clouds

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

nd they regester 5 or more stops from shadow III then I should which, incease or decrease my developement time.

Neither, presumably you have made tests so that your zone VIII prints with detail on paper. So in this case if your shadows are zone III and your clouds fall 5 stops above your zone III they would be Zone VIII, so in this case your indicated development time would be N.

The problem is that back when Adams, Archer and White worked on this system, papers had a exposure scale of 1.2 to 1.3. It has been my experience that present papers have an exposure scale of 1. 0 to 1.1. If you are following the ZS as explained by Adams et al, then you are most likely getting negatives that are too contrasty for your paper and probably are spending too much time burning, if you have tree branches or something sticking into the area of the clouds I am sure you are getting frustrated by dodging them while trying to burn the clouds.

[James O. Kenney]

Thanks for all the information. Now I hope there are some clouds this weekend to photograph

[Larry Gebhardt]

I find that if I give N-2 development to fit the clouds in a normal range I frequently have the subject too flat. So I favor giving the film the developement needed to fit the main subject tones where I want them and let the clouds float above - sorry for the bad pun. Then burn in the sky when printing. Or better yet use a graduated neutral density filter as mentioned above.

[David A. Goldfarb]

When the clouds are good and the light is right, I seem to do okay with normal or N-1 development and a medium yellow or orange filter (I think this one was orange)--



But after printing my first albumen prints last week, I'm really enthusiastic about printing landscapes in albumen, which is self-masking. As I understand it, this should work with other printing-out processes as well. The idea is that as the shadows come up, the density at the surface slows the rate of printing-out in the dense areas, while the highlights continue to come in. This scan doesn't really do justice to the print, which retains detail everywhere, but it's the sort of scene that would need a contrast mask or a fair amount of dodging and burning to work in a silver print. This is TMX processed for albumen (about N+3 compared to what I would do for silver) in D-76 (1+1), with no contrast masking, dodging or burning--

[robc]

1. incident reading is useless for metering clouds.

2. spot meter brightest part of cloud and place on zone 8. Any higher and you will lose detail in the cloud highlights.

3. if placing cloud highlight on zone 8 places land on too low a zone then you have a problem. using n minus development will just kill contrast in the clouds. SO make two images, one exposed for clouds and one exposed for shadow areas in the land. Merge two negs when printing. This assumes you have a tripod but this is a LF forum so I guess you probably have.

4. NB underside of clouds are usually in diffused shadow except at sunset so they will have a lot of blue light in them. Using a yellow, orange or even red filter will make bringing out detail in clouds much easier. Often only a yellow is required otherwise the effect can be overly dramatic. It really depends on what you are looking for.

5. extended red film such as ilford sfx and a yellow filter should reveal a lot of cloud detail, thought sfx is not available in large format if at all now.

[Ken Lee]

Like so many things, clouds often look best at dawn and dusk, because the light paints them more softly and with greater depth than in mid-day.

[Brian Ellis]

"I only shoot black and white film and I am rather new to the zone system, but I still get confused with the n + or - part of it. If I put my shadow in Zone III and then measure the highlight of the clouds, the big puffy white ones , and they regester 5 or more stops from shadow III then I should which, incease or decrease my developement time."

Assuming that you are trying to keep a little texture in the clouds rather than having them appear as bright white blobs, decrease. You're trying to reduce the brightness of the clouds, which means you need to reduce their density in the negative. Once the exposure is made the usual way of reducing highlight density in the negative is to reduce development time. After you do your zone system development time tests (or have The View Camera Store do them for you which is what I've done for the last five or so years) you'll be able to do this with some degree of precision.

As an aside, many people find that following the "standard" zone system advice of putting the darkest area in which you want to retain detail on Zone III leads to underexposed negatives even after using their tested EI. Bruce Barnbaum talked about this in one of his articles in Photo Techniques magazine a few years ago. I put that area on Zone IV rather than III and if that causes the brightest area in which I want detail to go above Zone VII then I use minus development (and increase the exposure by a third, half, or full stop depending on how much above Zone VII the brightest area is). If your negatives are properly exposed then keep doing what you're doing but if you're getting a lot of negatives where the middle gray and darker areas look underexposed you might try using Zone IV instead of III for the darkest detailed shadow areas.

[Brian Ellis]

"I find that if I give N-2 development to fit the clouds in a normal range I frequently have the subject too flat. "

Are you adjusting your exposure to take the planned minus development into account? When minus development is planned exposure usually needs to be increased above that indicated by the meter to prevent the middle and shadow areas from being underexposed (and therefore flat). For N -2 development you need to increase a lot. I don't have my my tables handy and I almost never use N -2 development but as I recall you increase expsoure by about a full stop with that big a decrease in development time.

[robc]

just for example, here is an image of just clouds made on 35mm with ilford sfx. The image was exposed for the highlights and not the shadows. If I remember correctly, a yellow filter was used. Development was normal.

clouds

land can just be seen in bottom corners!

[Ken Lee]

That link is faulty. Did you intend to append something more to it ?