Is this exposure or developing?

[Scott --]

Ok, armed with some new Hoya filters and my reciprocity data, I went out yesterday to experiment with long exposures.

All these had metered exposure of between 8 and 15 seconds. The 8 second shots had a 1/2 stop warming filter added, so with the reciprocity conversion, 100 seconds. One had no filter, but it was starting to rain, so the exposure ended up about 130 seconds. Never stood in place that long for a picture.

Anyway, the first two came out of the tank like so:


Surprisingly nice, but the highlights blown to smithereens. It was suggested to me to reduce development; I wasn't quite sold on N-2 for this, so I compromised at about N-1.4, or about 27.5% less development. Which gave me this:


Not the end-all be-all photos of a lifetime, but the mechanics are starting to improve. The last one might print well enough, and make something nice to stick in the landowner's mailbox. But, similar to my last post on burning, I have a problem to knock: The falling water's grey. Unacceptably so. But if I develop more (expose for shadows, develop for highlights, right?), I'll blow out highlights elsewhere.

So, what do I do? Have I gone too conservative on the ~N-1.5, or was my initial exposure off?

Thanks for putting up with me.
Scott

[Brian Ellis]

The first two appear to have good shadow detail and blown out highlights. The third appears to have poor shadow detail and dull highlights. I say "appear" because of the difficulty of judging what a print really looks like on the basis of a computer monitor.

Usually when there's good shadow detail but blown highlights it means development was too long. When shadows lack detail it usually means exposures were too short. However, you put yourself in a situation that's about as hard as it gets - very long exposures so that reciprocity failure came into play and adjustments for reciporicity failure are difficult to predict with complete accuracy. Then you used a filter for one of them and filter factors/adjustments aren't very precise. And finally, you photographed a waterfall. Highlights in waterfalls can be difficult to meter because while the water may appear to be pure white in many areas, in reality the water usually doesn't come down in a solid white sheet, the dark rocks behind the water often show through in many small places that you don't necessarily see but that can affect the meter reading.

So I wouldn't use these photographs as a basis for determining anything with respect to exposure or development times. If you're trying to determine your normal, plus, and minus times I'd suggest using the standard zone system methodology, which involves a series of exposures of a single-tone sheet of cardboard (you probably know the methodology so I won't go through it here) rather than trying to photograph various scenes. At a bare minimum, if you feel compelled to use various scenes as the basis for development time testing then pick ones that don't involve reciprocity failure and that don't have more than a 7 stop range from darkest metered shadow to brightest metered highlight. Also, forget the filter when testing. Then make a bunch of exposures of that scene and develop them for different times. It isn't the ideal way but it's better than picking a situation with as many variables and as difficult as these seem to have been.

[Randy H]

First, I am assuming these are scans from the negs, and not the print, yes?

Not the end-all be-all photos of a lifetime, but the mechanics are starting to improve.

Dude, pics are definitely improving!

The falling water's grey. Unacceptably so. But if I develop more (expose for shadows, develop for highlights, right?), I'll blow out highlights elsewhere.
So, what do I do?

Dodge and burn. Expose for the darkest shadow, develop for the lighter highlights, burn to tone down the highlights in the rocky area, and/or dodge the waterfall.
You have an extremely wide tonal range of light/dark areas. And I would agree with Brian about metering the waterfall, and it not being a solid object.

[Robert A. Zeichner]

Sometimes the scene is such that there is no way during exposure or development to capture everything just the way you envision. The falling water could be brightened by using a dodging mask. This is sometimes called a pencil mask. It involves drawing on some frosted drafting film and sandwiching a very thin piece of milk white plexiglass, the negative on one side and the mask on the other. The process in not terribly difficult to do and there have been a number of articles in Photo Techniques and View Camera in recent years describing how it's done.