NEW TOY!!! [like I need another hobby]

[William]

I used to hate trying to load film onto the stainless rolls at the lab. Much preferred the plastic ones.

I still shoot some film, through my Canon Elan 7 or my old Pentax K1000. Black and white, in particular, looks much better to my eyes on film rather than converted digital. Black and white at night looks best on film.

I got out of my own darkroom stuff years ago, but I have a tame printer who makes prints for me, and occasionally lets me use the lab.

-William

 

[aerog]

I still shoot some film, through my Canon Elan 7 or my old Pentax K1000. Black and white, in particular, looks much better to my eyes on film rather than converted digital. Black and white at night looks best on film.

It does usually, but a lot can be done to help digital along. The usual conversion is either a desaturation or a simple conversion, neither of which duplicates the exposure curve of the different B&W films. They look better if you do a conversion from a single color channel, or a mix of channels - then apply different exposure curves.

I still don't think much beats large format B&W though. My 4x5 stuff has a particularly good feel to it, even scanned.

 

[DrEntropy]

Hard to beat a well exposed 4x5 B&W neg for tonal range, 'specially with what is basically a "new" technology. Adobe and Corel photo-twisting proggies are about as good a tool as we've got so far. Even with those and the channel mixing, the end result is just "close".

Lately, the only things I'm doing with photos is "grip-n-grin" stuff, for two and three cloumn end product... hardly "fine art" photography. /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/frown.gif

My medium format stuff (Mamiya TLR's) has atrophe'd. What a shame. Sold off all SLR gear (Bronica) back in the '80's figuring it'd be better to have the cash than the gear when I quit chasin' brides.

This is all similar to the CD vs. vinyl discussions, innit? I s'pose that makes the "traditional photography" gear analog devices? /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/jester.gif

 

[William]

I still shoot some film, through my Canon Elan 7 or my old Pentax K1000. Black and white, in particular, looks much better to my eyes on film rather than converted digital. Black and white at night looks best on film.

It does usually, but a lot can be done to help digital along. The usual conversion is either a desaturation or a simple conversion, neither of which duplicates the exposure curve of the different B&W films. They look better if you do a conversion from a single color channel, or a mix of channels - then apply different exposure curves.

I still don't think much beats large format B&W though. My 4x5 stuff has a particularly good feel to it, even scanned.

What I've noticed is that very dark colors, that would come out as black on B&W film, are muddy greys if you do a straight desaturation. I've discovered that upping the shadows on a RAW file helps alleviate that. I inserted a nighttime photo that I used this technique with. Looks okay to me.

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-William

 

[aerog]

This is all similar to the CD vs. vinyl discussions, innit? I s'pose that makes the "traditional photography" gear analog devices? /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/jester.gif

Wish I'd sold off my stuff, its hardly worth anything now.

 

[aerog]

What I've noticed is that very dark colors, that would come out as black on B&W film, are muddy greys if you do a straight desaturation. I've discovered that upping the shadows on a RAW file helps alleviate that. I inserted a nighttime photo that I used this technique with. Looks okay to me.

There's a lot that can be done, but I think the secret is just in coming up with a curve that works the way you want. It always seems like a converted color file has far too many grays in it at first, to me anyway.

FYI - printing B&W from color - even with the appropriate paper - will yield similar results, at least we can fiddle with things digitally.

I've been reasonably happy with some of my B&W scans, but the printing has a lot to be desired. I'm not sure if I'm interested enough to convert my printer into a 6-ink grayscale printer or not - that's probably the only way to get anything decent out of it.

This one is converted to B&W from a color digital file, one of the few I've bothered with:

This one is a 16bit scan of a 645 B&W neg, edited and converted to 8bit .jpg. It's as close to my prints as I could get:

...and finally a 4x5 neg - not the best, but it scanned up nice: