Is film good in contrasty light?

[khrisrino]

Hi, I'd agree with koraks. I expect that you'll be disappointed with your film results. It's true that the film(s?) mentioned do have the ability to record a very long "brightness" range. But when you try to actually put this range to use you're gonna run into the same issues as you did with your digital back.

Interesting! The methods you describe do sound quite similar to what I'm doing digitally. My hope was that film would be easier to work with (even if it has the same issues to deal with). I guess I'll just have to try it to find out

 

[awty]

FP4 and meter for the shadows and dont over develop.

I like my high contrast scenes to stay high contrast.
This is a 12noon on a cloudless day using 35mm fp4
Rock Pool at Midday by Paul Fitz, on Flickr

 

[khrisrino]

+++++

This in essence is what the OP wants to know. isn't it? Currently in trying to help we are telling him what the problems are and possibly without trying to, are persuading him that his is a forlorn hope

Once we can see what it is he wants to achieve, we'll know how and if we can help him

pentaxuser

I was not sure if its ok to post pics. This is one of the examples I gave up on. This is pretty much straight from the camera so its quite dark. What I don't like about this one is that the transitions from light to dark are too extreme to recover in post (see crop)

 

[MattKing]

I think I know where you are coming from
Scanned from T-Max 400.

But it has as much to do with being familiar with the film, the developer, and how I use my meter than it does with the medium chosen.

This happens to be a scan from a 6 x 5.5 negative. The scan plus the post processing does a good job of emulating the 11 x 14 print.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

I'm with Koraks: you're expecting magic when what is needed, from the situation your describe, is careful planning of each step, careful measuring and at times tedious experimentation. High contrast scenes, with a wide luminance range, are the toughest, with the constant risk of blown highlights, blocked shadows and poor middle contrast. The choice of film developer itself won't be enough, you have to chose the right developer for it and the scene in questions, meaning the right dilution—especially in the case of Xtol, D-76 or D-23—the right development time, etc. Film doesn't handle highlights better than digital, the right developer used the right way does.

Not saying it's not worth it. On the contrary. If you find the "sweet spot", the results can be spectacular. But it takes time.

Yeah, you can go the "bracket a ton and send it to a lab" route, but I'm not sure the results will tell you anything.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Hi. I do a lot of high-contrast black and white photography, not only in the extremes of desert and mountain high altitude, but here in the redwoods where lighting ratios between brilliantly lit twigs and deep shade detail can be up to a 12 stop range once the fog is gone and direct sun is out. I shoot various formats, all the way from 6x7 to 8x10, and have learned how to get rich tonality out of the total range. By far the best film available at the present time for handling that long scale is TMax. I prefer TMax100 in roll films cameras due to its high detail capacity and finer grain, but TMax 400 in bigger sheet film sizes. But you can use either in any format. Learning how to correctly meter for these and properly develop for optimum performance takes some practice. And if you intend to make darkroom prints with the result, that's what you should try to do hand in hand right from the start. Sometimes people who merely scan and look at a screen get a mistaken impression. Besides, this is a so-called "analog" forum, whatever that means. It simply call it classic photography. But it's next to impossible to represent over the web a long scale print from a high contrast scene.

Other potential choices : FP4 is a more forgiving beginner film, but can't resolve deep shadows to the same degree TMax can. Delta 100 likewise, though it more resembles TMax if you rate it around 50. Tri-X? - well, if you enjoy the look of buckshot-sized grain. I call it Triassic-X for a reason. All kinds of possibilities, but most of them struggle in seriously high contrast. Better films in that respect once existed in the past, but were themselves quite grainy by today's standards. Just take my word for it and pick one of the TMax films.

A lot goes into doing this well. You can't just push some buttons and get the job done. High contrast requires accurate metering skill, preferably with a real spot meter. Or go ahead and bracket for initial learning purposes. If it's TMax, use actual box speed, either 100 or 400. Just try to get on to first base first learning appropriate exposure. Fine tuning the development method can come later, along with being hauled into the dark forest at night by torchlight to some secret spot to get initiated in the Zone System fraternity by a bunch of bearded old men with bent noses, none of whom will completely agree with one another. Run for your life if you can!

