On B&W film, doing my own 'speed test' of FP4 demonstrated a dynamic range of 11 stops of solid exposure range! Now I know paper won't render all of them, so this is where a good scanner does come into play. The gotcha with multiple exposure is that if the scene you are imaging has any dynamism whatsoever, it will show up as softness or worse. (similar to multipass LF digicams) However, having 11 stops on a single neg, allows you to do multiple scans at different exposures (whitepoints), or using your technique, print multiple enlargements at differing contrasts and exposures and meld those.
The downside of scanning from a print is that the experimental results I've seen, all indicate that scanning and then printing via digital photographic process yields the highest resolution/sharpest results of ALL techniques including 'straight to digital'. ----- Original Message ----- From: "don schaefer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 7:40 PM Subject: [filmscanners] Re: TMAX/grain/BWscanning/dynamic range > Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 06:57:38 -0700 > From: "KARL SCHULMEISTERS" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > ---------------------------------------- > B&W film has much greater dynamic range than color film (some film > approaches 12 > stops). Thanks, Karl, I assume you mean TechPan, although many people don't know how to get that much out of this film, and with 35mm, it's a very difficult proposition. Shooting color neg, you can split the dynamic range, shoot once for highlights, and another for shadow, and combine the scans in PS. I am not against BW shooting, just getting it scanned without the grain becoming compounded with other artifacts to make a very unpleasant situation is the problem. That's why I suggested making a very sharp wet darkroom print, then scanning it on flat bed. And that solution is suggested only because of the grain problem. If you have large format negs and no comparable film scanner, then it make even more sense to me. Now, whether you're printing to BW darkroom paper, or to an inkjet, you won't get 12 stops of dynamic range printed, so you have to decide into where all that extra dynamic range is going to be compressed to fit the range of the paper, and that's the choice we make as photographers, using whatever tools we choose, traditional or digital. It makes no difference. This is a great discussion. Thanks to all. Don/Boston, MA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
