Getting the Most Out of the Negative

Lately I've been working with a 35yo box of old Royal Pan that was described as hopelessly fogged and not responding to light. As you can see, that's very far from the case. Exposure at around 80EI gives pretty good results when developing either normally in D-76, or doing a cold benzotriazole developing in DK-50. Here's an album that shows the kind of results that I'm getting: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmSjZrrM. I think these are pretty acceptable for something that wasn't supposed to work at all.

I guess the thing that bothers me is, I'm not really sure how good my negatives are. I'm not doing any significant twiddling of these images in post at all. I'm just setting gamma to linear, and that's it. Nor am I asking for advice about that. But something bothers me about my negatives, and I don't really have the experience to evaluate them.

For my eyes, they're pretty grey. There seems to be a glow in the shadows. I'm not sure if that's fog or not, or just some stray reflection. This effect seems to have been slightly reduced in the two benzo/cold developed negatives, but maybe not. Maybe I could do better in that respect, but being inexperienced, I'm not sure where to stop.

Where should I start in order to get the most out of the negative? I think I did a reasonable job of picking an EI, and a development time and process that works for it. But is is the best that it can be? Without considering the final images you see here, what objectively would you say just looking at the negatives, and what could be improved upon? Just looking at what you see below, what would you do?



**Note that my goal here is not to use old film because it's cool or great or unobtanium or anything like that. It's to master the processes around taking pictures and developing film. Just manipulating a 4x5 camera takes some practice, and a couple hundred shots will do that.

D76, 7'30", 68F

DK-50 1:1 + benzotriazole, 15', 54F

"Lately I've been working with a 35yo box of old Royal Pan...
**Note that my goal here is not to use old film because it's cool or great or unobtanium or anything like that. It's to master the processes around taking pictures and developing film. Just manipulating a 4x5 camera takes some practice, and a couple hundred shots will do that."

It will be good film to use to learn the mechanics of using the camera and processing negatives. You seem to have a full range of tones...they might be a little re-arranged relative to each other due to age. If you enjoy playing with the chemistry, it will be fun to see what you can get and the experience can serve you well when you use film closer in date. I do suggest a new box of film so you will have a baseline to judge these crazy negatives!

Try a light bleaching of the negatives to clear some of the fog.

Expose fresh film to the same scene and print those negatives to see what you are missing. BTW, those prints don't look too bad.

Vaughn said:

"Lately I've been working with a 35yo box of old Royal Pan...
**Note that my goal here is not to use old film because it's cool or great or unobtanium or anything like that. It's to master the processes around taking pictures and developing film. Just manipulating a 4x5 camera takes some practice, and a couple hundred shots will do that."

It will be good film to use to learn the mechanics of using the camera and processing negatives. You seem to have a full range of tones...they might be a little re-arranged relative to each other due to age. If you enjoy playing with the chemistry, it will be fun to see what you can get and the experience can serve you well when you use film closer in date. I do suggest a new box of film so you will have a baseline to judge these crazy negatives!

Try a light bleaching of the negatives to clear some of the fog.

Click to expand...

Well, I've been working through a box of Foma 100 for the past year, and it's been very reliable and kind of effortless. It's worked great in SP-76EC, Xtol, D76, and PMK. I kind of went down this hole earlier in the year with a bunch of rolls of Tri-X, where I couldn't figure out if I was getting sufficient denisty or not. I had a bunch of experiences where negatives looked nice and sharp, but in the end it was just overblown, and other negatives didn't look like much of anything, or looked thin, and yet they produced nice pictures. And of course, the opposite happened, too.

I guess that what I kind of learned was (and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this), by eye, a negative could look good or bad, or whatever, but none of that makes any difference until you go to print (in my case scan) it. There might be more or less information in there, and the printing process is the one where that's converted to an image. Exposure and developing are the stages where you're capturing and fixing information, though, so that represents an upper bound on what could end up in the image. It makes sense to be as skilled as possible in that, and I'm getting an understanding of my limitations.

I would suggest that the scene and the lighting you put together probably are doing the most toward getting the most out of the film.
All that nice black background is a great place to hide the effects of fog!

MattKing said:

I would suggest that the scene and the lighting you put together probably are doing the most toward getting the most out of the film.
All that nice black background is a great place to hide the effects of fog!

Click to expand...

So, let me know if this makes sense as a way of describing what's happening; I'm actually over-exposing the film, but still staying within it's overall latitude. However, I'm doing it to a degree where the fog is deeper in the blacks, relative to the overall scene.

Does that make sense?

The lighting is all flash, btw.

you might consider over exposing your film at iso 40 and developing it in something like dektol ... 1:5 for 5 minutes.
might be funner. ...

focus_on_infinity said:

So, let me know if this makes sense as a way of describing what's happening; I'm actually over-exposing the film, but still staying within it's overall latitude. However, I'm doing it to a degree where the fog is deeper in the blacks, relative to the overall scene.

Does that make sense?

The lighting is all flash, btw.

Click to expand...

It makes sense, but it is more technical than what I was suggesting.
I was speaking more about the subjective effect - the fog plus black background still ends up as black background, once you print or post process for appropriate highlight contrast and density. A densitometer would be able to note the effects of the fog and reduction of contrast, but an observer won't.

Here's some of the work I was doing with the same pumpkin in the same background, but using fresh Foma 100 in D76.

focus_on_infinity said:

For my eyes, they're pretty grey. There seems to be a glow in the shadows. I'm not sure if that's fog or not....

Click to expand...

