Azo and Amidol

[lee]

with regular developers you can nail film speed and developing times in the same day. I used to have one that the company I used to work for issued me. Damned handy. I have one for film built in to my Metrolux II but I have to find the instructions to use it. They are not much use with ABC or PMK . I don't have a blue channel which I think I remember you will need to read negs with stain.

lee\c

 

[Donald Miller]

I've got a black and white unit and I only used it to establish film speeds and development time when I got into sheet film (TriX and HC110 per St. Ansel) some years ago. I didn't use it again until I started doing unsharp and sharp masking. I didn't use it at all to determine my rating of Bergger BPF 200 or the use of ABC pyro. I spend my time making photographs today. Testing can be a all consuming affair.

 

[clay]

I agree. Its easy to enough to test while you're working. If you keep some simple notes, it will be easy to decide "Hey next time, I'll add 1/2 a stop of exposure and develop another 2 minutes, and I'll bet I'll be right on" I've always been amazed at the number of posts that you see on ph***.net that ask questions like "My negatives are thin and low contrast, what do I do?" Doh! Expose a little more and develop a little more.

The only time you need to be a little quantitatively obsessive is if you are doing some process that has no contrast control in the printing, and demands a negative of a particular density range. I've found argyrotype and VDB to be sort of unforgiving in this way. But the easy way is just to stick to processes that give you some ability to compensate for variations in the negative's density range: variable contrast silver gelatin, platinum/palladium, and maybe gum. If your time is short, and you're not shooting for a client, just take pictures and learn from them, and modify things as you go. Or take advantage of other's work, as has been mentioned previously.

Clay

 

[David Hall]

I hate testing!

When I first started LF photography and wanted to learn the zone system, I went out and took god knows how many photos of the white house next door. I hated it. It made me not want to use a camera again.

I was hesitant about testing-as-I-go, thinking that I would make a bad exposure of the perfect scene, of screw up the development of the perfect exposure, etc. But so far, so good.

I have never even seen a densitometer, but I am interested in learning what the 1.- numbers mean when I read an article like the one Ed Buffaloe posted. Is there a source that explains the densitometer readings in a way that I could translate to zones or tones or something more practical for me?

dgh

 

[SteveGangi]

Hahaha good one! I hated the "Zonies" too for a long time. After many months of poring over the claims and methods of various people, and re-checking their math I was finding only contradictions and double talk. So and so would say he rated and exposed for this long and developed for that long to expand for N+whatever. Then he rated and exposed for this long and developed for that long to contract for N-whatever. There was a sense that if I didn't follow all this exactly, life would end as we know it. Guess what? The numbers never added up! I crunched the numbers exactly as stated, and came up with the realization that both negatives should be exactly alike. I finally broke down and went to the source, The Negative by AA. How wonderfully simple he made it seem. Expose for shadows, develop for highlights. Overexposure is a better mistake than underexposure because a dense negative will have "data" you have a chance of recovering and a blank negative will have nothing to "save". Pick a paper or contrast filter to match the negative. Dodge and burn because even good negatives will have spots the need some "fixing". All simple common sense. Now I just shoot the darn thing and use a seat of the pants approach. Better that, than to be paralyzed by the horrible gnawing fear of making a mistake wink wink.

 

[Aggie]

..

 

[SteveGangi]

So there we have it, Gordon really does know his $h!t. Sorry I just couldn't resist ROFLMAO