Should I bother with BTZS?

[DrPablo]

I'm intrigued by this, and the photos produced by its practicioners are wonderful.

But I do this as a pure hobby, I shoot low volume, and given how flexible B+W photography / printing is, I've gotten reasonable results winging it or using a limited Zone System techinque.

That said, I'd love to have more sophistication and consistency with scene evaluation and printing, and I'd consider getting into BTZS if the film testing, paper testing, all that stuff isn't a giant pain in the ass. But if it ends up so time consuming that it takes the fun out of printing, then it's not worth it to me.

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

There is no "beyond" in BTZS, it's just "further down." Which means that the same principles apply: expose your scene at an EI appropriate for the brightness range of your scene and develop your film so that it can fit on the paper you work with.

The only difference is that instead of using discrete values for your development times (N-1, N, and N+1), you have an actual continuous function, so that you can calculate N+0.75 if you want. The same applies for EI.

So for the same scene, with the Zone system you would just expose at 250 ASA, and develop at N+1; with BTZS you could calculate how to expose at 312 ASA and develop at N+0.89.

BTZS is a very exacting methodology, but you're doing the same thing as the ZS. That's especially useful for Pt/Pd printers who have narrow tolerances. I'm sure the photo engineers would scoff anyway at the simplicity of either system because they have the most exacting methodology for tone reproduction control, isn't it?

If you want a well-written (and free) article on BTZS methodology, check out Jorge's piece in the latest issue of Magnachrome, an online magazine.

 

[noseoil]

Yes. tim

 

[Thomas Bertilsson]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole reason for the BTZS approach that you want very specific densities in your negs, while developing in some sort of daylight tank?
Another way around the same problem would be to develop by inspection. It will require some definite practice, I'll say that, but once the technique has been refined, and you have learned what to look for, you should be just as well off.

Now, this is my opinion. If anybody has a different sense, then by all means prove me wrong.

- Thom

 

[DrPablo]

My impression is that its idea is to create a workflow that will naturally and empirically flow from a scene with a given brightness range to a print, avoiding much of the trial and error of the process.

My issue is one of cost/benefit, though. Cost is mainly measured in time and effort, rather than the cost of the BTZS book, film testing stuff, and the ExpoDev program for my PDA. And cost/benefit has to be measured in terms of individual needs, naturally.

So the question isn't whether or not everyone should be using BTZS. My question is whether it's worth it for someone like me who wants to make great prints, but doesn't sell a damn thing, shoots low volume, and wants to spend his time doing things that are enjoyable and not excessively procedural.

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

My impression is that its idea is to create a workflow that will naturally and empirically flow from a scene with a given brightness range to a print, avoiding much of the trial and error of the process.

And so is the Zone System. Pablo, as I've said, BTZS and the Zone System are the same thing. If you need a finer-grained approach, use BTZS. I suppose you must work in large format, otherwise don't even bother.

If so, think in terms of tolerances: do you work in such a way that differences of exposure in 1/3rd of a stop, and 30s of development matter to your printing? If not, then forget about it.

If you want to know whether the testing is too technical for your tastes, go read the magnachrome article.

 

[noseoil]

Pablo, BTZS, while a bit tedious at first to understand and learn, will help you understand your materials. It allows you to work with light, which would otherwise be too difficult to "guess" at for exposure and development. If you want to use it for a hobby, as I do, you will most likely be a dedicated amateur who enjoys problem solving and tends toward compulsive-obsessive behavior anyway (read anal-retentive). It also allows for a bit of intuitive thought, once you have the basics in hand.

It is certainly not for everyone, but development by inspection will not be something you will need to use, once you have worked out the numbers for your film and paper of choice, another way of looking at light and printing what you see. Not right or wrong, better or worse, just another tool in the bag of tricks you can use for a good print. tim

 

[Paul Howell]

It seems to me that the advantage for the casual shooter is that BTZS,or ZS for that matter, is that once you invest in the time and money for the tools and have your process down you will consistantly get a printable negative and it the long term save on materials and time. For Large Fomat users this can a lot of money.

