First Negatives: washed out?

[MattKing]

If the negatives are over-developed and I reduce development time, would that not just move the entire range of tones to the left on the histogram? Or does development effect one end of the tonal range more than the other, thus changing the spread of tones and increasing contrast?

Changing development time affects the highlights much more than the shadows. You usually adjust development in order to adjust contrast.
Changing exposure affects the shadows more than the highlights. You usually adjust exposure in order to adjust shadow detail.
Generally speaking, the best negatives don't appear "strong", they appear "subtle".
The negatives that you photographed and shared here look to me to have highlights that are much more dense than would generally lead to easy optical printing or simple and accurate digitization.
Normal films are able to record an extremely wide range of tones. Where you run into a limiting factor is when you attempt to convert that that range into a result that is usable in the later steps in the process - either printing it optically on to photographic paper, or scanning/photographing the negative digitally, for subsequent digital presentation.
A histogram is as much a measure of the scanner or digital camera's response to a negative as it is to the negative itself.
The scientific, purely objective way to evaluate a negative involves a calibrated light source and a densitometer. That equipment is totally different from what you are using, in that there is no firmware, no programming, no automatic adjustments, no algorithms and no attempts to "normalize" the result.
I've posted the image above number of times, but I'll post it again as an illustration. The negative that it corresponds to is almost ghostly, it is so subtle. As such, it scans wonderfully, and prints very nicely as well.

 

[Curtis Miller]

Matt, that is a lovely print. If I understand you correctly, you are echoing what i have heard elsewhere, which is that you expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights. As my images are bright and washed out, that suggests to me that I need to use less exposure to give me stronger shadows, and probably also less development in order to open up the dense highlights in my negatives. That should yield more contrast through the darker shadows, and better mid tone and highlight detail by opening the highlights.

Is that a correct understanding?

 

[MattKing]

Matt, that is a lovely print. If I understand you correctly, you are echoing what i have heard elsewhere, which is that you expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights. As my images are bright and washed out, that suggests to me that I need to use less exposure to give me stronger shadows, and probably also less development in order to open up the dense highlights in my negatives. That should yield more contrast through the darker shadows, and better mid tone and highlight detail by opening the highlights.

Is that a correct understanding?

Well.....
Thanks for the kind words.
In your efforts to understand this though, I think you are falling into an understandable trap.
You are thinking that you can control your results by controlling the exposure and development.
And you can, as long as you factor in the controlling affect of the means of presentation you choose. You need to target that exposure and development to your presentation choice.
Hopefully it will serve as some comfort that, while you can fine tune things to a particular type of presentation, most negatives that print well optically on photographic paper (my main target) will also digitize/scan well for normal digital printing. You can probably use the same negatives for the digital negative/traditional alternative contact printing processes too, although you would may prefer to fine tune them differently - people like Andrew O'Neill would be good people to ask about that.
When you read "expose for the shadows", it refers to negative film, and it really means "expose enough for the shadows". If you don't give enough exposure to record the details in the shadows, you won't be able to render ("present") that detail in your eventual result - be it through optical print or scan to digital file, because it just won't be there on the film in a retrievable form.
When you read "develop for the highlights", it refers to negative film, and it really means don't "develop too little or too much for the highlights". If you develop them too much, the result has too much contrast, and the most dense portions are difficult to extract detail from, be it through optical print or scan to digital file.
When you get to the presentation stage, if your highlights are too light in your print/scan/screen image, you print/scan or post-process the whole thing darker, until the highlights look okay.
If that results in shadows that are too light, you increase contrast at the printing/scanning/post processing stage. If that results in shadows that are too dark, you decrease the contrast at the printing/scanning/post processing stage.
If those printing brightness adjustments or contrast adjustments lead to mid-tones that are unacceptable, that is a good clue that something in the film exposure, film development or digitization steps is out of whack.
You can print/scan/post process different parts of negatives to different levels of darkness and contrast. That is what is known as dodging, burning and split grade contrast printing, or doing the same thing with layers or masks or a whole bunch of other more expert level techniques. It is mastery of those sorts of techniques that lead to the most powerful and effective final results (IMHO). You may have heard of the related Ansel Adams quotation: "The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."
The really, really old test for whether or not a negative is good is whether or not you could read old fashioned, lead type printed newspaper text through its highlights.
I'm guessing from your first post that you at least remember what that sort of type looks like. In more and more cases now people who post here don't even remember what newspapers look like!

