Hi all Noobie at LF and need help please

[petemack]

HI everyone, my name is Pete,

I am a complete first timer at Large Format, and to be quite honest i have absolutely no idea how to actually use/work/ expose for the types of shots that i have to take.

I have a brief for my college course and it involves taking interior shots - architecture and exterior shots, anyways we had the colleges 5x4 camera out and went on our merry way to take some nice interior shots at the local shopping mall, lovely curves and geometric shapes perfect i thought. We metered for the darkest place and the exposure was like 2mins at f64, we added 30 seconds (so 2mins 30secs)
Thought that this was going to be a great shot, developed it and it turns out that the negative is to light :( totally gutted

anyway, i was looking for someone to point me in the right direction for reaserch etc as i have looked at youtube, but there doesnt seem to be anything useful on it.


Many thanks Pete

[Rick Floyd]

Get thee to all the information found here: http://www.largeformatphotography.info/. The information is the most comprehensive available on the web.

[ic-racer]

HI everyone, my name is Pete,

I am a complete first timer at Large Format, and to be quite honest i have absolutely no idea how to actually use/work/ expose for the types of shots that i have to take.

I have a brief for my college course and it involves taking interior shots - architecture and exterior shots, anyways we had the colleges 5x4 camera out and went on our merry way to take some nice interior shots at the local shopping mall, lovely curves and geometric shapes perfect i thought. We metered for the darkest place and the exposure was like 2mins at f64, we added 30 seconds (so 2mins 30secs)
Thought that this was going to be a great shot, developed it and it turns out that the negative is to light :( totally gutted

anyway, i was looking for someone to point me in the right direction for reaserch etc as i have looked at youtube, but there doesnt seem to be anything useful on it.


Many thanks Pete

If the meter was set to the film ISO then you need to select a 'middle gray' area to make your reading. The way you were metering would produce pretty dark negatives. If they were really too light, then maybe the shutter is not opening, or you forgot to remove the darkslide.

[Filmnut]

Lots of things can go wrong in LF, as one doesn't have all the neat technology the new small format cameras do that help to give us a more foolproof system!
How was the neg processed? Was the temp correct, and the developer fresh and uncontaminated? Even a drop or two of stop or fix will kill the dev.
Take a few quick shots, making sure of all of the basics, and develop them before you shoot some important stuff.
The other thing, is to bracket your exposures, do one a stop over and a stop under.
I know it wastes film, and LF film is expensive, but there's times it's worth it.
I have shot 4X5 for many years and I struggle with the cost of the extra film, but I have lost many shots over the years, simply because I didn't have a backup. So now I always bracket a bit.
If you can scan a problem shot and post it here, the community can sometimes help to idenitify the problem, or at least help to narrow it down. If you do this, try to give us as much info about how it was done as possible.
Hope this helps!
Keith

[Lachlan 717]

If the meter was set to the film ISO then you need to select a 'middle gray' area to make your reading. The way you were metering would produce pretty dark negatives. If they were really too light, then maybe the shutter is not opening, or you forgot to remove the darkslide.


Pete, in very basic terms, you were correct in metering the darkest area that you wanted detail in. However, you should have subtracted 2 stops' value in order to keep shadows as shadows (in other words, use a shutter speed 4 times quicker). As Ic-Racer has mentioned, metering off the dark areas will cause overexposure. If you are not sure why this occurs, your meter wants to "make" the metered area a mid-grey (obviously, it has no way of knowing what you're looking at!!). Thus, the reading it gives for dark areas will cause them to be "overexposed" to the point of being mid grey.

So you might understand this better, consider metering snow. Your meter wants to expose the "brightness" of the area to be a mid grey. Thus, it will give you a reading that will "underexpose" the snow to come out grey, not white. So, with snow, you need to do the opposite of the dark areas: you need to add time in order to push the greys up into the highlight zone.

(If you really want to understand this a bit better, have a look at this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_System). It will give you a bit of an understanding of what this is all based on).

Also, were you using a wide angle lens? If so, you probably didn't need to shoot at f64. A 90mm lens on a 5x4 will produce a fair amount of Depth of Field at f16/f22, saving you 4 or 3 stops accordingly.

