cadre

I may be hitting up the wrong crowd here but here goes nothing.

I just transfered to a new school where I am studying photography and the photo lab is much different here. As a result I am now buying and mixing my own chemicals and I am wondering if anyone has experience with testing films with chemicals to perfect development times and temperatures and all that. This is somewhat using the zone system but hopefully not as much of a full out pain as that.

I'm using Ilford films, mainly fp4+ 125 with Kodak HC-110 developer and Kodak fixer. Basically what I want to do is to find out what temperature and time will give me the best film development. I figure I will start with what the manufacturer reccomends and shoot a couple rolls with my zone equipment (black and white towels, gray cards and such) in order to test what will give me the best result with my setup. I am just going to find a good time and hopefully a good temperature along with a good time for the fixer. The idea is that this will give me enough information to be able to adjust to different circumstances.

The only problem with this is it seems time consuming and I don't know that I will be controlling all the variables properly. I also haven't done anything like this in quite some time and my class here is not this in depth. Does anyone have experience with this type of thing? Any ideas on how I can do this with some shortcuts?

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My life is one of those 'you had to be there' jokes.

*Nikki*

I used to work in a photo lab and we ran all the film at the same speeds except for a couple of different black and white films. I would recommend contacting a lab and asking what they do as far as time goes and then adding and subtracting from there.

cadre

This is a good idea so today I got some there from one of my professors and I have a starting point from the information there. I think I will still have to do a fair amount of testing though since I decided to go full out with the Zone system. I never fully got it last semester so I probably need to start over. This should be fun.

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ngdawg

Hmmm...
One of my teachers at Gibbs strongly recommended I contact his photography professor at Kean University to further my photography learning and add film and film development. I sent the professor an email, along with my site link.
He responded 'Film is a dying art. Photojournalism no longer relies on it-fewer and fewer in the private sector do; everyone uses digital for its immediacy." He went on to say that he couldn't steer me into film photography because there's simply no need for it as technology advances and the need for immediate results gets stronger. (my teacher was utterly shocked)
Interesting that it's still a credited subject then.

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saltfish

I've always found that the employees at your local camera store are usually still die-hard film nuts. They are usually a great source of knowledge for things like this.

cadre

It is definately a dieing art but I don't think that film will go out all together. My prediction is that it will become more and more a hobbyist thing like when film photography was first being practiced. Alot of the companies will probably switch to digital but there will a few very good companies that continue to serve the fanatics at higher prices.

As far as it being a credited subject, it is more at some places than others. At the school I'm at right now, the photography major is under the school of communications so of course the emphasis is on digital and more journalistic photography rather than more artistic. However, I was planning at one point on going to an art specific school and there film is much more emphasized.

I am a huge fan of film and I always will be. I use digital, in fact I started with digital but I enjoy working in the darkroom too much to give it up. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I like to work with my hands.

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serlindsipity

Film will never die, it will fall into the Alternative process category just like Van Dyke Printing, cyanotyping, tintyping, Deguerrotypes and so on. But to use the zone system takes lots of personal trial and error as well as expense, and when it comes down to it, the best learning is your own (for no matter how much you learn from someone else, you have to experience it first hand.)

And if anything, people who learn in film "see" better in the camera i find. They are less likely to shoot 15 shots for one good one. thats is one good thing.

K, sorry for threadjacking but i had to say that since I just had a conversation about the same subject a few days ago.

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Sty

Well, the MP's for high-res art photography cost still too much. I'd rather go with a field-type large and have 200MP scan of that instead of paying $35k for 40MP medium back...

Although it was an interesting experiment when somebody did put a scanner as a back and had 1GP pictures...

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br,
Sty

I route, therefore you exist

cadre

This is true

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My life is one of those 'you had to be there' jokes.

Rinndalir

Do you have a link for this story? That's insane.

Sty

I tried to find it but it's now vanished from the net. I did find another gigapixel project though, but they use film.

But they also get 4 gigapixel pictures...

http://www.gigapxl.org/

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Sty

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