Black and white film in bright/ high contrast cond

[Simon_5087]

Hello-

I'm about to go and shoot some film in conditions i'm not use to, i.e very sunny/bright, yes i'm based in England!!! I'm unsure as to what b/w (C41) film and colour (E6) for that matter will be best for high contrast. I'll be using a yellow or orange filter on b/w and polariser on colour. I'll be shooting mainly architectural, buildings and detail. I'll like to keep clear of grainy film, detail's good. Any advice is GREATLY appreciated. Thanks

[Ole Tjugen]

I didn't even know there were any LF C41 B/W films available?

Your filter choises confuse me a little too - everything you have mentioned will increase contrast...

Grain isn't normally a problem with LF either. Personally I'd use FP4+, since it has the latitude to handle high contrast.

[Eric Biggerstaff]

You can pre-expose or "flash" the film to help control high contrast situtations ( I think this can be done with the b/w film you mention).

[Steve Feldman]

Sunny days?

Bright contrast??

England???

Expose for the shadows. Develope for the highlights.

More simply put - Over expose slightly from normal and develope about 20% less than normally. Called -N or expansion developement. C-41 in LF doesn't exist that I know of. Any B & W emulsion is ok.

[Bruce Watson]

Just about any B&W film can handle whatever you can do to it. But I'm with Ole - what C41 B&W film did you find in sheet film?

As to the color side, just about any E6 film is going to have trouble with the large subject brightness range (SBR) that bright sun implies. IMHO you'd be better off (that is, more successful in capturing a large SBR) with a color negative film (c41).

All that said, how you treat the film depends on your downstream process. If your B&W film is headed into the darkroom for enlargement onto photopaper, then you'd be well advised have your N- exposures and development times worked out before you expose the film. Else you may well suffer in the darkroom trying to print the resulting dense highlights while still maintaining your shadow detail.

If your downsteam process is to scan and print digitally, you would be well advised to have your exposure and developement times worked out to produce a somewhat thinner than "normal" negative. This will make it a bit easier to scan, and result in a bit smaller grain.

So... given your requirements for architecture and less grain, I'd go with whatever medium speed film you can find. As Ole says, FP4+ is a good choice. For a C41 film, I lean toward 160Portra. I don't have a clue for an E6 film, sorry.

[Ed Richards]

> If your downsteam process is to scan and print digitally, you would be well advised to have your exposure and developement times worked out to produce a somewhat thinner than "normal" negative. This will make it a bit easier to scan, and result in a bit smaller grain.

That is what I though until this morning, when my step wedge arrived.

http://largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/topic/502877.html

At least for B&W, the scanner will have no trouble with a high Dmax, so the best negative for scanning will have the widest contrast range. Just expose enough to get detail in the shadows and worry less about where the highlights are going.

[Pete Watkins]

Silverprint in London offer two C41 process Fuji films in 8 x 10, NPS & NPL.

[Eric Leppanen]

For B&W, I'd chose FP4+ as has been suggested above. It provides the greatest flexibility for managing contrast.

For color neg film, I'd suggest either NPS or Porta 160NC.

If you must shoot E6, Astia 100F (perhaps pulled a half stop) is the lowest contrast Fuji transparency film available. I'm less familiar with the Kodak transparency films.

[Bruce Watson]

Ed,

I used to think that having a higher density range for negatives was a good thing for scanning. I changed my mind after doing some experiments.

It's not a question of what the scanner can read through. I've got a drum scanner and can read through just about anything short of 3mm lead sheeting ;-) The problem with developing a Tri-X negative, for example, to a density of 3.0 is what it does to the film. In general, as density increases, so does grain size. In general, as density increases, sharpness decreases. I've got the really dense, really grainy, not very sharp 4x5 Tri-X negatives to show it too. Scanning these beasts isn't a problem - the scanner performs flawlessly. The problem is the image on the film being cooked, and showing it.

The joy of scanning is that the scanner will take whatever density range you give it on film, and convert it into the numerical range it uses (my scanner is 12 bits, so the range is 0-4095) for output. If you give it a small density range, the scanner stretches it out to fit into the range 0-4095. If you give it a large density range, the scanner compresses it to fit into the range 0-4095.

That said, we agree on one thing - expose for the shadows and let the highlights fall where they may when scanning. However, I develop less than I would for darkroom printing - my "N" development for scanning is about what a darkroom worker would call "N -1.5". This after about a year of experimentation under lots of actual real world conditions, turns out to be about optimum for me.

