Blown out highlights - Bessa R

[jcee]

Hi all.
I've been having a lot of fun with a recently acquired Bessa R and 35/1.7 Ultron. Since this is my very first manual film camera, I shot the first couple of rolls "by the book" - set the ISO to the film speed, exposed to see a perfect "0" on the meter. While I was mostly happy with how most photos were in focus, I noticed that a lot of my highlights were totally blown out.

So I shot the 3rd roll (B&W this time) at the meter reading of "- 0" or when it starts to display "-", and the result is still the same - blown out highlights, while the rest of the photo looks quite right.

I don't know if it's just me not knowing how to use the camera, or Bessa's meter is lying, or the photo lab who scans these is not doing a good job. I have my photos put on a CD at a local lab, as I don't have a film scanner yet.

Please see the two samples I'm attaching. The first one was shot with Superia 200, the second one was shot with Ilford XP2 super 400. Both of them were shot wide open - about 2 or 2.8, and handheld at 1/30 or so. If anyone can tell me what I'm doing wrong, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!!

 

[RML]

I think that much be caused by the scanning. Have the shots printed properly to your specs, then see if you still have blown hi-lites.

 

[kludge]

It may well be the lab. When I was first playing with b/w, I shot a roll of XP2 and had 4x6 prints made. One shot was mostly clouds, and the top half of the print was completely blown out. Then I scanned it at home, and the clouds looked fine - nothing blown out at all.

I really highly recommend investing in a decent scanner. Even my crappy $100 Canon flatbed (with film attachment) does a better job than anything I've gotten from a lab.

 

[Goodyear]

The first one in particular, I would also point to the scan. The second one may be a bit overexposed.

Actually, looking at it again, I doubt it's that overexposed.

Scanning.

 

[rayfoxlee]

Have a look at your negs. If there is detail in the negs, it is the printing/scanning that is usually at fault, unless the brightness range of the shot was beyond the capability of the film. You have some pretty harsh lighting by the look of the pix, (bright daylight?) on the yellow fruit and I suspect some deeper shadows at the back of the fruit stall. I reckon the brightness range in the scene was too great. Take some shots in overcast conditions and see what they look like.

To put your mind at rest, test your meter alongside another meter (preferably a separate handheld, such as a Weston V). A spot meter is always going to be the best bet for B&W.

Don't get disheartened by a few duff rolls of film. As you are new to a manual camera, it is a bit of a learning curve. After 45 years, it still is for me! The Bessa + Ultron is a great combination.

Good luck

Ray

 

[Fred]

jcee,
If you're shooting negative film then there is a quite wide exposure latitude of at lease a full stop each way. From what I hear the Bessa meters are pretty good.

Anyway I recon a tweak in the scanning will bring back those blown highlights as the images shown should not need any exposure nudge from the center weighted meter suggestions of the Bessa.

 

[FrankS]

Time to switch to B+W and home processing! The problem is with the lab that developed/printed/scanned your images.

 

[jcee]

Thank you for all the comments. I am looking into buying a scanner - probably the minolta dimage iv, or maybe an epson flatbed. It's 6 bucks to have the photos scanned, I suppose the scanner will pay itself off after 30 rolls. 🙂

I have examined the negatives, and in the case of the b&w photo I posted, it seems there is some detail on the white areas of the neg. Not much but as far as I can tell, more than what the scan is showing. I'm believing more and more that I should scan my own negatives.

Both of these were shot indoors with somewhat of a dim lighting. On the fruit photo I don't know where that harsh lighting came from - it may be that the light bulb was right above it - I can't recall. This shot does look overexposed to me, too - although I must have metered at "0." I sold my Digilux 1 after buying this Bessa - when I get another digicam, I will definitely use its meter to compare.

Wheww! Lots to learn!

 

[jcee]

Results from scanning them myself

Results from scanning them myself

Hi, all.
I purchased an Epson flatbed scanner, and I scanned the two images I posted here.
They're still bad amateur photos, but at least now I can see that it was mostly the scanning job of the lab that caused the harsh contrast. It looks like they threw in some kind of automatic curves/contrast/sharpen setting. I was starting to think my meter was broken. So there are grays after all... not just black & white. I'm seeing these photos in a whole new light. 😱

I will be taking a photography class in the spring where I will have access to the darkroom, so until then I think this scanner will suffice. For the times when I feel super lazy, does anyone know of a good lab in the LA/south bay area?

