Skies Appear too Dark on Foma 400

Minolta93 said:

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. I did use Sunny 16 rules for exposure, in the one I posted I had the aperture open wider than f/16 to capture shadow detail. Probably at least one or two stops. So I don't see how this would cause the sky to be darker in any way apart from, like someone has mentioned, the sky actually being darker in reality than it feels when you're there.

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All I was, my fault for not being more clear, was suggesting, Is rather than throwing in another variable, my recommendation would be to try to minimize the unknowns here. Try reshooting, with the sun at your back, see if you don't get nice snappy contrast. Normal looking negatives. Fresh developer and fixer too.

mshchem said:

All I was, my fault for not being more clear, was suggesting, Is rather than throwing in another variable, my recommendation would be to try to minimize the unknowns here. Try reshooting, with the sun at your back, see if you don't get nice snappy contrast. Normal looking negatives. Fresh developer and fixer too.

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Oh, okay. I use Rodinal so that shouldn't have been a problem, but it might have been the fixer. I didn't do a clip test this time around. Thanks.

Minolta93 said:

Do you happen to know what the real speed is in Rodinal? I would have hoped shooting it at an EI of 200 would remedy any of those issues.

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I don't know, but if I wanted to experiment again with F400 and rodinal I would start at EI 200 too.

If it's any indication, I got decent results with F400 @250 in HC-110 (b) 7min.

But i'm done with this film. If I want a cheap 400 ISO film I can get kentmere 400 (actually Agfaphoto APX 400) for only 0.20€ more where I live, and I got better results with 100 ISO films exposed at 200 then pushed than my experiment with F400 @250. Of course it's all very subjective, some people are very happy with F400 in 35mm and are able to get good images with it. So far i'm not

Use HP5 if you like white skies. The examples shown in this thread are made with two films that give you nice density in the sky without filtering (TMax 400 and Foma 400).

When Kodak messed up Tmax 400 (the backing paper) I made the switch to Foma 400 b/c this similarity in tonality. (They are quite different in other regards.)