 

[Maris]

From my experience dense dark woodland with patches of raw sunlight is pretty well an impossible subject if a good looking and fully detailed picture is required. The brightness range can even be beyond the capabilities of the human eye. Try it: stare at a sunlit patch and don't let the eye wander. The shadows are blank. Now fix the eye on a deep shadow and note that the sunlit patches appear blank. The fully detailed picture, highlights and shadows, is something assembled in the brain not the eye. A biological equivalent of digital HDR I suppose.

It is possible using Zone system controls to generate a picture that has simultaneously tone in the sunlit highlights and tone in the deep shadows but the mid-tone contrast will be so muted that the picture will be very dull and probably not worth looking at.

There is a unusual way to succeed with a picture of such a scene but only on a day with clouds:
Frame the scene in a camera mounted on a solid tripod. Make a first exposure metered for the sunlit patches. Don't move the camera or the film.
Now wait until a cloud covers the sun and evens out the lighting. Make a second exposure metered for the overall scene. The double exposure will bring highlight and shadow detail close together for a fully detailed negative without crazy contrast.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I was not sure if its ok to post pics. This is one of the examples I gave up on. This is pretty much straight from the camera so its quite dark. What I don't like about this one is that the transitions from light to dark are too extreme to recover in post (see crop)

You're shooting backlit subjects that are creating silhouettes. The lighting range is too great for what you want to accomplish. That's why other photographers wait for overcast or fog as you said in your first post. Celebrate the silhouetted pictures and wait for other lighting for different results.

 

[destroya]

I agree that tmax 400 would be a great choice with pyro-hd or M as a developer. should give you a nice long tonal scale and the pyro will help keep the highlights in check, sort of. I agree that you should take a meter reading in the shade to get proper exposure for the tree and let the sky fall where it does. you could try a compensating developer but that is getting deeper into the woods, so to speak.

your metering is causing some of your problems it seems. I know the area you are shooting, I shoot there all the time and it will be a contrasty shot almost all day. try metering like was mentioned before. take a reading with no sky and see what happens. you could also take 2 shots and do an HDR merge, one exposed for the trees and one for the sky

john

 

[gone]

My hope was that film would be easier to work with (even if it has the same issues to deal with).

Just the opposite. Every B&W film will look different at different EIs, and in different light and in different developers. So before one even begins, the film shooter is faced w/ a lot of decisions that will alter the IQ. Even the way it's agitated will influence it's appearance. For your purposes, I'd say get some Tri-X and develop it in D76 stock solution. That's pretty foolproof and offers smooth tonality.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Just the opposite. Every B&W film will look different at different EIs, and in different light and in different developers. So before one even begins, the film shooter is faced w/ a lot of decisions that will alter the IQ. Even the way it's agitated will influence it's appearance. For your purposes, I'd say get some Tri-X and develop it in D76 stock solution. That's pretty foolproof and offers smooth tonality.

Another pairing Tri-X and XTOL or 400 and XTOL.

For a website supporting film I see a lot of gloom and doom. Time destroy all cameras, film and digital, and go back to hammers, chisels and stone slabs before the sky falls and all rains cause floods!

 

[Helge]

Hi. I do a lot of high-contrast black and white photography, not only in the extremes of desert and mountain high altitude, but here in the redwoods where lighting ratios between brilliantly lit twigs and deep shade detail can be up to a 12 stop range once the fog is gone and direct sun is out. I shoot various formats, all the way from 6x7 to 8x10, and have learned how to get rich tonality out of the total range. By far the best film available at the present time for handling that long scale is TMax. I prefer TMax100 in roll films cameras due to its high detail capacity and finer grain, but TMax 400 in bigger sheet film sizes. But you can use either in any format. Learning how to correctly meter for these and properly develop for optimum performance takes some practice. And if you intend to make darkroom prints with the result, that's what you should try to do hand in hand right from the start. Sometimes people who merely scan and look at a screen get a mistaken impression. Besides, this is a so-called "analog" forum, whatever that means. It simply call it classic photography. But it's next to impossible to represent over the web a long scale print from a high contrast scene.