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

I use ZS rather than BTZS, but whether you use either of these approaches or development by inspection, it's all about being able to produce a negative that will print the way you want to, following a process that suits your cognitive style. Considerations of economy of materials and volume of production are secondary, I think.

If you're having trouble getting the results you want with the methods you are using, then that's a reason to explore these approaches to get control of the process and see which of them seems most intuitive to you.

 

[pgomena]

The first time I tested BZTS it was a bit confusing, but once you get the hang of it, your results will speak for themselves. I, too, am a low-volume and occasional photographer at the moment, but the results I get following BZTS testing and metering procedures are superior to results I got testing by other means. It's a personal choice, of course, and everyone eventually creates their own personal working methods.

BZTS is a futher refinement of the Zone System. I've found it has taken me from getting negatives "in the ballpark" to getting negatives "in the infield." It's ideal for sheet film cameras, but also useful with roll film, especially if you have a camera with interchangeable backs.

I don't bother with the "expo-dev" calculator because I hate to fiddle with electronic gadgets in the field. An old Gossen Luna-Pro SBC does me fine. (I also use a spot meter on occasions where I can't easily make incident readings.) I carry a copy of the BZTS film speed and exposure charts for my film in a little 3x5 notebook. Not as exact as figuring things to 1/3 stop, but I find that working with 120 roll film in the field tends to make such precision a bit much.

Printing good BZTS negatives is a joy. The images just fall onto the paper and burning/dodging become expressive tools instead of drudgery.

You will need access to reflection and transmission densitometers, but the testing is not that difficult if you're experienced in a darkroom. I highly recommend buying the software over drawing curves by hand. The book is good, but a quick reading isn't easy. See also Phil Davis' article in the latest View Camera magazine for a good synopsis.

Peter Gomena

 

[avandesande]

IMO if you are working in an alt process where making test prints is expensive and time consuming it makes sense.. for me 'in the ballpark' works well enough for silver gelatin.

 

[Ian Leake]

I found that BTZS gave me a far better understanding of what really goes on with film and paper. But there's a health warning: I also found myself in creative deadlock, because I got mentally stuck feeling that I had to test everything before I tried to take an important photograph. It took me a long time to realise what was going on and pull myself out of it...

 

[resummerfield]

I also found the BTZS method very helpful, and well worth the time and effort to learn.

 

[pentaxuser]

On seeing your thread, I was sure that I recalled seeing one of your B&W prints of the inside of a cathedral - always a test of getting the right neg for printing in my opinion.

My impression at the time was of a very good neg but I had a closer look. I haven't changed my mind about its quality. If this is what you regularly achieve with difficult shots then it would seem to raise the question of whether BTZS would give a good return for the effort involved.

If I have understood your thread, it was this return for effort expended in using BTZS that was the crux of it.

Of course it's like everything else in life, you'll never know if BTZS can squeeze the extra requisite quality out of your photography that you desire until you try it.

If you do try it and it doesn't yield a good rate of return, the key question then is: How would you feel about expending the effort?

If the answer in my case was: I would feel I had wasted my time then that would tell me what I needed to do or not to do as the case may be.

pentaxuser

 

[sanking]

The real danger of BTZS is that the system makes it so easy to make great negatives you will soon have far more of them than you can ever print, even if you work around the clock. At first this abundance will make you happy, but as your files become burdened with the excess of great printable negatives you will probably start to question the logic of going out and doing new work. This may lead to depression for some because the thing that most of us like to do above all is to get out and find and create new images.

In my own case life was much simpler when I just went out and exposed a lot of negatives with a wide field averaging meter, lumped them all together, and developed them all the same. That way only about one or two of twenty came out decent enough to print so I was able to keep up with my good work. Now, thanks to BTZS, things are ever so much more complicated. I just returned from a trip abroad where I made some 100+ 5X7" negatives, and thanks to BTZS, after developing it looks like well over 99% of them will print almost perfectly, in spite of the fact that I was shooting in some difficult back lighted scenes where the SBR was 9 or more. This surplus, coming as it does just at the first of the year, has really put me in a hole for the rest of the year as I need to abstain altogether from doing any more work, or at least curtail it significantly.

