Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Maris points out, in a current thread on ETTR in digital cameras, here, the long tradition film photographers have had in getting the important subjects well over to the right in exposure. So it's apt to devote a new thread just to the processes for achieving this with our film cameras to get usable images we can make into impressive prints.
We now have, a still small but expanding, nucleus of OPF photographers returning, at least partly, to real film. This really makes me feel that we are indeed starting to take advantage, once again, of the broadest possibilities for working with light and the foundations of the art. You, I know have such a lot of experience with fine imaging. So I'm going to ask you to help move us along the path of ETTR, taking advantage of all you know about film, where processing is so fundamental to the curve by which the light is written into the paper with silver deposits.
If you could add "pushing development of film with a particular developer", which color and black and white films would you choose, with what development times for the highest value subjects in zone VII? IOW, how low EV could you still get a usable exposure for film?
Asher
So Maris, Jim Galli, Ben Rubinstein, Mike Shimwell, Cedric Massoulier, Nigel Allan and other film photographers,I agree ETTR is a powerful exposure strategy. Some film photographers have been doing it for decades. The late Fred Picker put it succinctly when he suggested "place your high value on Zone VIII, shoot, and accept what you get in the shadows".
In a general philosophical sense the best recording of an image, film or digital, is the one that contains the maximum possible information. This is equivalent to the maximum usable exposure. No, not the maximum achievable exposure but rather the maximum beyond which you lose information; notionally Zone VIII in film or level 255 in digital.
We now have, a still small but expanding, nucleus of OPF photographers returning, at least partly, to real film. This really makes me feel that we are indeed starting to take advantage, once again, of the broadest possibilities for working with light and the foundations of the art. You, I know have such a lot of experience with fine imaging. So I'm going to ask you to help move us along the path of ETTR, taking advantage of all you know about film, where processing is so fundamental to the curve by which the light is written into the paper with silver deposits.
If you could add "pushing development of film with a particular developer", which color and black and white films would you choose, with what development times for the highest value subjects in zone VII? IOW, how low EV could you still get a usable exposure for film?
Asher