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