BetterSense
Member
I haven't started shooting B&W other than XP2. But here's the problem I can foresee. You have three variables of exposure, development, and printing exposure. How can you know if you are underexposing in the camera or underdeveloping? Or over-exposing during printing?
Even if you give the negatives the 'eyeball' test for dense-ness, if they appear too dense, you still can't tell if it's exposure or developing. Unless you just totally go by the Massive Dev chart as gospel. Do people do that?
What makes total sense to me, is the method explained by Ken Rockwell of bracketing an entire roll of shooting an OOF 18% grey card. Then measuring the density of the resulting neg, subtracting the density of base+fog and choosing whatever EI is closest to his optimal number. But STILL, if you are developing yourself, how can you know that your development is 'correct'? If it this test turns up showing that you should shoot Tri-X at 200, maybe you are underdeveloping, you know? The only thing I can think is that people really take the development charts as gospel. I can't even think about what you would do without a densitometer.
Printing is a whole other shootin match, but it would be so much worse if I didn't even know if my neg was proper to start with.
Sorry for the long post by my scientist brain thinks about these things too much.
Even if you give the negatives the 'eyeball' test for dense-ness, if they appear too dense, you still can't tell if it's exposure or developing. Unless you just totally go by the Massive Dev chart as gospel. Do people do that?
What makes total sense to me, is the method explained by Ken Rockwell of bracketing an entire roll of shooting an OOF 18% grey card. Then measuring the density of the resulting neg, subtracting the density of base+fog and choosing whatever EI is closest to his optimal number. But STILL, if you are developing yourself, how can you know that your development is 'correct'? If it this test turns up showing that you should shoot Tri-X at 200, maybe you are underdeveloping, you know? The only thing I can think is that people really take the development charts as gospel. I can't even think about what you would do without a densitometer.
Printing is a whole other shootin match, but it would be so much worse if I didn't even know if my neg was proper to start with.
Sorry for the long post by my scientist brain thinks about these things too much.