I've shot a couple of dozen of the Lane plates so far, and have got some good results. However the consistency hasn't been there. I think most of that might be me. The latest batch came back with very faint images. The sky portion was the darkest but the foreground part was extremely light. Blue Moon processed and suggested I'm not giving them enough light. This is possible. I've been exposure at ISO 2, 1/2 sec., f16--basically using "sunny 16" on sunny days. Exposures seem off by at least one stop, maybe even two. They scanned and I got a printable image. At first I thought the c.1922 Heliar lens in dial set Compur was running slow at 1/2s, but it sounds right and my film (FP4) shots come out well. So, I don't think it's the lens. Should I try adding one more stop to the exposure--i.e. ISO 1? The plates were very, very light.
The last batch I shot had something truly weird going on I've not seen before. They too were very very light but there was an image when I scanned with Epson v700. These appear to have some strange artifacts in them that look like giant bamboo stalks up the center. There's also some strange white streaks radiating from a central point. I load/unload these in a windowless bathroom at night, using a Patterson red light. The red light is usually ~3 feet away and I keep the plates covered as long as possible. Does anyone have any explanation of what's going wrong here? The weird bamboo thing happened to two plates, both shot with a c.1910 100mm Dagor in Compound. I've seen nothing like that on the film shots I took with that lens though. It's just really weird. Anyone have any ideas? I also attached a scan of a plate from same batch, same scene, using the c.1922 Heliar in Compur. There were no weird bamboo tubes in this one, but image was very faint.
Kent in SD
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