I've been pretty quiet on the film front recently ... I was rather disappointed with my first couple of rolls, both in terms of what I'd done photographically, and what I was able to extract from the negatives as scans ... plus I wasn't sure about the actual film I'd first used (Ilford XP2S) ... plus film is not cheap ... and money's getting a bit scarce for me ...
Having seen some of Antonio's work using Kodak BW400CN and being impressed with the tonality, I had a poke round Flickr and a lot of people seemed to be getting similar results with it - a rich, smooth, graded look that I really liked ... so I managed to get a few rolls cheap and resolved to try it.
At the same time, I've been reading up a bit on film, over at RFF (!), in some older books on printing and development chemistry (including Gene Nocon's "Photographic Printing" which I got for £1.99 and is full of excellent photos) and in old photography almanacs from the '60s; It is disappointing that I don't seem to have retained any memory of all those hours spent with my brother in his darkroom 40-odd years ago ... let alone all the years I shot film ... hmmm ... anyhooo, this has led to a couple of decisions and a realisation.
First, I've resolved to give home development a go (I'm got Freecycle WANTED ads out for tanks & stuff ... nothing so far except, believe it or not, a very high quality colour enlarger which I couldn't resist accepting ) "as and when" ...
Second, I realised I was probably carrying my digital habit of using spot metering mode for highlights into film shooting, whereas I should almost certainly be exposing for the shadows ... oops ... which won't have helped the results from my early rolls I suppose ...
Third, I decided to try a different "workflow" for scanning which a few people online seemed to swear by. Nothing amazingly whizzy but which was supposed to provide maximum DR for post-processing.
The idea is basically simple:
Use Silverfast (supplied with the Plustek) in "16-bit HDR" mode at maximum resolution to produce a linear scan, generating a large (110MB) tiff file. HDR mode in SF8 hasn't really got many options to fiddle with, it generates a "flat" scan so long as you zero the exposure adjustment. You can't mess with the tone curve in this mode.
It also produces a "negative" scan output so a further step is required, which is ...
Inverting the negative scan to positive (using whatever method suits - PS or Gimp for those who can drive the bloody things (I can't/won't); it is possible invert an image straightforwardly in LR too, but then all the controls become "back to front" and it just annoyed me - perhaps there's another LR solution but I haven't worked it out yet).
Then one can edit away using whatever you like.
Note for geeks: For the tone inversion, I found a clever script (Linux, Mac or Windows) called negfix8 that calls ImageMagick ... it takes forever but is satisfyingly tech-heavy and requires the use of the command line ... yum!
Upsides: Seems to produce lovely scans for editing in LR
Downsides: Slow - the Plustek 7600i can't batch scan and each frame takes c.4 minutes at 7200dpi; plus inversion time - which took a couple of hours for a full roll (might be faster using a PS or Gimp script I suppose) ... best bet of course is to do a load of prescans
So, I finally ground to the end of the roll of BW400CN and here are the first results ... still a bit compromised, but I'm much happier with them than the earlier ones. The next step will be to try some of the earlier negs using this method to see if there is anything to be gained there. And in the meantime with the camera, I need to remember expose for shadows ...
These are all with 35mm Summicron, most I think with a yellow K2 filter
Having seen some of Antonio's work using Kodak BW400CN and being impressed with the tonality, I had a poke round Flickr and a lot of people seemed to be getting similar results with it - a rich, smooth, graded look that I really liked ... so I managed to get a few rolls cheap and resolved to try it.
At the same time, I've been reading up a bit on film, over at RFF (!), in some older books on printing and development chemistry (including Gene Nocon's "Photographic Printing" which I got for £1.99 and is full of excellent photos) and in old photography almanacs from the '60s; It is disappointing that I don't seem to have retained any memory of all those hours spent with my brother in his darkroom 40-odd years ago ... let alone all the years I shot film ... hmmm ... anyhooo, this has led to a couple of decisions and a realisation.
First, I've resolved to give home development a go (I'm got Freecycle WANTED ads out for tanks & stuff ... nothing so far except, believe it or not, a very high quality colour enlarger which I couldn't resist accepting ) "as and when" ...
Second, I realised I was probably carrying my digital habit of using spot metering mode for highlights into film shooting, whereas I should almost certainly be exposing for the shadows ... oops ... which won't have helped the results from my early rolls I suppose ...
Third, I decided to try a different "workflow" for scanning which a few people online seemed to swear by. Nothing amazingly whizzy but which was supposed to provide maximum DR for post-processing.
The idea is basically simple:
Use Silverfast (supplied with the Plustek) in "16-bit HDR" mode at maximum resolution to produce a linear scan, generating a large (110MB) tiff file. HDR mode in SF8 hasn't really got many options to fiddle with, it generates a "flat" scan so long as you zero the exposure adjustment. You can't mess with the tone curve in this mode.
It also produces a "negative" scan output so a further step is required, which is ...
Inverting the negative scan to positive (using whatever method suits - PS or Gimp for those who can drive the bloody things (I can't/won't); it is possible invert an image straightforwardly in LR too, but then all the controls become "back to front" and it just annoyed me - perhaps there's another LR solution but I haven't worked it out yet).
Then one can edit away using whatever you like.
Note for geeks: For the tone inversion, I found a clever script (Linux, Mac or Windows) called negfix8 that calls ImageMagick ... it takes forever but is satisfyingly tech-heavy and requires the use of the command line ... yum!
Upsides: Seems to produce lovely scans for editing in LR
Downsides: Slow - the Plustek 7600i can't batch scan and each frame takes c.4 minutes at 7200dpi; plus inversion time - which took a couple of hours for a full roll (might be faster using a PS or Gimp script I suppose) ... best bet of course is to do a load of prescans
So, I finally ground to the end of the roll of BW400CN and here are the first results ... still a bit compromised, but I'm much happier with them than the earlier ones. The next step will be to try some of the earlier negs using this method to see if there is anything to be gained there. And in the meantime with the camera, I need to remember expose for shadows ...
These are all with 35mm Summicron, most I think with a yellow K2 filter