The benefit of this is that you might bring your exposure duration back enough to overcome reciprocity failure of the film you're using (saving the non-precise 30 seconds that you added to the original exposure). You might also get sharper images at these f-stops, but that is a whole different story.

[Jfnphotography]

Pick up the book "Using the View Camera" by Steve Simmons this will give you a lot of good information. If you are new to film I would start off with Polaroid’s or having someplace process your first few sheets of film until you get good results. Then try developing your own film. You don't want to many variables at one time, was it my exposure or my developing or both. Using a 4x5 is fun there is just an expensive learning curve to get started.

[N Dhananjay]

Assuming all your equipment is working correctly and no pilot error (i.e., shutter working OK, timing OK etc.), I think the error here is that you did not correct for reciprocity. Once your exposure times get longer than 1 second, your emulsion speed actually slows down considerably. The rule of thumb is that at exposures longer than 1 second, you need to add one stop, exposures longer than 10 seconds, you add 2 stops, and exposure longer than 100 seconds, you add 3 stops. It sounds like you had an indicated exposure of 120 seconds (assuming you did meter the shadows and placed them at Zone 3). This means you would need to add 3 stops - so your actual exposure should have been along the lines of 16 minutes. In reciprocity regions, contrast also increases, so you would need to compensate development to reduce contrast. Think of it as follows - if your shadows needed 1 second, you would need to add a stop to get sufficient exposure in the shadows. However, the highlights are not in the reciprocity region, but are getting a longer exposure as well - thus an increase in highlight density and an increase in contrast.

Hope this helps. Cheers, DJ

[petemack]

wow folks!!!

Thanks very much for all the help, what a knowledgeable bunch
:)

[Drew Bedo]

I tend to bracket my shots up and down a little. Did you adjust your exposure for bellows extension? As the front standard is moved forward to fosus on subjects closer than infinity, the intensity of light falling on the film is lower (inverse-square law). This must be adjusted for when making exposure choices.

[Dirk Rösler]

Welcome to LF. You may also wish to just practice metering. This can be done with a small camera set to manual, film or digital. Meter your scene as you would do for a LF shot, then take the shot with these settings and evaluate. Once you nail exposure, there only 999 things left that can go wrong when shooting LF ;)

[Andrew O'Neill]

So, you metred the shadow and your reading was 2 minutes at f/64? Did you transfer this exposure reading to the camera? If so, then your shadow would be about middle gray, possibly resulting in a bullet proof negative. Sounds like a reciprocity issue. Which film are you using?

[Lachlan 717]

So, you metred the shadow and your reading was 2 minutes at f/64? Did you transfer this exposure reading to the camera? If so, then your shadow would be about middle gray, possibly resulting in a bullet proof negative. Sounds like a reciprocity issue. Which film are you using?

Andrew,

If you set your shadows to mid gray, wouldn't you push your mids to highlights and highlights to blown-outs (i.e. overexposed by at least 2 stops, depending on how dark the metered shadow Pete chose was)?

[Andrew O'Neill]

Yes, one would think so. But we don't know what EI or film was used. For me, a 2 minute exposure with HP5+ would have to be multiplied by a factor of 5 to compensate for reciprocity. That's 10 minutes. A factor of 5 is 2 and 1/3 stops, I think. So, I think he ran into reciprocity effects.
If not, then it could be a number of other factors. A mistake in metering, bad shutter, bad developer...

[David de Gruyl]

And if it is Tri-X, it is worse. For a 100 second exposure reading, assuming that is correct, you end up with 1200 second (20 minutes) exposure and 30% less developing.

At a 120 second reading, I would probably have opened the aperture the three shots rather than wait around for 35 minutes or whatever to get a decent exposure. Tri-X has a terrible repciprocity curve, and you should look at a different film if this comes up often.

[ki6mf]

lots of good information here and one thing the view camera does is allow for perspective correction on the film. procedure is to make front and back parallel to the subject regardless of the angle of the rail or bed of the camera

| -[] not | -\ \

use the tilt and shift mechanism to accomplish this. If you do use extreme movements and you have ground glass with a 45 degree angle in each corner look if you can see light coming through the lens , IMPORTANT from each corner of the ground glass, when its opened for focusing. If you can see the lens there is no vignetting if you cant change the amount or shift swing tilt till you can see part of the lens.