Other potential choices : FP4 is a more forgiving beginner film, but can't resolve deep shadows to the same degree TMax can. Delta 100 likewise, though it more resembles TMax if you rate it around 50. Tri-X? - well, if you enjoy the look of buckshot-sized grain. I call it Triassic-X for a reason. All kinds of possibilities, but most of them struggle in seriously high contrast. Better films in that respect once existed in the past, but were themselves quite grainy by today's standards. Just take my word for it and pick one of the TMax films.

A lot goes into doing this well. You can't just push some buttons and get the job done. High contrast requires accurate metering skill, preferably with a real spot meter. Or go ahead and bracket for initial learning purposes. If it's TMax, use actual box speed, either 100 or 400. Just try to get on to first base first learning appropriate exposure. Fine tuning the development method can come later, along with being hauled into the dark forest at night by torchlight to some secret spot to get initiated in the Zone System fraternity by a bunch of bearded old men with bent noses, none of whom will completely agree with one another. Run for your life if you can!

 

[DREW WILEY]

Alan - The question seems framed around b&w film. A much different ballgame than color film. There are numerous ways to strategize a high contrast exposure; but with any of them it's important to meter both the deepest shadow gradation values you hope to retain perceptible texture in, as well as the highlights at the other end. Many people resort to Zone theory and "minus" develop the film, or use some analogous form of compensation development to squeeze the overall sandwich together. But that comes with the penalty of diminished textural differentiation in the midtones. In other words, they stomp on the sandwich until it's thin enough to eat.

Combined with that strategy, they often overexpose the shadows to get the shadow values up off the toe and onto the straight line of the characteristic curve; for instance, using Zone III shadow placement with Tri-X. But that just exacerbates the overblown highlight issue in high contrast scenes. That worked better back when long scale contact printing papers like Azo were in frequent use, but now seems counterproductive for regular silver gelatin printing.

What I prefer to do is choose a film with a long straight line to begin with, which is capable of good shadow gradation way down into Zone I; and at the present time, Tmax films are the answer to that, but only if the metering and development are correct. Just a matter of fine-tuning one's skills. Then there are all kinds of potentially helpful tweaks like staining pyro development, use of VC papers, supplemental contrast masking, etc. I really enjoy all of that, plus the challenge itself of high contrast scenes. But I want to preserve all the native depth and sparkle. No polarizers or drastic minus development for me.

Any let me just emphasize once again that this is the kind of thing I do all the time. It's entirely feasible. Tomorrow I'll be out in a foggy seaside low-contrast setting. But just a short distance away driving to or from, I might well encounter a direct sun deep forest situation in the redwoods with extreme contrast. I can handle either using TMax. The only better films were the true 200's like past Super-XX and Bergger 200. The current pseudo-200 of Foma 200 does itself have an exceptionally long straight line, but is otherwise a massive headache in deep shade, with abominable long exposure characteristics and disappointing quality control. So I didn't include that under forest scenes per se; been there, done that, learned my lesson. A slow fine-grained film which did work was Efke 25, but it's gone too.

 

[ic-racer]

I use subtle fill flash in my landscape scenes like what you have posted. I try not to make it obvious, but other times, clearly the flash is evident.
I'll see if I can find some examples.

 

[ic-racer]

This one is pretty obvious fill flash.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I use subtle fill flash in my landscape scenes like what you have posted. I try not to make it obvious, but other times, clearly the flash is evident.
I'll see if I can find some examples.

