Hi all!

I have recently bought my first 5x4 and I'm relearning my way through analogue photography.

This is a paper negative I exposed today and I have a couple of questions regarding exposure.


Toy cars - test by Moiz, on Flickr

Firstly, do you think it is exposed correctly? Personally, I think it may be a little on the dark side but possibly only half a stop but bear in mind this was a test to see how paper negatives react to colour so the two cars on the right, which were orange and red, were expected to be very dark. The three in the middle are green, blue and purple, from right to left. The digger is yellow and the surface top is a mid blue.

Secondly, I metered this with a Sekonic L-328 incident meter with a dome. The only light source was a large window behind the camera. I metered the scene, valuing the paper at EI3 and got a reading of f13.5 60secs. I set up and shot the image, except my cable release got stuck and I ended up exposing for 80secs.

Then, after I had packed up I realised I had not allowed for bellows extension factor (so much to remember!) which, a rough re-setup revealed to be 1.25stops.

Now I need to calculate what the actual EI of the paper is before doing some more tests and it is making my brain hurt. If we assume that the exposure is correct am I correct in thinking that I should rate the paper at, say, EI5?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Moiz

PS. the image has had no manipulation other than to be poorly scanned and inverted in PS.