 

[DougK]

I've had the same thing happen to me from the lab I take my stuff to. Usually they are very good, but occasionally prints come back where I would swear that I blew the exposure, yet they scan great. After that, I learned to check the negs alongside the print; if they look OK I quit worrying about the prints since I'm going to scan them anyway.

 

[paulfitz]

I had the same experience with the "scan to cd" from Walmart which is Fuji equipment. Film scanned by them in two different locations is "blown awaaay!!" First one is Florida Walmart, second one is my scan of same negative, third is Louisiana Walmart, fourth is my scan of same neg. (Please forgive the harsh flash, my mistake in the TTL fil setup). I still like to system though. You can get the color film and a CD for proofs cheaper than a roll of slide film processed. Then review the images on the PC and decide which ones need a real scan.

I think they have the scanners set to produce nice prints from the contrast range, but somehow this comes out much too harsh on the PC (and also the Mac for that matter). So don't use their scans as a definative proof - just general. Look at the negs and decide from there.

 

[jcee]

Thanks, both of you. As a total newbie in film photography, I thought what I got was what it was.
So I've been sitting here scanning some of my negs over. And while I'm glad to see those highlight details, I'm getting much muddier photos than the scans I got from the lab. (paulfitz, I can see that the scans from Walgreens are much more vibrant, while the details are much nicer in your scans.) So I keep applying levels, curves, sharpening and saturating... And I ask myself - "Is this cheating?"
Just how much post-editing is o.k. before it's cheating? I had no guilt doing this with a digital camera...

I wasn't going to show this photo because it looks so crappy and out of focus, but here's my scan of the above fruit photo. (untouched) I thought superia was a very vibrant film. Alongside not knowing how to use a camera, I must not know how to use a scanner!

 

[paulfitz]

It's not cheating if you get the scanner to give you what you want. It's only cheating if you violate some copyright laws (*GRIN*) but let's leave that for another (much later) time. I think you might find that the flatbeds tend to give smoother highlights, but muddier blacks. I could never get them to scan right, even with Vuescan software, without a lot of processing. Above two scans are from Fuji 100 scanned with Vuescan. I once shot with the CV 35mm 1.7 and found that the contrast was supurb! I scanned TMax 100 on the Coolscan III and could not believe the performance of that lens. So you should be confident you will get there on the camera side.

You might want to think about a dedicated film scanner if you will be doing a lot of work. I tried and HP flatbed and Epson, and they gave good results, but the HP took 10 minutes to scan the neg at 3600dpi.

First image is the Ultron shot on TMax with the Coolscan. I think it's over the top contrast wise though - probably over developed. Second image is from the HP. So it's just a matter of the processing that you do. Make sure you scan in 16 bit mode if it's available. And try Vuescan - I find it has a lot more control of the scanner than anything else for the price.

 

[RML]

On a realted note, what would be the purpose or advantage of using 16bit TIFF instead of 8bit TIFF as output? I don't need to scan my negs as I use the R-D1 but I need to concert them from RAW into TIFF, and I'm wondering whether to use 16bit TIFF or 8bit TIFF.

 

[pvdhaar]

On a realted note, what would be the purpose or advantage of using 16bit TIFF instead of 8bit TIFF as output? I don't need to scan my negs as I use the R-D1 but I need to concert them from RAW into TIFF, and I'm wondering whether to use 16bit TIFF or 8bit TIFF.

This depends on the intended use..

The 16bit TIFF retains the 12bit information per colour channel instead of compressing it to 8bit per channel. This compression step causes some loss of detail in the highlights and lowlights.

If your target is getting ordinary prints (dye-sub or inkjet), then 8bit is enough. The prints will hardly show the additional detail of the leftover 4bit.

If you're however sending stuff for printing in other ways (e.g. offset printing, rotation-press), modifications to the dynamic range and colour space conversions may be required to get the best out of the image given the inks used in the press machines. Here the additional information may be required to enable smoother mapping from one space to another and still retain colour fidelity.