Now, you don't need to, nor should you, believe me. It's easy enough to run the tests yourself, and you should. The only way I can convince myself of these things is to to do the work. I suspect others react similarly, so as they say, YMMV.

[Ed Richards]

Tri-X might be a critical difference. I am using Tmax 100 in Xtol, which I think produces much less overall contrast, esp in the mid range. I also suspect that it has much less grain at equal levels of over exposure and thus scans sharper than Tri-X. I can over expose/over develop quite a bit before things get softer. Tri-X is faster and has other qualities, it just may be more picky for scanning. (What got me thinking about this was scanning some negatives which I had overexposed quite a bit to get the shadows under some trees, with a building with a shiny tin roof. I realized that I was never saying, Gee I wish I had not over exposed that sheet, but I was saying, Gee, I wish there was more light under that tree, a lot.)

That and one's idea of proper exposure is pretty individual - my notion of over exposure, which was honed on Kodachrome and digital, might be your just right.:-)

[Struan Gray]

Bear in mind that Bruce has a drum scanner with excellent signal to noise performance. Thus he can scan a flat negative and increase the contrast using a mixture of analogue and digital gain and still end up with a nuanced image. On cheaper scanners the noise levels are higher, so when you stretch the contrast of a flat negative you get posterisation and blotchy tones. I use TMAX-100 and Portra NC scanned on an Epson 3200, and Ed's method is more consistently the least bad. In LF I can live with the consequences of overexposure when I make an analogue print or get a good scan made, although it is more annoying in MF.

[Ed Richards]

Bruce raises an interesting question - how much difference in grain do you see across the negative density ranges? Even in an over exposed negative, the middle and lower ranges will be receiving the same exposure as the highlights in a normally exposed negative - do you see significant differences in grain within a negative?

Bruce - Now what we know you have a drum scanner, all becomes clear - for those of us with a consumer scanner, grain is less of an issue because we cannot resolve it.:-) Any chance we could persuade you to post a scan of a Stouffer step wedge to give us an idea of how accurate they are so we can compare this with our scans to see how much smearing we are getting with our scanners?

[Bruce Watson]

Straun,

I would think that a flatter, less dense negative would work to the advantage of CCD scanners too. The reason being that as you decrease density, you are effectively increasing the signal to noise ratio for the scanner. That is, you are moving the signal away from the noise floor of the CCD. Whether or not this idea translates to real life, I've never studied (sold my flatbed years ago), but it sounds like it doesn't work for you. I'll trust your judgement.

Ed,

Can't. Don't have a Stouffer step wedge to scan. Or any step wedge for that matter. The darn things are expensive, and film, paper, and ink are a higher priority for me right now.

[Struan Gray]

Bruce, you are right in that the darkest areas of a thin negative do have better signal to noise in a raw scan. However, you have pushed the highlights closer to whatever value the scanner measures for film base plus fog, and when you expand the contrast to make the highlights print white you multiply the noise along with the image data. On cheap scanners the noise is not just random, and so it is visually more intrusive than simple uncorrelated white noise, or for that matter, film grain. See this thread for typical results:

http://largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/topic/502454.html

Note also that the noise floor in cheap scanners is optimised for slide film, and you rarely get close to it with a negative. Some scanners increase the analogue gain and/or integration time negative mode to try and compensate for this, but marketing and reviews concentrate on shadow detail on Velvia, so that's where the budget goes.

[Ed Richards]

Bruce,

> Don't have a Stouffer step wedge to scan. Or any step wedge for that matter. The darn things are expensive

Ah, but postage is cheap and it is plastic and will not break. Send me an email with your address and I will send you mine if you are interested in scanning it. You can then post it back to me. It is not something I use on a regular basis.

richards@lsu.edu

[paulr]

"However, I develop less than I would for darkroom printing - my "N" development for scanning is about what a darkroom worker would call "N -1.5". This after about a year of experimentation under lots of actual real world conditions, turns out to be about optimum for me."

This is my experience too.

I got very lucky in that the paper I liked most was on the contrassty side and had a prominent shoulder and dark midtones. (fortezo grade 3). When I tuned my processing for this paper I ended up with negs that were low contrest, high key, and had very little toe. These same qualities make getting good scans almost effortless.

In fact, I like these negs even better for scanning, because I can get sharper results than I could from the darkroom. When I switched to tmax 100 and finally settled on a develper for it, I loved the smooth tones, the shape of the scale,and the fine detail and fine grain. But I felt it had a bit less edge definition than my previous film (agfa pan). Now that's irrelevent. As long as the detail is there, I can bring the edges back.