First Development: The Photos. (56k warning)

[Stephanie Brim]

A couple of things before I post the photos.

I accidently developed a roll of color film in with the black and white. Incidently, it came out rather well for being color. You can see it in the photo of the kid that's in the few I'm going to post now.

 

[Stephanie Brim]

 

[rbiemer]

Stephanie,
First developing? Good Job! I especially like the last photo in the first post!
I am amazed you got anything at all from the color film. Didn't think the chemistry was close enough...shows what I know.
Keep 'em coming!
Rob

 

[varjag]

The first development bath in C41 is actually the old-school silver hailde development. The silver gets replaced with color dyes later in the process.

 

[taffer]

Good job, they look really good to me !

That 'feet in water' shot is simply fantastic, btw.

 

[Wayne R. Scott]

I'll second Taffer's vote on the feet in the water. Very Nice!!

Which camera did you use?

Wayne

 

[captainslack]

Good job, Stephanie!! You've got limitless possibilities of things that Darth Vader could be looking down on. 😀

 

[T_om]

A LOT of potential there Steph... nice stuff.

Do you have an image editing program? If so, load these into it and try playing around with the "levels" and "curves" adjustments a bit. "Curves" is better in that no data is clipped or lost, but "levels" work well too if not used to extreme.

Several of your shots exhibit what is termed a "bleak & white" tonal range, meaning the tonal scale does not include any true blacks. Usually, to provide 'pop' to an image containing a large range of tones, there must be a true black SOMEWHERE in the photo.

Tom

 

[Roger Hicks]

Stephanie,

Nice.

Cheers,

Roger (www.rogerandfrances.com -- do you read Shutterbug?)

 

[jyl]

Does this mean one could develop a C41 B&W (like Ilford XP2) in B&W process, in a pinch?

What sort of development times would you use?

 

[XAos]

A LOT of potential there Steph... nice stuff.
"Curves" is better in that no data is clipped or lost, but "levels" work well too if not used to extreme.

It was my impression that if you takes a histogram that looks like

____| ---- \____

and auto stretch it, that the resulting

|--------------------\

has not lost any information - since nothing is getting clipped. Only if you set "black" or "white" to a point inside the existing histogram are you clipping any information. Is this not the way it works? I find curves works GREAT for bringing out shadows or suppressing highlights, but I've never gotten it to work well on scans like these or where the histogram looks like curve #1.

 

[T_om]

Does this mean one could develop a C41 B&W (like Ilford XP2) in B&W process, in a pinch?

What sort of development times would you use?

No "pinch" necessary.

XP2 develops in Diafine with no trouble at all. Expose it at a EI of about 200 and off you go.

Tom

 

[wlewisiii]

T400CN developes fine in Diafine as well, though it's not one of the recommended films. I've been told the negs won't last if you do that, but if you have, say, expired film that you don't want to spend money on at a lab, it will work.

William

 

[T_om]

It was my impression that if you takes a histogram that looks like


and auto stretch it, that the resulting

has not lost any information - since nothing is getting clipped. Only if you set "black" or "white" to a point inside the existing histogram are you clipping any information. Is this not the way it works? I find curves works GREAT for bringing out shadows or suppressing highlights, but I've never gotten it to work well on scans like these or where the histogram looks like curve #1.

I never use "Auto" levels (or hardly "Auto" anything else for that matter).

The problem with Auto Levels is twofold: it ASSUMES there is a proper black point and white point already and it also assumes every photograph has a fairly equal distribution of tones, which is seldom the case.

I would stay away from auto levels. If you MUST use one of the auto correction tools, then try "Curves" first.

You will find you get a better tonal range if you set the black and white points yourself and then tweak the mid-tones.

Tom

 

[XAos]

I'm actually using Gimp, not PS, so I dont know how theirs works, but I played with it to the point I was fairly happy with auto for black and white without chopping anything, then I tweak grey for skin tones. This basically makes the darkest pixels "black" (unless they're in a long tail, then it makes the darkest portion of the main body of pixel values black), and the same for white. There's usually a nice black in the frame but I find there often isn't a true white, or "blue' sky will be brighter than an object painted "white". This is especially true for color - they're usually better anyway but I've learned just to let it do its thing.

 

[Stephanie Brim]

The film was cheap Walgreens ISO 400, meaning it was Agfa. Development time was 5.5 minutes in stock solution D76...and I developed it with the roll of HP5 that the tree photos came off of. The vader and the other photos there came from the color roll.

As for 'bleak and white', I think that I should have actually developed the HP5 for less time. I purposely put these out with no correction so that I could show what they looked like since they were my first. 🙂

 

[David Doler]

There are a lot of really awesome photographers here on this site. You should be quite pleased that Roger Hicks gave you a nice complement. He and his wife Frances are no strangers to the photographer's art and their books and other publication are must-haves too. Anyway, congrats on the fine effort and I'm very pleased to know that the desire to the create in the darkroom is still alive.

Just a note - the best advice I ever heard (and I'm pretty sure it was from Ansel Adams) was to pick just one combination of chemicals and film and use it exclusively for one year. Don't stray, don't experiment with anything else. Why? The theory being that you will become so good that your confidence will soar! When you do start to experiment, you'll know your failures and mistakes are not because you don't know what your doing and you won't get discouraged. Make sense?

Worked for me.