How much tolerance and precision we need in our work is an important issue.
APUG is not a homogeneous community, even though we are united by an interest in traditional photographic printing methods.. On the one extreme we have folks who use exclusively 35mm and shoot only a few rolls of film per year, and have little or no financial interest in the process. At the other extreme are LF and ULF photographers who expose hundreds of negatives per year, many of whom derive income from their photographic activities. In between there are MF users.
My own belief is that if you are a LF or ULF photographer working with sheet film one should do whatever is possible to expose and develop the individual sheets so as to make printing as easy as possible. In the long run you will save a lot of time and aggravation by learning what you need to know to make negatives that print well. And since you are working with individual sheets of film it is a simple matter to expose and develop for each scene.
On the other hand, if you are a 35mm photographer any given roll of film typically will have negatives covering a fairly wide range of subject lighting conditions, and if that is the case optimizing development for the entire roll is impossible. My own solution to this situation is to use C-41 color negative film, expose for shadow detail, and just have the film processed at local lab. To make a B&W print you will have to either have the negatives put on CD or scan them yourself, but since highlight density of color negative film shoulders considerably a good scanner should be able to capture it, even if the subject has very high contrast lighting. To print you will have to adjust the curves with image manipulation software.. If this procedure interests you go over the hybrid forum and start a thread. I will say, however, that I have exposed medium format color negative film in SBR conditions of 10 or higher and was able to make prints with a full range of tones from the deepest shadows to the highlights. On the whole I find that this procedures is much more productive than shooting B&W film in the camera.
Sandy King
Dear Sandy,
Hang on! There are a couple of assumptions here. I might as well say, 'At one extrenme there are 35mm users who expose hundreds of rolls a year, and at the other, LF users who expose a few dozen sheets a year.' As for deriving income, that's a complete red herring, independent of format.
I'd also suggest that scanning colour neg film is some way from the route that serious 35mm or MF photographers might consider the optimum for getting B+W prints with the best possible tonality. A lot of us prefer processing 'real' B+W film in the traditional manner and printing it in a 'real' darkroom.
The simple truth about LF is that you can afford to be a lot sloppier than you need to be with smaller formats, because bigger grain and reduced sharpness (associated with wanton over-exposure) matter a lot more as the format gets smaller.
It is remarkable that LF users often attempt to be more technically precise than 35mm users, but it is unremarkable that a significant percentage are deluding themselves that they are working to a very much higher standard of precision than they are, when they are in fact being saved by the inherent flexibility of the B+W neg/pos process.
Note: I do not intend to include you in the latter group!
As one who has owns and has used numerous formats from Minox 8x11mm to 12x15 inch (though I have not shot under half-frame/single-frame 18x24 for years), I really do feel that you are making a generalization here that is hard to defend.
Cheers,
R.