The weird part to me was why shoot at asa 1200? Was it different in the 60s? It's not a normal place to set a meter. ...
I've also read that he would use a dim green light to inspect film while developing - was that common practice? Can someone explain that in detail?
What speed you set EI for is arbitrary and not regulated by what the markings on the meter are. Most meters allow 1/3 step ISO settings, and ISO 1200 is two thirds of a step from ISO 800 to ISO 1600. It doesn't really matter anyway, because if you are not doing photometrically calibrated work, what the "real" sensitivity is comes to more a matter of what looks good to you than any measured standard density of a negative might be.
🙂
Panchromatic film can be inspected in processing without degrading or exposing the developing using a very low wattage greenish light for a few seconds, at most. Orthochromatic film can be inspected in processing with typical red to amber safelights (used in printing) since it is not sensitive at the red end of the spectrum.
Unless you're doing tray development of 35mm film (a very awkward, messy, and mostly silly practice since you can't inspect and change development on one frame specifically...!), in process inspection is something that is done on cut sheet film exposures. It's almost impossible to evaluate a teensy 35mm frame for development in the few seconds that you can look and then resume processing in any real sense, even once you learn what to look for in-process. This is very different from examining a single exposure of 4x5 to 8x10 inch film for a couple of seconds to determine whether you need another half a minute of processing or another two minutes of processing. It's not a process for most of the roll film photography being yakked about in this thread, therefore.
One thing that really does bother me is how the very young people will buy a single roll of film...push it 2 stops...and publish a "review" of it in YouTube and make recommendations or statements of the films quality or "who it's for". Irritates me because at least in my own experience, it took me probably 30 rolls or so of hp5 shot at a few different EI and paired with various developers to even begin getting a handle on it. They do this for lenses and camera bodies as well and I find it misleading. Even so, I suppose it's not as bad as the "why I bought this camera" videos. Lol
LOL! I just put such "reviews" in the category of "Ignorable Silliness" and only read them if I find the particular reviewer entertaining to read. I don't bother getting annoyed or irritated by them.
The camera reviewers are worse. They pick up a camera and lens they know nothing about, do a three hour walkabout snapping with it, and go on to pronounce how awful or wonderful it is with the gravity of a credentialed authority on it. Utter nonsense. No one can know more than initial impressions of a camera and lens, unless the camera is so awfully simple, or just so awful, as to be just garbage that doesn't deserve the label "camera". Yeah, you can tell whether the buttons fit your fingers and whether you can see through the viewfinder in a twenty minute walk, but not much else.
This is why I rarely read reviews of equipment (and film) for anything other than entertainment unless I happen to know the reviewer well and know that they spent quite a bit of time
working with the equipment before they wrote their review/impressions. It's why I often write a "first impression" of new equipment I buy so that I can see what I thought about it on acquisition from the perspectives of a month or two later when I've gotten well into my third "thousand exposures" with it.
I don't have the room, and I now do a hybrid style process: develop negative, scan, process with software. I have used Fromex in Long Beach and MPIX that have a service of digital file printing on real B&W paper and then liquid development for silver gelatin print. They look very good and are way better than Costco printing on Fuji Archive color paper which always has a slight color cast.
I haven't had room for an actual darkroom since about 1990, and even then it was a dual purpose room in my apartment otherwise referred to as "the kitchen" when not in use processing film.
🙂
Printing at home basically died for me until the early '00s when the first decent inkjet printers started to appear, but it wasn't until the release of the Epson R2400 and other pigment ink printers of that generation in 2005 that I resumed printing in any volume. Another couple of years and the selection of good papers, and good printer-paper profiles appeared such that by 2008-2009, I found myself capable of making prints again that were now far better than anything *I* ever had patience to produce in a darkroom, and last as long.
I've been doing that hybrid film processing/scanning/image processing/inkjet printing workflow since the middle '90s. It worked much more proficiently once the printers, inks, and papers came up to speed in 2008, and I have since sold many hundreds (possibly thousands, I've never really accounted the numbers completely) of satisfying prints that way ... although the majority went to a digital capture original exposure by 2006-2007.
I still do it with film alongside digital capture, and I'm happy with the results I'm getting. Once I closed the photo business in 2010-2011, I sold far fewer prints but I occasionally still get requests and sell prints from my "Picture Every So Often" posts. No client has yet come back and told me that the quality wasn't up to snuff (even with my repeated requests that they do so), and the prints hanging on the wall of my living room ... made the same way ... for a decade or so, being subjected to the vagaries of normal sunlight and room lighting, etc, still look identical to the reference archive copy of the same print in my boxed archives. That says to me the modern inkjet process is good enough for my purposes.
😀
G