 

[Curtis Miller]

Matt, once again a thoughtful, and helpful post. My goal for output at this point is partly online posting, and preferably digital printing at relatively small scales. I used to do big digital prints for sale in a gallery that represented me, but I'm no longer doing that, so these will mostly be for personal enjoyment. Though you never know whether I might try to sell them at some future time. I enjoy putting my work into book form and printing through Blurb. That's an option too, but again mostly for my own and a few friend's enjoyment.

Today I did more testing. I shot a roll (ten exposures), bracketing a couple of shots minus one stop, correct exposure, and one stop over, which is where I had been exposing. I also reduced my development time from 12 minutes to just over 10 minutes. The results are perhaps better, but not wildly different than before. The exception is that the underexposed negatives are definitely thinner than before. So here are three sample negatives.

To my eye, the underexposed negative looks best, offering deeper shadows and more contrast. However, when I adjusted the images in Lightroom, I found that the correctly exposed image yielded what I consider the best looking image. That is a matter of preference, but clearly the under and normal exposure images work best. The overexposed image required a lot of heavy darkening to look usable. Here they are in order of exposure, from under to over.

The underexposed negative had the widest spread of values, reasonably centered in the histogram. The normal and overexposed negatives pushed further and further to the highlights and got narrower with more exposure. It seems clear to me that overexposing doesn't work at all. In the underexposed negative, the shadows are pretty good. They are well to the right on the histogram, without clipping. There is room for more density in the highlights, which could mean I went to far in reducing development time.

But I feel like the correctly exposed negative yielded the best looking print (on screen at least). There is more contrast and more punch in the mid-tones. The fact that I had to drag the shadows far to the left on the histogram actually seems to have yielded a better look than a negative with a wider spread of values to begin with. Interesting, but a bit confusing to me.

 

[MattKing]

Curtis,
First a bit about nomenclature.
I find it preferable to avoid the phrases "under-exposure" and "normal exposure" and "over-exposure" in discussions like this. To me (and others I think) the two outliers imply errors. I find it much more helpful to use "reduced exposure", "metered exposure" and "increased exposure".
Secondly, for clarity, when you refer to "normal exposure" are you referring to exposure based on the ISO speed of the film, or are you using a different EI speed?
But more generally, I have some observations about your test, and the results. When you consider these observations it is helpful to keep in mind we are at the mercy of variables like my monitor calibration and the image uploader built into Photrio.
With respect to your test itself, it seems to me that you have picked a subject that creates some difficulties. Your subject ranges from bright sky to shaded areas under trees, as well as snow in the foreground. The information you glean from these tests may very well be more applicable to subjects like this than to more general subjects.
With respect to the negatives, and subject to my concerns about the reliability of how things are displaying on my monitor, my initial reaction is that the first negative appears properly exposed, the second negative appears to exhibit overly generous exposure which can probably be easily dealt with at the "printing" stage and the third negative appears to exhibit too much exposure, which may very well lead to impaired highlight rendition.
The contrast of the first two negatives looks good. The increased exposure of the third negative makes it harder to evaluate the contrast of that negative.
The positive images that you display do show the problems that you reference, but I believe that if the negative images are accurate representations of the film negatives themselves, then the positive problems arise from the digitization parts of your process and/or your post-processing steps after that.
In my scanning experience, highly detailed, flat, low contrast scans yield the best final results. Those best results come from post-processing those scans to add back the contrast and tonal range that you need.
Digital cameras are designed to photograph subjects with a wide range of tones. A film negative is a physical entity which itself has a lower range of tones, but which has encoded into it information about subjects with a wide range of tones. Optical printing on to photographic paper automatically decodes that information. The digital camera isn't set up to automatically decode that information - that is the role of post-processing.
Unless some sort of decoding algorithm is applied - such as the algorithms built into film scanners/scanning software, I would not expect a digital photograph of a black and white negative to ever yield a histogram showing a wide range of tones. You want a histogram that corresponds to a file can be post processed into a file exhibiting a histogram of something that prints or displays well.
Assuming that the first negative looks like the image of it you posted, I'd suggest experimenting with the settings on your digital camera to see whether you can obtain a detailed, relatively low contrast "scan" of that negative. Note the shape of the histogram from that file. Then figure out how to post process those files for the displays or prints you want.