So before making a switch to BTZS I would recommend that you consider the dangers that it poses to your health and state of mind.

Sandy King

 

[gainer]

Photography with film and development is an open loop process. Anything one can do to predict the outcome with greater accuracy should be tried. When dealing with roll film, unless all scenes on the roll have the same brightness range, the closest one can come to either the zone system or BTZS is to expose for the shadows and not develop too much. The virtue of either system is mostly in letting you know what you are in for in the darkroom.

Sandy's predicament reminds me of what one of my first mentors told me of a photographer who set off to England with his view camera and two glass plates and came back well satisfied with half his plates unused. This was before I ever heard of the Zones or BTZS. If all of Sandy's photos are as interesting as they are printable, he's in for some long periods of darkness.

 

[DrPablo]

Thanks all for the varied perspectives, and I'm glad I've engendered a useful conversation on the subject. Maybe the best thing for me is to really try to be stricter about the zone system first, and then move on to BTZS later on. I'll be moving soon and setting up a better darkroom that will lend itself more to consistency.

On seeing your thread, I was sure that I recalled seeing one of your B&W prints of the inside of a cathedral - always a test of getting the right neg for printing in my opinion.

My impression at the time was of a very good neg but I had a closer look. I haven't changed my mind about its quality. If this is what you regularly achieve with difficult shots then it would seem to raise the question of whether BTZS would give a good return for the effort involved.

Thanks for the comments. Yes, that was my shot. I was overall pleased with my exposures in the cathedral, but the negatives have taken a lot of work to print to my satisfaction. I think I could have done it much better if I'd used contracted development to get the alter under control. B+W is such a flexible medium and the HP5 and FP4 I use are such forgiving films that I have found I can get great prints out of suboptimal negatives if I work at it enough. Whether or not BTZS is my medium I'm sure a more rigorous, formal, repeatable methodology will lead to more consistent results.

The real danger of BTZS is that the system makes it so easy to make great negatives you will soon have far more of them than you can ever print, even if you work around the clock. At first this abundance will make you happy, but as your files become burdened with the excess of great printable negatives you will probably start to question the logic of going out and doing new work. This may lead to depression for some because the thing that most of us like to do above all is to get out and find and create new images.

Heh, we should all have such problems. I'd rather have too many good shots than not enough. But it's true, though -- it's one of the reasons I've really moved away from digital, because the volume of shots (including good ones) was beyond what I could handle.

 

[reellis67]

My question is whether it's worth it for someone like me who wants to make great prints, but doesn't sell a damn thing, shoots low volume, and wants to spend his time doing things that are enjoyable and not excessively procedural.

That is my situaution as well, for the most part. These exacting measurements just take too much from the experience, which for me has quite a lot to do with just getting out there and working. I use old wooden cameras and I just like to get out and shoot and enjoy working with whatever it is that I'm photographing. I figure as long as I'm happy with what I'm getting, I must be doing thing right. I'm not bragging in any way here, but I am happy with the negatives that I get - they print well, they don't take a lot of calculating or dragging around electronic equipment, and I end up with negatives that I don't have to work all that hard to get good prints from.

I think the bottom line is, as with any technique or piece of equipment, if *you* feel it is needed, then it is. If you don't, then it is not. Try it out and see what you think.

- Randy

 

[gainer]

If you know where Zone III is on your spotmeter for the film you are using, you're halfway there. If you can correlate the shadow reading with your film's black, same thing.

 

[sanking]

Heh, we should all have such problems. I'd rather have too many good shots than not enough. But it's true, though -- it's one of the reasons I've really moved away from digital, because the volume of shots (including good ones) was beyond what I could handle.

This would be one good excuse for taking up ULF. The logistical problems in toting the equipment around will severely limit the number of potential exciting image possibiliities. Then, as the size of the camera increases there is an exponential increase in difficulty of operation and chance of failure on any given shot. All of these problems work to your advantage by limiting the number of keeper negatives, to the point whre you won't go crazy trying to figure out which negative to print because you will only have a few really good ones.

