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How to avoid things like 2 second print time? :-)

Jedidiah Smith

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Feb 22, 2006
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441
Location
Ventura, CA
Format
35mm
I know, I should probably know this stuff like the back of my hand at this point, but...
...I've started to print some of the shots I took a few months ago when trying some new films. I came across one frame that I really liked - and I kid you not, the print time was 2 seconds! This strikes me as a little off. Does that mean I massively exposed wrong? Or would it possibly be a development error? (These were new films to me.) The strange part is that the negative looked pretty good to me when I looked at it under a loupe.

35mm B&W neg, on diffuser enlarger (dichroic head), printing at 8x10 size, onto ADOX MCP 310.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Jed
 
You dont say what f/stop are you using on the enlarger lens. Maybe you only need to stop down the lens.
 
Sounds pretty thin Jed, but if it is a nice image you can always stop down the enlarger (you did not expose with enlarger lens wide open did you?) and/or add a neutral density filter to extend the exposure time under the enlarger. It's a little hard to answer your request without having a little more information about the density of your negative in question. good luck
regards
erik
 
Ah, sorry about that! I'm using f5.6 on the enlarger lens. I suppose I could go to f8, but would I lose some sharpness? (Minolta C.E. Rokkor-X 50mm f2.8 lens)

About the neg being thin - yes, I think there's obviously something wrong with my technique for that film, either in exposure or development. Regular "good" T-Max 100 negs print for me at about 8 seconds or so @ f5.6 to get an 8x10 size enlargement on the ADOX MCP 310 RC paper. Does that sound fairly normal?
Can I somehow get a rough check on the density of my negs without buying a densitometer? (Read: I can't really afford any more equipment at the moment!)
Thanks,
Jed
 


Jed, try stopping down and see if you can tell any difference in sharpness ( I doubt it ).
Stick you neg on some newspaper print and you should just barely be able to read the print
through the highlights (densest part of neg). If it really easy to see the print you may have
under developed or under exposed (or both) the negative. You don't need a densitometer
to judge this. Compare the negative with one you get normal exposure times with and
you might answer the question of it being thin or not.
regards
erik
 
I wouldn't worry about the sharpness difference between f/5.6 and f/8 on a good enlarger lens. I'm not familiar with your lens model, but I doubt if a Minolta f/2.8 enlarger lens in good condition is substandard. If you remain concerned about it, using an ND filter, as Erik suggested, is another option. (Using yellow and magenta filtration simultaneously can achieve the same effect, although you'll need to find the right balance to maintain your paper grade with your enlarger and paper.) Two more options are to swap in a dimmer light source and to switch to a slower paper.
 
On an 8x10 you should be able to go all the way to f16. It will look pretty mushy under the grain magnifier, but in an 8x10 at a normal viewing distance, it should look Ok. The only way to know how small you can go on the aperture is to try it out.

Also, you can dial in some red (ie Y and M) to add some effective neutral density. Many heads are roughly calibrated so that 30cc of filtration is one-stop.
 
Jedidiah Smith said:
Ah, sorry about that! I'm using f5.6 on the enlarger lens. I suppose I could go to f8, but would I lose some sharpness? (Minolta C.E. Rokkor-X 50mm f2.8 lens)
Click to expand...

If you stop down a lens from wide open, the sharpness increases rapidely until you reach the optimal stop. Then the sharpnes decreases very slowly. It may be possible that you see a difference in sharpness if you use f/16 or less. But not at such a small print size which requires only 2s at f/5.6.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks for all the replies. Do most of you use f8 on the enlarger lens? I always thought "optimal stop" was 2 stops down on a good prime lens (so in my case f2.8 -> f5.6) but maybe that is wrong. I won't hesitate to change it up if necessary, then.

On another note - what's the best way to prevent this in the future? I don't have a problem messing around with this shot, because it was just for fun, and not that important. My main goal here is to figure out what I did wrong, whether or not it was an exposure error or a developing error or both?
I will check out the "news print" through the neg here tonight and see how it looks. Probably is too thin, I'm thinking.
 
Thanks for all the replies. Do most of you use f8 on the enlarger lens? I always thought "optimal stop" was 2 stops down on a good prime lens (so in my case f2.8 -> f5.6) but maybe that is wrong. I won't hesitate to change it up if necessary, then.
Click to expand...

I use f16 for many 8x10s and f11 or f8 for 11x14. Optimal stop might be 2 stops down from wide open, but if that results in times too short to deal with, then it's not helpful. Like ic-racer said, I really doubt many would see a real difference in sharpness closing down more. I'd rather stop down than add something in the light path like a ND filter.
 

The normal thing to do, esp. with new films & developers, is to print a contact sheet with standardized settings to give you minimum time for maximum black through the film rebate. It's quick to set this up, and it provides 'at a glance' indication on exposure & development. You find your contact settings with a test strip, then use them for all subsequent rolls. (For instance, I'll occasionally proof my exposure & development with my enlarger set at 25 inches, f/8, grade 2 for 10 seconds with Plus-X. The contact prints should look 'normal'.)

This may be the method you are looking for. It gives you the feedback you need if you want to tweak you exposure and/or development, and gives you the best indication of how your enlargement will look.
 
 
Up from 2 F stops they reach the best quality and it will be a bit better on 3-4 F stops and then slowly goes down.
So for a 2,8 going to f=11 is no problem at all even f=16 where it will be slightly less is hardly noticable.

Try to get an exposure time around 10 seconds. It depends on paper, light bulb, type condensor/diffuser too.

I am using only a N.D. 0,6 filter for RA-4 color printing due to the fact color paper is much more sensitive.
 
Jedidiah Smith said:
... I always thought "optimal stop" was 2 stops down on a good prime lens (so in my case f2.8 -> f5.6) ...
Click to expand...
Every lens design has it's own sweet spot when evaluated against some particular criterion. Some lenses designed for high speed have their best performance near or at wide open. Other lenses perform best stopped several stops down. That "rule" of 2 stops down is not too bad in general, but is not true with all lenses all the time.
 
Thanks for all the replies, it gives me something to mull over. I'll see about using f8 on a regular basis and see if the results are better / worse / it doesn't matter.

I will also try the "average 10 seconds" time for a print. That seems pretty reasonable to me. I just realized I was using a new (to me) camera, as well as film & dev. combo that were new on that particular roll - man, guess it was all a crap shoot in some way! Amazing anything turned out at all...
 
I recall doing some tests of various f-stops with some of my enlarging lenses a while back. I don't recall the precise results, but I did get better results at slightly smaller apertures (larger f-stop values) than the conventional wisdom of 2 stops from wide open would suggest. On my best lenses, the difference across the range of apertures was hardly noticeable, even under a loupe. Only my worst lens (a 4-element Nikon EL-Nikkor f/4) showed differences that you'd notice with anything less than a magnifying glass at 8x10 size. Given some posts I've read from others, I suspect my 4-element Nikon lens may simply be a dog (bad from the factory or abused at some point; I bought it used). FWIW, my best lens is a 6-element f/2.8 Nikon EL-Nikkor, so I'm certainly not ragging on Nikon!
 
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