A "sharp" developer to use with rotary processing

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Richard Man

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Ted Grant is one of the living legend photo-journalist / documentary photographer from Canada. He's the one that took the photos of Trudeau sliding down the rail etc.

If you ask him how he shoots, he would say he uses the KISS principle, he would hold up the camera to his one good eye (literally) and shoot. He (used to ) run around with 3 or 4 Leica around his neck with different film and lens. He has been shooting Leica since the 50s and when Leica finally released the M7 with auto-exposure, he never turned back.

When you ask him how he prints, he says just click on the auto button and out comes great prints from his Epson printer (more work in the old days in the darkroom).

He doesn't talk about gear, fancy this and fancy that. When he was shooting film, Tri-X pushed to 800/1000 is all he did. He uses the same developer/paper combo. Light, action, shoot is his motto. He just trusts the camera's meter and there's that.

But of course if you look at his photos, you know there is a lot more. He has so much experience that he know when a scene is good, *click* and there it is.

Not a bad model to follow, if you shoot that type of photography.
 

cowanw

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Well, Stone's point of the negative and the print reminds me very much of my reading of Mortensen, who, I understand, would only take a picture in lighting compatible with a 7b negative. not heat he is a good example of a non manipulated image.
 

cjbecker

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cowanw said:
Well, Stone's point of the negative and the print reminds me very much of my reading of Mortensen, who, I understand, would only take a picture in lighting compatible with a 7b negative. not heat he is a good example of a non manipulated image.
Click to expand...


whats a 7b negative?
 

Roger Cole

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I took the thread back off ignore. If I'm going to post in it, I might as well do so from a real keyboard.

Nothing wrong with an unmanipulated image if that's what you want and your aesthetic and fits your subject matter etc. But I confess I don't for the life me understand why anyone would shoot film today rather than digital if they want that, particularly in black and white. The exception would be transparencies for projection as that just looks better than digitally projected imaging, in my view anyway.

I got a PM from another thread participant and here's what I wrote back, which I think may be worth sharing here, or at least pretty much says what I have to say about the original subject plus manipulation in printing:

Bottom line of course is that there is no way to get the kind of edge effects he wants from rotary, but that doesn't stop many of us from being quite happy with our rotary processing and our negatives from it. He either needs to give up on demanding dilute Rodinal style edge effects or move back to hand inversion. He doesn't like that answer though so round and round it goes.

I know some people are fond of the "straight print aesthetic" and I guess that's ok. I certainly see some I think are overdone. Bruce Barnbaum comes to mind as a contemporary photographer who is a very skilled printer but sometimes seems to over do it (particularly with local bleaching.) But I'm also with those who say if that's what you want - straight print every time - just shoot digital and be done with it. Why even bother with film? (I started to recommend Barnbaum's book to Stone, BEFORE he invests in setting up to print, but typing on my iPhone curbed my enthusiasm for that idea.)

Stone, seriously - some people don't like his rather haphazard rule-of-thumb approach to something like the zone system, but Barnbaum's Art of Photography has printing examples where he shows the straight print - he like many people tends to make a straight print rather flat in contrast for evaluation then use it to visualize what he wants to do next with it - and talks about what he does to make the final print and then shows that too. I don't know that it would be worth the money to you as I doubt you'd like his approach to, well, anything very much, but it might be worth finding a copy to thumb through.
 

Richard Man

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I am hoping that we will FINALLY come up with a matrix like:

(ah heck, the forum software gets rid of the spaces, so hopefully you get the idea anyway)

hand inversion stand development rotary
best grain X film + Y dev .....
best tonality ....
best edge effect ....
best Tri-X contrast .... (better be Tri-X here XD) ...
best high ISO
...

etc. I mean, MAY AS WELL XD
 

markbarendt

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Well once you get a consensus on what "best" means....
 

NedL

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Truzi said:
Google is your friend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiaroscuro
Click to expand...

