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false_Aesthetic
27-Aug-2006, 17:50
Hey,

So I've been pouring over "The Negative" trying to figure out how I can control some of the blow out parts of my photographs.

I shoot at night and would love to keep some amount of detail in the highlights but I know it's hella hard to do while keeping detail in the shadows.

The solution for color stuff was to do 2 exposures and sew them together in photoshop. . . http://anti-aesthetic.net <--- examples

----

With B/W I know I have a bit more control when I process the film, but I have no idea where to start. It seems that a lot of "The Negative" was/is based around old film with thick emulsions---stuff I don't have access to.

Btw, I'm shooting FP4+, rating it for 100 and then adding about a half stop for reciprocity (exposures are about hovering around 6min. . .).

If I need to I'd be down for switching film if that would help.


Thanks

Tom

Capocheny
27-Aug-2006, 22:18
Tom,

If you can find a book called, "The Leica Manual, The Complete Book of 35mm Photography (15th edition)" by Morgan, Vestal, and Broecker... read pages 222 - 233 on The Zone System for 35 mm. Even though it was written for 35 mm... it's equally applicable to large format. Best of all? It's written in an easy to understand fashion and should help you with your questions.

In your situation... you need compression with respects to the number of zones. So, after measuring and placing your shadow areas, you'll need to measure the highlight area that you want to maintain detail in. If it falls above the 5 or 6 Zones... you'll need N-minus development.

Although The Negative does discuss this in detail, IMHO, the above manual seems to explain it in an easier and more straight-forward manner. It was, for me, easier to understand and follow than The Negative.

Just my 2-bits worth! :)

Cheers


Hey,

So I've been pouring over "The Negative" trying to figure out how I can control some of the blow out parts of my photographs.

I shoot at night and would love to keep some amount of detail in the highlights but I know it's hella hard to do while keeping detail in the shadows.

The solution for color stuff was to do 2 exposures and sew them together in photoshop. . . http://anti-aesthetic.net <--- examples

----

With B/W I know I have a bit more control when I process the film, but I have no idea where to start. It seems that a lot of "The Negative" was/is based around old film with thick emulsions---stuff I don't have access to.

Btw, I'm shooting FP4+, rating it for 100 and then adding about a half stop for reciprocity (exposures are about hovering around 6min. . .).

If I need to I'd be down for switching film if that would help.


Thanks

Tom

Ralph Barker
27-Aug-2006, 22:40
Tom, most of the discussions about contrast control with B&W relate to typical daylight scenes, with a moderate range of values. Night photography often falls into a different category as far as scene brightness ranges, as the scene often includes the light sources (street lights and such) directly. As such, I don't think you'll be able to totally compensate for that with exposure/development adjustments. But, you may be able to come closer than without those adjustments.

If you're scanning your negs and printing digitally, you might still decide to shoot two exposures and selectively combine them in Photoshop. I think it depends on what esthetic you want to follow, what you want to produce, and how you want to produce it.

Donald Qualls
28-Aug-2006, 07:54
I'll second Ralph on the problem of trying to preserve highlight detail in night shots. Not only do you have a huge scene brightness ratio (many times, the difference between the darkest important detail and, say, a lit shop window will be more than ten stops), but reciprocity failure tends to increase the contrast, because the film exposed to the brighter areas loses much less speed than the areas that see only the dimmer parts of the scene -- so the areas that need the least exposure get the most, effectively.

The only "traditional" solution available is to expose generously for the dimmest important details (+1 or even +2 stops is helpful, if you have the time -- this can run to many minutes or even plural hours per exposure in some cases), then give the strongest contraction development that can be reliably applied with your film and developer (N-2 is usable with most combinations, a few can still go N-3, but higher contractions simply don't work with modern films). It can also help a great deal to use films that have better reciprocity characteristics; Acros 100 is the best B&W available for this at this time, needing only 1/2 stop correction up to two minutes (unfortunately, a streetlight lit scene requires two minutes or more at f/16 in ISO 100) and one stop out to, IIRC, 1000 seconds. Beyond that, use of a film/developer combination with less or no shoulder (the classic pairing here is TMY in HC-110) can help preserve detail in the highlights, to you at least have a choice to burn in a bright area and have detail instead of a dead gray.

Once you have the negative, split-filter dodging and burning (for instance, burning the highlights during the high contrast exposure to bring up detail) can retrieve even more of the information, providing it got onto the negative in the first place.

Unfortunately, most scanners will lose detail in the high density highlights long before the film does, so the two exposures suggestion is probably the most practical if you scan your negatives rather than printing in a darkroom (you'll essentially be doing a film-captured version of HDR, selectively showing the two images in various transparency ratios to maintain detail throughout).