It's probably a combination of fog and a natural loss of sensitivity due to age resulting in a fairly low contrast negative. This is not at all uncommon when using very old film.
Fog is often pretty easy to work around - you just print or scan through it - which your results prove as they look pretty good.

If you're curious to know how much fog you're really dealing with, try putting a piece of film directly in the fixer and fixing it completely. This will show you what color the base material is with no emulsion on it whatsoever. Now compare that to the rebates of your exposed and developed film. If the exposed and developed rebates are darker (and they will be), that's how much fog you have. Is that amount of fog a problem? it doesn't seem so as your scans look quite good.

In terms of getting more contrast out of your negatives, you could always try a more active developer and/or more agitation but, in the end, there's a practical limit to what you can get out of old film. In your case it doesn't seem to be very limiting at all!

focus_on_infinity said:

...
I guess that what I kind of learned was (and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this), by eye, a negative could look good or bad, or whatever, but none of that makes any difference until you go to print (in my case scan) it. There might be more or less information in there, and the printing process is the one where that's converted to an image. Exposure and developing are the stages where you're capturing and fixing information, though, so that represents an upper bound on what could end up in the image. It makes sense to be as skilled as possible in that, and I'm getting an understanding of my limitations.

Click to expand...

Sounds good!

The requirements for scan-only vs wet processes are different...and depending on the process, very different. Scanners hate my negatives, lol! Once I left silver printing and went to the carbon and platinum printing processes, I began to be more aware of the possibilities of matching a negative specifically to a process. Exploring the carbon process 'before the internet' from a magazine article, I took two years of working back and forth between the negative and the print, one feeding the other. Without ever seeing a carbon print, how far could I take a simple formula and method to create a print that would take me further than a silver gelatin could...and what would it look like? See something interesting...push the process in that direction...all the while matching the possibilities with a new negative...all the while photographing under the redwoods, tossing new types of images into the works because the new process allows for very wide scene brightness ranges that silver printing can't easily handle. Ah ha! A 13+ stop range?! I finally get to give a negative normal development (image below)!

Seems with scanning, one gets all that info on the film from here to there on the curve, and one is set to go...twist and shape it however one wishes from there. But that probably just shows what I don't know. Like grain structure, I suppose. Would there be a specific grain size and/or structure that facilitates scanning over others? (Rhetorical question)

Good luck in your explorations!

Vaughn said:

Sounds good!

The requirements for scan-only vs wet processes are different...and depending on the process, very different. Scanners hate my negatives, lol! Once I left silver printing and went to the carbon and platinum printing processes, I began to be more aware of the possibilities of matching a negative specifically to a process. Exploring the carbon process 'before the internet' from a magazine article, I took two years of working back and forth between the negative and the print, one feeding the other. Without ever seeing a carbon print, how far could I take a simple formula and method to create a print that would take me further than a silver gelatin could...and what would it look like? See something interesting...push the process in that direction...all the while matching the possibilities with a new negative...all the while photographing under the redwoods, tossing new types of images into the works because the new process allows for very wide scene brightness ranges that silver printing can't easily handle. Ah ha! A 13+ stop range?! I finally get to give a negative normal development (image below)!

Seems with scanning, one gets all that info on the film from here to there on the curve, and one is set to go...twist and shape it however one wishes from there. But that probably just shows what I don't know. Like grain structure, I suppose. Would there be a specific grain size and/or structure that facilitates scanning over others? (Rhetorical question)

Good luck in your explorations!

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm very interested in printing, and carbon prints specifically. There seems to be both a depth and a delicacy there that's unique to carbon printing. There are some images that I can imagine that I feel could come from that process. But, first things first.

Scanning is very useful, and that's my end product for the moment. But I do find that image manipulation in software just feels like an empty and aribitrary pursuit. I'm open to changing my mind about that, but for now, I just don't feel I have any compelling aesthetic I want to pursue with it. I'm basically just flipping the image with ColorNeg, and that's it.

Work as hard and have as much fun with creating images as you are exploring the limits of the material, and it will all come together!

Vaughn, that is a beautiful image! You definitely got the most of that negative! I lived in Arcata for 13 years and never warmed to the seacoast landscapes, and redwood forests make me claustrophobic - much prefer the wide open spaces of the desert West....

Looks to me like you are underexposing. I prefer to bomb old film with light then the resulting negative has more "image" which reduces the apparent fog, relatively speaking of course

Also if you want to reduce fog, Rodinal with Benzo is the best I've found. P-Aminophenol is a low fog developing agent by itself and Benzo of course helps the situation.

Hope that helps you.

Exactly!

A negative to the naked eye means nothing. A thin tmax100 negative will print beautifully with so much detail, not something that could be said from a traditional film.

focus_on_infinity said:

Well, I've been working through a box of Foma 100 for the past year, and it's been very reliable and kind of effortless. It's worked great in SP-76EC, Xtol, D76, and PMK. I kind of went down this hole earlier in the year with a bunch of rolls of Tri-X, where I couldn't figure out if I was getting sufficient denisty or not. I had a bunch of experiences where negatives looked nice and sharp, but in the end it was just overblown, and other negatives didn't look like much of anything, or looked thin, and yet they produced nice pictures. And of course, the opposite happened, too.

I guess that what I kind of learned was (and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this), by eye, a negative could look good or bad, or whatever, but none of that makes any difference until you go to print (in my case scan) it. There might be more or less information in there, and the printing process is the one where that's converted to an image. Exposure and developing are the stages where you're capturing and fixing information, though, so that represents an upper bound on what could end up in the image. It makes sense to be as skilled as possible in that, and I'm getting an understanding of my limitations.

Click to expand...