Figuring Out The Actual Film Speed
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- If you want to really understand black and white photography then you have to nail down the actual speed of the film you're using. The Box Speed is one thing but to find the real speed takes a test or two.
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Do you have a question? Ask in the comments section.
Rob Skeoch is a career photographer, working for five newspapers and wire services before joining the team at Major League Baseball for 17 seasons and the NFL for 14 seasons. Then he was a national manager for the camera group at Sony North America before going back to shooting.
Now he shoots for gallery shows around the world, mostly street work and portraits made with a Rollei twin lens. For 35mm shooting he uses a Nikon F3 and a couple M-mount Leica cameras and shoots mostly Ilford film.
film speed
film speed explained
black and white
b & w
Bang! I have just finished an 8 months testing with several films and PAN F 50 has become my present favourite while I do home dev in Ilfosol 3.
Your explanation is close to an "academic" presentation of things a lot us have been doing for decades without true understanding.
Really powerful.Thank you.
Glad you found it useful!!
when photographing a 4-tone test card, 2 (-3 ; +2) frames are enough to roughly determine the presence of Zone II and the "contrast gradient". Later you can play with 1/3. About developers - in the manufacturer's description there is a parameter "Shadow Details", which is different for each developer and regardless of reasonable dilution and development time, Zone II is drawn with a difference of a few Stops. for example xtol vs d-76 ...
Thanks. It's a funny time we work and play in. In the past you would tweak your film speed and development type and time over the course of a few hundred rolls of film. Just making small changes as you shoot. Now people expect great results on their first roll.
I miss my Gossen Luna Lite. Often used it with my Nikon's. I bought a Sekonic anniversary issue strobe meter to use with my Elinchrom's. It has the flat contrast disc. If I was unsure about a reflective metering doing street photography, I would take a reflective meter off of shaded grass or a shaded grey concrete wall. I never got into deep personally calibrating a film stock. Fascinating though. I sounds like what you're doing is what Ansel Adam's talks about finding 'Emergence' in his 'The Print' book. Never got that far. It sounds like you're shooting b+w film at 2/3's it's box speed.
For the most part it's 2/3 of the film speed. If you shoot a lot, running the tests is worth it. Otherwise you can clean things up in the darkroom. Either way works great.
Fantastic video!!!
Glad you liked it!
I've seen several tutorials on how this process works, but I've always been curious what a digital version of the process would look like with DSLR scanning. I'm always striving for better results with my film to digital workflow and often find that the closer I emulate well established and proven darkroom techniques in the digital part of the process, the better results I'm able to get. For example, my process for inverting color negative scans from a DSLR is as close to the RA-4 printing process as I can make it, which let's me take advantage of decades of color printing experience and advice from the experts
A proper digital version requires you to work in a gradient/tone space thats the same as for film... basically you gotta get your scan into a space where the values are linear with respect to the density, which happens to be log space. (No real way to get that if youre in photoshop or whatever, but putting your negative into gamma 7.7 is a close approximation). For accurate colour inversion, the important part is the mask removal, which ideally should be done per channel for the cyan and magenta coupler components, with removal properly masked by the density of those dye layers.
What he said!!! I'm not the one to ask about that as I've never tried to duplicate a certain film type with my digital profiles. I do know that shooting digital is closer to shooting colour transparency than it is to negative film... in my limited experience. And some cameras like the fuji might be better set up for it than others.
I shoot a lot of Pan F 50 in studio lighting. I love it, for that. Perfect frames every time and they look like little sheets of glass. I am less keen on it for candid or environments where I cant control the light for obvious reasons. I dont think its designed for flexibility or uncontrolled circumstances so I tend not to use it for that.
Those are good points. I'm just getting started with Pan F.
You might want to clear up the difference in light and pigment. For example, your shirt color is a pigment that reflects light, etc.
That's a good point, thanks.
How would you take a metering of the Moon if you said that the spot meter measures 1 degree while the angular diameter of the moon is 0.5 degrees? Sure, if the spot meter just averages everything inside a 1 degree circle then it should be trivial to approximate corrent exposure for the surface of the Moon, but still, feels like on oversight.
You might also be right. Full moon this week so I'm going to give it a go.
Thanks.