Do personal EI's standardize printing times?

[MattKing]

There are no good short cuts.; only bad compromises.

Christopher:
In case you wanted to re-populate your signature line, this would be an excellent choice.
Particularly when you consider who said it!

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Christopher:
In case you wanted to re-populate your signature line, this would be an excellent choice.
Particularly when you consider who said it!

Good observation!

 

[pentaxuser]

I may just stick with FP4.

.

Yes I'd have thought that for most of the year at Houston's latitude, a film like FP4 should be fine.

pentaxuser

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Yes I'd have thought that for most of the year at Houston's latitude, a film like FP4 should be fine.

pentaxuser

I don't know that I could tell you the difference between any of them at this point, to tell you the truth.

 

[pentaxuser]

I don't know that I could tell you the difference between any of them at this point, to tell you the truth.

Do you mean the differences between say FP4+ and HP5+ as negatives? In that case I am not at all sure I could either. What I was referring to was the difference between say Houston's average light over the year and my average light in the middle of the U.K. when FP4+'s speed might not be enough for quite a lot of the time, depending of course on what I was taking a pic of. I'd expect much less of an issue with necessary shutter speeds for any pics involving motion in Houston.

At all but the smallest of enlargements from say 35mm film, the finer grain of FP4+ confers an advantage to the print's look unless graininess is important for the desired look

pentaxuser

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Do you mean the differences between say FP4+ and HP5+ as negatives?

Yes, as negatives. I couldn't tell you the difference between HP5, FP4, Tri-X, or T-Max if the names weren't printed on the sides. I've not done enough printing yet to truly have an eye for it.

But I understood what you meant. And actually, I'm kind of surprised myself. My error of shooting FP4 at 400 has opened up a whole bunch of new curiosities for me. I've only got one or two photos left on the second roll that I bulk loaded before it gets developed, hopefully on Monday.

 

[Bill Burk]

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.

Whoa your curse worked. Can you undo it. I didn’t make Brilliant Bromide but last night I made some of the worst prints I have ever seen.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, they would have been great prints if you had used Brilliant Bromide instead, especially with Picker's special Zone VI developer (which was just modified Dektol with extra hydroquinone). Of course, strictly 2 minutes 1:2. Any deviation from that strict protocol means the entire eight zone universe will collapse.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I remember it, but never used it. I do have a bit of a "museum" on one shelf with partial sleeves or boxes of random old papers laying around just for nostalgia I suppose. None of it is any good for printing purposes anymore. Likewise, I have token rolls of worthless old obsolete films in the freezer just for the heck of it. Some were darn good products back in the day. Before VC papers became refined enough to be truly versatile, my favorite graded papers were Seagull G (80% of the time), supplemented with a little bit of Brilliant Bromide for its special look, and Agfa Portriga for its own look. But I used other papers too from time to time, including Ilfobrom Galerie graded.

My older brother preferred DuPont cold tone paper, and his darkroom was a sight to see! - near the beach in the long bathroom of an old barn, with the holes in the walls covered with tarpaper patches, and then everything wallpapered over with old National Geographic maps, a beehive Beseler 4X5 enlarger already quite old when he bought it, and a small drymount press next to that, all distinctly funky. But students at the photo academy with its high tuition scrounged pretty hard to make ends meet, and most of what they could spare went into fine cameras instead, preparing for a commercial career with serious portfolios.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Mark did things understated. It fit his subject matter well; but I take multiple directions, and not a single predictable style; therefore quite a wide range of papers overall, but with a few inevitable favorites over the years.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

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?

developing a personal EI isn’t he same as standardizing how much contrast you develop to. If you want to reduce variables in printing, it’s best to standardize what contrast you develop to, and then determine the best EI for that contrast. This of course assumes you only ever shoot one film, as film base plus fog will also affect how long you expose the paper for.

if you work out a standard development contrast, and personal EI, and only shoot one film, then the only real variable will be subject brightness range.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Yes, the background itself would be identical for all versions, if you printed each neg to the same time. I was illustrating simply how reading a 'standard target' could result in an altered exposure because the 'stadard' itself deviated in brightness (as shown in my examples)/ so you need be be carefult and consistent in your metering methods!

If you used an Averaging meter, you CANNOT be consistent enough, not to the same level of consistency of a spotmeter.And even the spotmeter could be fooled, if I had spotmetered the 18% grey card for all the shots in my example! Just trying to illustrate for you some of the variables that can creep in to defy your efforts to expose for one 'standard print time'.

that’s why I whenever possible use an incident meter. Reflective meters introduce all kinds of variability.

 

[wiltw]

that’s why I whenever possible use an incident meter. Reflective meters introduce all kinds of variability.

• Incident meters reduce the variable caused by subject surface reflectance, and inherent brightness...the eye is somewhat poor at assessment of tonality in looking at the interent color of that item...if you look at a color Macbeth card and look at a B&W rendition of that card, poeple would be surprised at the bad guesses they can make!
• narrow angle spotmeters allow one to better assess the range of tones in a scene, from darkest to lightest, to assess their position, relative to exposure indicated mid-tone, within the capturable range of the film and the reproduction range of the final media for which the shot is taken (e.g. offset press has narrower range than photographic paper.

IOW there is value to be had by both kinds of meters,n and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each, in a given photographic situation.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

IOW there is value to be had by both kinds of meters,n and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each, in a given photographic situation.

...unless you’re a person like me where too many choices result in the inability to decide which to use when.

 

[wiltw]

...unless you’re a person like me where too many choices result in the inability to decide which to use when.

The two indicate different things! So there ought not be confusion caused, unless you do not understand what each is telling you.
The confusion, if it arises, may be due to the fact that one of two meters is out of calibration!

 

[Adrian Bacon]

...unless you’re a person like me where too many choices result in the inability to decide which to use when.

in that case just pick one and stick with it unless you run into a problem compelling enough to make you want to try a different choice.