A large piece of cardboard with reflective me material can be used to reflect light for fill in. I have never done that, but there are such reflectors for sale at the usual places.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Yeah, for small subject outdoors, a fill reflector could be used. My brother did that, even in good ole Super-XX days. But I never seem to, even though I do keep a small collapsible bounce disc in my pack. (When I occasionally employ that, it's for pre-flashing a sheet of color film in camera using a warming filter, to offset any deep blue-cyan bias in Ektar shadows, using the gray disc side; but I could hypothetically use the white side as a fill reflector instead.)

I don't even know where to buy flash powder anymore. Besides, it might start a forest fire. But so might a heated discussion over the best pyro formulation. They call it "pyro" for a reason : pyrogallol, pyrocatechol, pyrotechnics ...

 

[khrisrino]

Alan - The question seems framed around b&w film. A much different ballgame than color film. There are numerous ways to strategize a high contrast exposure; but with any of them it's important to meter both the deepest shadow gradation values you hope to retain perceptible texture in, as well as the highlights at the other end. Many people resort to Zone theory and "minus" develop the film, or use some analogous form of compensation development to squeeze the overall sandwich together. But that comes with the penalty of diminished textural differentiation in the midtones. In other words, they stomp on the sandwich until it's thin enough to eat.

Combined with that strategy, they often overexpose the shadows to get the shadow values up off the toe and onto the straight line of the characteristic curve; for instance, using Zone III shadow placement with Tri-X. But that just exacerbates the overblown highlight issue in high contrast scenes. That worked better back when long scale contact printing papers like Azo were in frequent use, but now seems counterproductive for regular silver gelatin printing.

What I prefer to do is choose a film with a long straight line to begin with, which is capable of good shadow gradation way down into Zone I; and at the present time, Tmax films are the answer to that, but only if the metering and development are correct. Just a matter of fine-tuning one's skills. Then there are all kinds of potentially helpful tweaks like staining pyro development, use of VC papers, supplemental contrast masking, etc. I really enjoy all of that, plus the challenge itself of high contrast scenes. But I want to preserve all the native depth and sparkle. No polarizers or drastic minus development for me.

Any let me just emphasize once again that this is the kind of thing I do all the time. It's entirely feasible. Tomorrow I'll be out in a foggy seaside low-contrast setting. But just a short distance away driving to or from, I might well encounter a direct sun deep forest situation in the redwoods with extreme contrast. I can handle either using TMax. The only better films were the true 200's like past Super-XX and Bergger 200. The current pseudo-200 of Foma 200 does itself have an exceptionally long straight line, but is otherwise a massive headache in deep shade, with abominable long exposure characteristics and disappointing quality control. So I didn't include that under forest scenes per se; been there, done that, learned my lesson. A slow fine-grained film which did work was Efke 25, but it's gone too.

That's encouraging to hear. I'm always open to trying new techniques so I appreciate all the ideas.

 

[khrisrino]

This one is pretty obvious fill flash

It works though. I frequently use reflectors when working with small subjects outdoors like flowers and such.

 

[Vaughn]

I photographed in the redwoods for years -- always foggy/overcast days, working in the mid-day light pooling down through the redwoods like from a huge softbox. Easy to work with with silver printing, light changes slowly, lots of contrast...no minus development.

But occasionally the fog would burn off and the contrast goes out of the roof (or canopy in this case) and I'd put my camera away and enjoy the light. But I found a old process that could handle the contrast and loving it. Still do a little expansion even with scenes of high SBR (contrasty scenes). My negs are not optimal for scanning, though.

Good luck on finding a good combination.

 

[koraks]

Soon the OP will be running back to his digital Hasselblad in tears.

My understanding is that OP shoots for a living and in my opinion he's best helped by honest advice. My honest advice is that he already has excellent tools for the job and that adding new tools will come at a significant cost of learning to use them, reducing his productivity or increasing his workload, and that the benefit in the end will be marginal at best. No tears need be involved in making a sound business decision.