 

[jcee]

Thanks again, paulfitz. I will keep your advices on mind.
Your photos look great. I admit I thought I would make photos like yours if I bought the Ultron. 😉 Hopefully I will get better over time.
I'm going to return this scanner - Epson 3590. The scan quality is ok - but I really can't stand the noise. It makes a piercing noise that could wake up my neighbors. 🙄 I will probably buy the minolta sd iv for its price, I wonder if it's very loud?

 

[Bertram2]

So I keep applying levels, curves, sharpening and saturating... And I ask myself - "Is this cheating?"
Just how much post-editing is o.k. before it's cheating? I had no guilt doing this with a digital camera...

No, not cheating. The goal is to make the scan look like the print and if you have understood that the scanner does not deliver more than a kind of "RAW" output you won't have any prob with what is cheating. You cannot get mor info out of a neg than it contains, all kind of manipulation has it's limits.
As long as you keep it all in the limits of a darkroom tuning where should be the cheating then.

My wife usually got mad while watching me adjusting contrast, brightness , gradation and colours in PS for a monitor presentation, but since I showed her a very complex so called burn-in plan of a LF landscape photgrapher she's understood that the neg isn't the photo yet and the scanner is just a halfblind pal trying to do his very best. What isn't much compared to our human eye tho ! 🙂

BTW a pol filter helps enormously for such kinda vegetable in th bright sun and in general all chromogenic B&W films are more sensitive to blown out highlights then silverbased films. FP4 would have worked better, still my 100ISO fav.



Regards,
bertram

 

[tetrisattack]

Not to exhume an old thread, but I wanted to point out the other advantage to scanning/editing in 16-bit mode: avoiding posterization of tones as you make cumulative changes to the image, especially if you use curves or layer masks.

Do this in photoshop:
Start a new document in grayscale, 8-bit. Fill the background black, and set the foreground color to white. Get out the paintbrush, set it to 10% opacity, 0% hardness, and use a fairly fat brush. Now, make a bunch of strokes in the same spot, so that you build up a blob to white. You'll notice tonal posterization around the edges of the blob, areas where the gradient makes distinct, discrete jumps in value instead of fading away smoothly.
Repeat the test in 16-bit mode, and the range of tones should come out virtually perfect. This situation comes up in my workflow all the time, because I do my tonal manipulation through multiple curves adjustment layers with layer masks. To exaggerate the problem, add a stack of levels/curves adjustment layers to compress and then expand your tonal range. A 16-bit (or even a 12- or 14-bit image from your scanner or camera) has much more precision; the image holds up to manipulation more accurately. To apply this to real-life, you'll most likely notice posterization in out-of-focus areas, in the sky, or any other part of your image that should have a nice gradient. The problem is less noticeable in color images.

So, that's another reason to shoot in RAW or scan to the highest bit-depth possible: more color precision equals smoother manipulation in photoshop.

And in the interest of full disclosure, I used to program computers and dabbled in audio synthesis and 2d and 3d graphics, so sample precision problems are fairly intuitive to me now in ways that seem to mystify many people.

 

[TheMadUkrainian]

Try Swan Photo. I go to Tuttle Camera in LGB (Hey Bernie/ Hey Gary) and they send out to Swan. Always had good results.

Also, please don't worry about 'amateur photos' around here. You learn here. I read in a Drawing book when I was an animator that you have to make 5000 bad drawings to make one good one, so get the bad ones out of the way as quickly as possible.

 

[jcee]

Try Swan Photo. I go to Tuttle Camera in LGB (Hey Bernie/ Hey Gary) and they send out to Swan. Always had good results.

Funny you said that. The original scans ARE from Swan Photo via Tuttle Camera. 😛
I haven't been back after the first couple of rolls. I recently got one roll scanned at Walgreeens (C41 BW) and I'm quite happy with their job - and paid like half of what I paid at Swan - and didn't have to wait 2 days.
I suppose it depends on personal taste. Tuttle Camera, by the way, has excellent service - I love the people there. I just wish I liked their lab better.