously, Mr. Rabiner, you're an experienced and capable  
photographer, and if you don't believe in pulling then it's not  
necessary to get good results.  I don't do it myself either.

As for being new to the list, I've been on it since January, reading  
and keeping my mouth shut.  I'm an amateur photographer who sometimes  
takes a good picture by luck, and I work in digital lighting on  
computer-animated motion pictures for a large company.  I also have a  
physics background, which breeds a very technical mindset about  
creating images, though I like to think I'm not aesthetically  
useless.  If Feli DiGiorgio, with whom I once worked for a while, is  
reading this, it's a different company now. :)  And, I own a Leica  
with a few recent lenses, which is the absolute outer limit of what I  
can afford.

-- Mark