Yes - after a lot of experience! Or you can get deep into the weeds of densitometry & sensitometry. Making a potentially expressive negative is relatively easy, judging how to print it comes with experience and aesthetic choice.
There's relatively little 'right' or 'wrong', just negatives that are easy to make prints that say what you want them to say & others that leave you pitching prints in the bin, cursing their inability to express what you want them to.
Once you have your negative in hand, your film development and exposure has already been "cast in stone". At this stage you are either:So, when one gets to a more advanced point, do you hold up your negatives to the light and make a call based on that? (on how to develop for shadows and highlights?)
I will not be trying this anytime soon. Just curious.
John, recommending any deviation from published specifications to a novice is extremely counter-productive.
Particularly so when you lack the qualifications, budget, and equipment on which to base such deviations.
If those adjustments results in better negatives in your darkroom, it likely results from errors in your process.
- Leigh
I think the first goal of most photographers is to produce a negative that prints easily on grade 2 paper.So for a novice like myself with limited experience, where should I be making most of my tone/density changes? In printing and camera exposure?
A shooter who only makes one exposure understands his equipment, and knows what he's doing.anyone who only makes 1 exposure of a scene, portrait, landscape &c is kind of crazy anyways.
A shooter who only makes one exposure understands his equipment, and knows what he's doing.
- Leigh
I think the first goal of most photographers is to produce a negative that prints easily on grade 2 paper.
If the negative has higher density gradient than desired, you can go to a grade 1 paper.
You can go to intermediate grades if using variable-contrast paper.
I always try to get the desired detail in the shadows. Those are not easily manipulated after exposure.
If the subject is more contrasty than desired you can adjust film development to compensate.
Or you can use various printing techniques to compensate for a problem on the negative.
- Leigh
That's what happens when you change the frame of reference....having worked professionally for 30 years...
How do you know what to develop/if it needs developing if you can’t see the film until after processing?
Thanks Leigh!
So for a novice like myself with limited experience, where should I be making most of my tone/density changes?
In printing and camera exposure?
Correct.Say you shoot a roll,and develop it "normally". It's only then that you can see the negatives and get an idea of the contrast and such, correct?
I think I know why I'm confused.
I have not yet been taught how to interpret/read/understand the level of contrast before I develop. On a meter or anything else.
So my thought process was, "How can I know whether to change something I can't even see?"
You can see it, but you must learn to see it.So my thought process was, "How can I know whether to change something I can't even see?"
Think of it this way. When you're metering a scene and then making an exposure, you're making a decision where the elements of that subject fall on the tonal scale from white to middle gray to black in a print.
That makes sense. What if I have a roll of 24 , all with different exposures? How would I remember all of them and what the contrast was on each?
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