Sigh. I wish Fuji was not such a ridiculous company... and that they'd offer Acros in 8x10 in the U.S.
Sigh. I wish Fuji was not such a ridiculous company... and that they'd offer Acros in 8x10 in the U.S.
That seems pretty amazing Joana. How was that shot and processed?
The way to get large ranges of light onto a negative is best described in Ansel Adams book "The Negative" and known as the Zone System.
What Ansel Adams describes applies to wet printing, so I have experimented and changed the "rules" to suit scanning better - the main difference being that the original system is meant to give a negative with around 5 stops of range whilst, for scanning, I have determined that I can work with a range of 8 stops (from zone 2 to zone 10).
Essentially, you need to determine the Subject Brightness Range of the scene before you. If that range is greater than the target range for your printing process, then you need to adjust the exposure and plan to adjust the development to compensate.
For example, for scanning, I might find that I have a SBR of 10 stops, from zone 2 for the deepest shadow detail. This means I need to determine the zone 5 exposure at 3 stops less than the zone 2 reading and then over-expose the shot by 1/2 stop per stop over the 10 stop target range. So, for the station office scene I used a zone 2 exposure of 30 seconds, I needed to reduce this to 4 secs for zone 5 and then increase that to 8 secs to allow for planned under-development.
When developing, it is usually reckoned to reduce the time by 15% per stop of over-exposure.
But nothing beats taking those ideas as a basis for experimentation to determine what your particular film and developer combination gives you.
Ilford Delta 100 is also pretty amazing for wide exposure range, especially for scanning. I once, accidentally, under-exposed a shot by 4 stops and still managed to get some sort of scanned image from, what looked like, a clear sheet of film!!! And that was without any kind of development compensation. Had I compensated, I think I might have got a printable imageOriginally Posted by bobwysiwyg
ACROS all the way....
Strangely, I've been finding that Delta 100 doesn't require much reciprocity correction at all for exposures 20 minutes or less; a far cry from Tri-X Pan! I certainly agree with Joanna about Delta's ability to retain info (on scanning) with gross exposure errors (which I often did while compensating for non-existent reciprocity failure).
Here's one on 8x10 Delta about 45 minutes after sunset.
Wonderful shot Rory, demonstrating why digital will never beat film in the smoothness of gradation
A C41 film would help a lot, but I see XP2 is limited to 35 & 120.
TXP 320 is a good choice for controlling the hi lites and higher speed emulsions tend to be less contrasty than the slower. For development, try two bath Pyrocat HC
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