Do personal EI's standardize printing times?

[awty]

Whats an EL?

 

[ChristopherCoy]

The large dip in the middle is where you are spending time over-thinking things!
.

Well I had to be stuck here for 12 hours today and couldn't shoot or develop or print, so I had to think about something.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Whats an EL?

Exposure Index

 

[Horatio]

I envy you folks with working darkrooms.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Before everyone gets so esoteric and off on tangents arguing about personal EI and its derivation, I would like to bring EVERYONE back to the OP question!:

Is is possible to make a 'standard' exposure on film, and be able to print that standard exposure in the darkroom at a standare TIME, rather than a different print time for each print?​

Yeah, these zone based peripheral topics always end up leading to another zone debate, don't they?

 

[wiltw]

I already answered it. No.

Got that, thx Looking for other opinions, but they got all esoteric suddenly once again.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

I envy you folks with working darkrooms.

I'm driving 2.5 hours each way just to work in mine. I went last weekend, and I'll probably go again next week.

 

[BrianShaw]

Got that, thx Looking for other opinions, but they got all esoteric suddenly once again.

The discussion got a bit esoteric only regarding peripheral issues. I think all would agree with the answer.

 

[awty]

Exposure Index

Oh, whats it used for?

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Oh, whats it used for?

At this point, your guess is as good as mine.

 

[BrianShaw]

At this point, your guess is as good as mine.

It makes for lively banter at happy hour!

 

[ChristopherCoy]

It makes for lively banter at happy hour!

I'm starting to think it needs to be up there with religion, politics, and sexual orientations.

 

[MattKing]

If it makes you feel any better, if you were to look at my contact proof sheets, you would see some variation in how I expose things.
That doesn't bother me because, other than with obvious screw-ups, it is pretty simple to adapt from negative to negative, starting this test strip with a little less, this test strip with a little more, and that test strip with the average time.
I always do a test strip. Experience - and some consistency in my negatives - helps me get close, reasonably quickly.
By the way, getting to a good starting place quickly for the first test strip is a good use for a simple enlarging meter like an Ilford EM-10. Particularly for those of us with temporary darkrooms.

 

[Bill Burk]

Drew, a versatile negative is a great reason for choosing an EI!

I use standard printing time loosely, not like Picker’s dogmatic “minimum time for maximum black”. And I don’t go around beating kids on airplanes for screaming. The things he got away with!

I just like when the expected print time is around 32 seconds. I do test strips in third stops from 50 seconds down to around 16 seconds. Anything in that vicinity is fine with me and means I don’t have to change f/stop or light intensity.

And I use “aiming for a print time” as an example of the kind of personal exposure decision a person might make. Sometimes I wish more of my negatives printed at 32 seconds.

But, no. I don’t think it’s a very good reason to pick EI, it’s just “reasonable”.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, if you do decide to become the reincarnation of Picker, please reinvent Brilliant Bromide paper, and I'll spend a lot of money (but not listen to your exposure advice). He was quite a character - behaved like a patent medicine when he really didn't need to. I have some of his excellent darkroom gadgets. I was never a sucker for his "fine art reference prints", which one highly skilled printer described as the some of the worst prints he'd ever seen.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Which is what I'm doing now.

Well how was I to know that?
I guess then that I don't have to tell you that every negative is unique and there's no such thing as one size fits all approach... unless you use digital negatives LoL.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

If the process of finding a personal EI results in your ending up with more consistently exposed negatives, then you will most likely find that printing will be more consistent as well.

Follow this advice.

 

[Sirius Glass]

No, I develop for 2 minutes for Dektol at f/8 and the vary from there.

 

[awty]

At this point, your guess is as good as mine.

I won't worry about then.
I treasure treating each picture as an individual, each picture is a new beginning.
I do a rough draft on some RC paper, post up, then think some more. If worthy of a proper print I would have worked out how to do do, which paper to use, my dodge and burns and my final toning. Then you frame it put it on the wall and savour your creation.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Well how was I to know that?
I guess then that I don't have to tell you that every negative is unique and there's no such thing as one size fits all approach... unless you use digital negatives LoL.

I don't think I'm looking for a one size fits all approach, because, as has been said, it doesn't exist. But I'd like to figure out some sort of standard starting point, and negate or at least limit as many variables as I can. Right now everything is all over the place. It's been fun experimenting, but I'm ready to be able to say "I expose at this speed, develop in this chemical, for this amount of time, and make a test print for that time," for each film I use. Which, for the foreseeable future is going to be FP4 and HP5 in bulk rolls. I'm moving away from Kodak and going Ilford everything.

 

[BrianShaw]

No color????

 

[ChristopherCoy]

No color????

Not at this point. I've never developed color negatives, or printed them, so I feel like that is a whole new set of... expenses mostly, that I don't want to introduce into the mix just yet. I think that, for me, it would kinda be the baby turd in the swimming pool right now.

 

[Bill Burk]

Interesting choice of films, traditional grain versus tabular. I used to work for Kodak and they were nice to me so I can’t shake my loyalty. My two have been 100TMAX and TMY2. I dabbled in the idea of Double-X as my “fast” film because I prefer finer grain, and 200 is fast enough for me. I am not sure that I will adopt it because it doesn’t have frame numbers and the film base feels different, but it has “beautiful” grain.

4x5 TMY2 is hands down my favorite. If I hadn’t bought that camera I would have never “discovered” tabular grain.

I took me a long time to accept 100TMAX because I love Panatomic-X so much. But I just developed a couple rolls which I shot at EI 64 and the negatives are dense. I will print some today to see what I got.

Have you considered Pan-F?

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Have you considered Pan-F?

No. To date 99.999% of film shot has been Tri-X. I decided to switch to HP5 after the last Kodak purchase. And then I was given two bulk rolls of FP4, which is loaded and being exposed now. (I'm out of Tri-X in 35mm and only have 4 rolls left in 120)

On the first roll of FP4, I failed to change the meter on the camera, and left it at 400. I thought I had ruined it, but was pleased to see that the negatives came out quite well with a 16 min development time in HC110. I've been conversing with Matt privately about my processing choice, and if further experimentation proves positive, I may just stick with FP4.

Once I finish this bottle of new formula HC110, and then the full bottle of the "old" formula HC110 I have, I'll switch over to an Ilford developer as well.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

If you go through the trouble of the film speed test, and the film development test, do your printing times become standardized?

For instance, if your predetermined exposure of 15 seconds gives you zone I and zone VIII, and nothing changes, can you always just stick any negative in the enlarger for 15 seconds as a starting point and get the full range of print values, or do you still have to do the test strip thing?

Don't see the test strip as a bad thing. It is the most organized and meaningful way of printing.
1. find the right exposure for the highlights
2. determine the right overall contrast to get optimized shadows and then...
3. burn to deemphasize less important subject detail.
These three steps provide the fastest way o a good print. darkroom exposure meters (any kind) often skip the test strip but leave you just short of a good print. We should do more test strips; not less. just my humble opinion after 50 years of printing;There are no good short cuts.; only bad compromises.