In over forty years spent in photography, I have heard a lot of different approaches to process. A lot of them begin with exposure of the camera negative. I have come to believe the more expedient and repeatable process must begin with the printing paper or print medium. Until we know the contrast range of the print we can not know the proper exposure and development of the camera negative.
What are your thoughts on this?
Hi, I've spent a lot of years heavily involved with what we called "quality control," which in our case about 2/3 of this was what the photo processing business knows as "process control." Now a "process" can basically be anything you want to decide that it is, so I'll narrow it a bit. We considered "process control" to generally be only the film and paper development-to-dry portions. Having said that, let me jump elsewhere.
It might be best to define a few terms: optimal, repeatable, and previsualize. That way we’ll be sure to be talking about the same thing.
I agree. The title of this thread seems to be about "repeatability," but the original post suggests that we must consider response characteristics of the printing paper in order to know what sort of exposure and development aims are needed for the negative. So in my world these would be seen as "process specifications" and being able to stick close to the specs is roughly the "repeatability" (this is not exactly correct, though). Once you have decided on the "aims," then the combination of trying to meet these and doing it consistently is what I generally consider as "process control."
I spent more than a few years overseeing this sort of thing in a large photo processing lab. I would say that the number one thing you would need to do to be assured of being repeatable is to set up some sort of MEASURABLE guidelines. Without such, there's really no way to be sure what's going on. Now, I'm saying "measurable," suggesting that you might need something like a densitometer. But anything that you could assign a value to would essentially work; perhaps you have several reference images that have varying exposure or contrast; you could rate your freshly-processed work with respect to these (closest to sample 'A' or 'B' etc.) See the method that Bill Burk uses as an example.
Anyway, the topic can get a lot deeper than most people would expect. If you want to get your feet wet on this, you can download Kodak pub Z-133, essentially an instruction manual for "monitoring" a b&w process. (The monitoring procedure is basically the foundation of a process control system.) I appreciate that you probably don't do the sort of volume that makes this sort of system worthwhile, but it can give you the sense of how such a system can work; you might find that you can adopt an idea or two from this.
As a note, a lot of photographers tend to look at something like this and say that this techie stuff is not for them; they put more stock in the "vision, or "artistry" of the thing. I would say that the comparison is along the lines of a mass production system, with interchangeable parts, vs a system where everything is individually hand-fitted. If you're gonna do it for a living in a competitive situation, there's a lot to be said for the "mass production" aspects. Anything else, well it probably doesn't matter so much.
...realizing that 'decent' can be a moving target. Can one make better than a 'decent' photograph without the equal consideration of vision/image, capture, neg processing, printing, and presentation? For me, the past 40 years have been a process of concentration on the whole process. Otherwise, to me it would be like saying breathing is a distraction to living.