 

[Mr Bill]

That's encouraging to hear. I'm always open to trying new techniques so I appreciate all the ideas.

Drew mentioned preflashing color film. This is something you could also do with your b&w film. It might be helpful in your example shot. Essentially you put a very weak exposure across the entire film (you can do this either before or after the main exposure). For example, after the main exposure give a 2nd exposure perhaps 3 or 4 f-stops down from the metered exposure (it could be an out-of-focus reflector, or even a clear sky). The desired effect is to very slightly lift the darkest shadows, such that a little detail comes into them. Anything above the shadows is essentially unaffected, depending on how hard you "flash" the film. It is essentially equivalent to a lens with poor flare control, except that you can control how much.

 

[foc]

Fill in flash, for landscapes, is very hard to do successfully and make it look natural. After all, you are competing with nature and the sun and they nearly always win.

Personally, if I find the scene too contrasty or the light is not to my liking, I will just leave it and maybe come back another day.

Know your own limitations and the equipment and materials limitations.


With a subject like this, you really need to understand fill in flash and the inverse square law.

 

[Helge]

Fill in flash, for landscapes, is very hard to do successfully and make it look natural. After all, you are competing with nature and the sun and they nearly always win.

Personally, if I find the scene too contrasty or the light is not to my liking, I will just leave it and maybe come back another day.

Know your own limitations and the equipment and materials limitations.


With a subject like this, you really need to understand fill in flash and the inverse square law.



View attachment 310757

Getting the flash off to the side makes a huge difference. Just be sure not to hit the front lens element directly. A big shade is mandatory.
Bouncing looses a lot of power.
A central shutter is good for balancing the flash and daylight, but comes with the penalty of shallow DoF necessary to get some daylight/natural light on the film.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Alan - The question seems framed around b&w film. A much different ballgame than color film. There are numerous ways to strategize a high contrast exposure; but with any of them it's important to meter both the deepest shadow gradation values you hope to retain perceptible texture in, as well as the highlights at the other end. Many people resort to Zone theory and "minus" develop the film, or use some analogous form of compensation development to squeeze the overall sandwich together. But that comes with the penalty of diminished textural differentiation in the midtones. In other words, they stomp on the sandwich until it's thin enough to eat.

Combined with that strategy, they often overexpose the shadows to get the shadow values up off the toe and onto the straight line of the characteristic curve; for instance, using Zone III shadow placement with Tri-X. But that just exacerbates the overblown highlight issue in high contrast scenes. That worked better back when long scale contact printing papers like Azo were in frequent use, but now seems counterproductive for regular silver gelatin printing.

What I prefer to do is choose a film with a long straight line to begin with, which is capable of good shadow gradation way down into Zone I; and at the present time, Tmax films are the answer to that, but only if the metering and development are correct. Just a matter of fine-tuning one's skills. Then there are all kinds of potentially helpful tweaks like staining pyro development, use of VC papers, supplemental contrast masking, etc. I really enjoy all of that, plus the challenge itself of high contrast scenes. But I want to preserve all the native depth and sparkle. No polarizers or drastic minus development for me.

Any let me just emphasize once again that this is the kind of thing I do all the time. It's entirely feasible. Tomorrow I'll be out in a foggy seaside low-contrast setting. But just a short distance away driving to or from, I might well encounter a direct sun deep forest situation in the redwoods with extreme contrast. I can handle either using TMax. The only better films were the true 200's like past Super-XX and Bergger 200. The current pseudo-200 of Foma 200 does itself have an exceptionally long straight line, but is otherwise a massive headache in deep shade, with abominable long exposure characteristics and disappointing quality control. So I didn't include that under forest scenes per se; been there, done that, learned my lesson. A slow fine-grained film which did work was Efke 25, but it's gone too.

The photos the OP showed us had lighting that lent itself for silhouettes. Trying to capture all those mid tones and other tones he wanted is nearly impossible under those lighting conditions. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. He should wait for better light.