Two issues, one with prints, one possibly with negatives.

[hamradio]

First....

Some negatives I print are super clean it seems, but the prints are full of areas of obvious dust on the negatives. I cleaned the lens on the enlarger, already, and some prints turn out great.


The other thing...

None of my photos are ever very sharp, it seems. Paper is something pretty cheap from freestyle, and I've had pretty decent results. I'm almost calling into question if the negatives themselves aren't very sharp...I've been using fomapan 100 and fortepan 100 (and a few rolls of 400) with arista premium developer. The last roll I did came out of a minolta srt201 with rokkor 50mm...I think the results should have been much sharper than what I see when making prints. The same happened with my canon ql17...everything seems slightly out of focus, almost. But, I see these results regardless of camera and lens. Could it be the developer? I've never tried anything else. (I use all of these supplies at school, but am very shortly getting my own reels, tank, and chemicals)


Some sample pics. They really look horrible from my dirty scanner, and scratches on the negative in the first pic.

(from a holga, tmax 400...I know it's a holga, but it should be a little sharper than this, I think)

Thanks,
Devan

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

THe Holga shot looks like it should...no it will not be sharper. You want sharp in Medium format? Buy a Hasselblad! LOL

35mm is not a very sharp format. Really. There's just a limit to how much fine detail resolution you can get in 35, especially with oldschool films like Foma and Forte. More modern films are finer grained and a bit sharper, but not much. The pic you posted from 35 looks normal for a 35mm landscape. People who shoot landscapes tend to choose medium format at minimum and most hardcore landscape shooters use large format. 35mm is great for things that don't need extremely fine details, like portraits, street photography, journalism.

Examples:

35mm

Medium Format