Sandy King

 

[MVNelson]

Dr Pablo I asked the exact same question you ponder here. I too tried to make and did on a few occasions make good prints using a sort of hit and miss technigue. A series of misses caused me to make a decision to leave it all alone or learn a method of getting consistent results. To make a long story short, I acguired the BTZS book and software. I read it. It was clearly written but somewhat tedious(translate boring in some chapters). I got the tubes and tray. I borrowed the hospital's Xray dept densitometer. The next day I started in the a.m. early loaded the software. Did the darkroom film testing and was done early enough to do my first field test before sundown. I exposed 4 4x5 sheets of Tmax100 in D76 1:1 and that p.m. processed them according to the BTZS calculation . The negatives were literally the most accurate I ever made and produced my pre-visualized images in straight printing. In one day I discovered the benefit of Btzs. Now I can choose almost any film/dev combo, test it in 1 1/2 hrs and Field test it in another hour or so. After that I can go and explore that combo with real subject matter to my heart's content and spend that time developing my photographic vision confident that the technical aspects of film exposure and developement are under control. To answer your question, yes it is well worth it.
Miles

 

[Maine-iac]

In one day I discovered the benefit of Btzs. Now I can choose almost any film/dev combo, test it in 1 1/2 hrs and Field test it in another hour or so. After that I can go and explore that combo with real subject matter to my heart's content and spend that time developing my photographic vision confident that the technical aspects of film exposure and developement are under control. To answer your question, yes it is well worth it.
Miles

Took me about the same time to test for film E.I. using Fred Picker's old Zone VI system (finding .10 density above film base/fog using a .10 neutral density filter and reading it over a lightbox with my spotmeter rather than a densitometer.) Then some development tests to get my N, N+1, etc. times.
Same end result. For me, the math of the BTZS just gets in the way.

Larry

 

[Donald Miller]

The greatest failing of the Zone system is that it begins in the middle of the logical process to arrive at a definable and repeatable result...it begins with the target density for a type of enlarging light source rather than the scale of the paper that you are printing on...seems rather ill thought out now that I have spent some twenty plus years using the system...I switched to BTZS a couple of years ago...I would not go back.

 

[wm blunt]

I'm intrigued by this, and the photos produced by its practicioners are wonderful.

But I do this as a pure hobby, I shoot low volume, and given how flexible B+W photography / printing is, I've gotten reasonable results winging it or using a limited Zone System techinque.

That said, I'd love to have more sophistication and consistency with scene evaluation and printing, and I'd consider getting into BTZS if the film testing, paper testing, all that stuff isn't a giant pain in the ass. But if it ends up so time consuming that it takes the fun out of printing, then it's not worth it to me.

You can skip a lot of the testing by contacting The View Camera Store and have them do the testing for you. They send you several sheets of your film type exposed with a step wedge and you develope the sheets, return them and they read and plot the densities. They send you the results. Also you can use the BTZS power dial instead of a palm pilot. It's a small cardboard device that used either zone system or incident metering. A pretty inexpensive way to get into BTZS.

 

[timbo10ca]

Took me about the same time to test for film E.I. using Fred Picker's old Zone VI system (finding .10 density above film base/fog using a .10 neutral density filter and reading it over a lightbox with my spotmeter rather than a densitometer.) Then some development tests to get my N, N+1, etc. times.
Same end result. For me, the math of the BTZS just gets in the way.

Larry

Hi Larry-
As I do not have a densitometer, this sounds like a method that may help me. Could you please elaborate for me how you do it? I am currently thinking of buying a timer with an exposure meter that will supposedly act like a densitometer, but I can't see how it will do it accurately, as it is placed on the projected image (which may be at any brightness, depending on what the enlarger lens aperature is set at). Plus, I already have all the equipment you mention, other than the .10 neutral density filter- Is this the equivalent of a 1/3 stop ND filter? Where do you even find these?

Thanks,
Tim