Ha! Yes, I actually have read that but have a difficult time relating it to what was on the Unblinking Eye site about tonality, and also some other uses I've seen of the word. I was wondering if the expanded tonal range of a 7-D negative might be an example of it... Those 9 different types of negatives, I would say, qualify as major "manipulative" choices, not to mention that we are talking about black and white film.
 
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StoneNYC

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Thanks Roger, I will look into it, appreciate the upfront approach.
 

cjbecker

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I know, they quite making 320 in rolls a while ago. What were they thinking.
 

Roger Cole

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Michael R 1974 said:
I don't like Barnbaum's book.
Click to expand...

Lots of people don't. It's not so much that I'm advocating the book, as suggesting his photos in it showing the difference between a straight print and a final print to give Stone an idea of how that can be a creative interpretation (even if you don't like Barnbaum's work or book.)
 

nworth

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Every time - no, but a really good practitioner (not me) can come pretty close by adjusting the exposure and development to compensate for the light and scene. That doesn't necessarily mean that you will get an ideal print, just an adequate straight print. Interpretation counts, and it involves both the negative and the print.
 

nworth

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StoneNYC said:
How is that possible???

Ugh... That makes no sense, if I can properly expose a transparency, then I can equally expose all my negatives to the same exposure level and print them all with the same times or whatever...
Click to expand...

We are mixing a couple of things here that do not mix - color transparencies and black and white prints. The materials are very different and the way you look at them is very different. Color transparencies have no where near the dynamic range of black and white negatives, but we see them as vivid and dynamic because of the color. Although color printing can be difficult, even with good negatives, it is usually much more forgiving than black and white printing. We are drawn to the color and ignore many minor problems with tone. We also like the contrast we see in color transparencies, but that contrast often (not always) doesn't work in black and white. Translating the broad dynamic range of the black and white negative to a print that is aesthetically pleasing is a real art. With black and white, you have less work with, and you have to work harder to make it work.
 

nworth

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StoneNYC said:
Yes I could have, because I know the moons exposure like AA did, lol, but I wouldn't have the darkroom skills to heighten the darker scene.
Click to expand...

I had an opportunity to look at and compare more than a half dozen prints on AA'a "Moonrise," including a couple of contact prints, a while back. They were all quite different, and they were all outstanding. Perhaps this is one of the points. There is probably no ideal print from a given negative. A straight print from a near ideal negative may be beautiful, but there will be other prints, not made much differently, that will also be beautiful - and different. What you want has a lot to do with this. When you have non-ideal negatives, which is more often the case, print manipulation can be vital to make if beautiful.
 

Xmas

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cjbecker said:
I know, they quite making 320 in rolls a while ago. What were they thinking.
Click to expand...

Ok I can relax again... we only ever has the 320ISO in 220 as far as living memory tells me.

Back to manipulations.
There seems to be a genre of printers here who split grade - printing the mid tones for more contrast and burn the highlights and dodge the shadows to recover detail.

Is that considered manipulation by the ' more purists'

Note they have need doing it for decades soon after VC paper/RC became available.

Frequently my exposure is wayward and I need salvage to recover.

Even Ansell had to intensify the fore ground of moonlight?

Noel
 

markbarendt

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I read this PHD thesis centered around soft focus lenses a while back. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/505

It was a very interesting walk through many of the technological changes in photography (photography's syntax) and how what we have preferred has changed along the way.

The chase of/debate about the benefits of one photographic characteristic over another has been going on a long, long time.

One of the many interesting concepts in the thesis is that as resolution and sharpness increased the need for retouching and manipulation increased. Soft focus lenses were in large part developed to address the issue of too much sharpness.

In the same way the sharpness of the lenses Stone uses on his Mamiya 7 are simply à la mode rather than a definitive answer.


By the way Stone, before you start drooling over the high resolution of albumen paper understand that you would need to make it from scratch and it would require developing your negatives differently.

Edit (can't resist the next paragraph)
 
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markbarendt

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Xmas said:
Is that considered manipulation by the ' more purists'
Click to expand...

Why would anybody not consider that a manipulation?
 
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