 Alex Cabrall |
Underexposed Negatives and VC filters. Hello all, I've posted this question at other sites, but the responses haven't exactly flown in. I've been experimenting with VC paper and filters, but it turns out I don't understand them AS WELL as I thought I did. I have a roll of negatives that's pretty underexposed (the snow fooled me and my meter), and the prints with a contrast of 2 1/2 (my default that works awesome for normal negs.) aren't good...at all. Is there a rule of thumb for: 1: What grade for Underexposed Negatives, and 2: What grade for Overexposed Negatives? This is black and white, by the way :).
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Mark Feldstein |
It's been awhile since I worked with polycontrast RC papers, but without seeing your negs, Alex, it's kind of hard to tell how thin is thin or how underexposed they are. If a filter of 2 1/2 works well with your average negatives, then assuming your negs are really thin, start with a 5 denser filter and stop the enlarger lens down to f 11. Then make a test strip at 3 second intervals, say up to 15 seconds and develop it by time and temp. See if you can zero it in that way. If you find you're in the ballpark, maybe make another test using f-8 and process that one. If the test strip still shows the contrast is too flat, go to the next lower number, same f-stop, and try another test. I'd say that unless you have an enlarging exposure meter, trial and error is about the only way to go until you can judge the under and overexposed negs the same as you can the ones with more normal densities. Oh, and if I'm incorrect on going to the higher number 5 filter, instead of a number 1 first, sorry. As I said, it's been awhile since I worked with RC papers and I'm having a bit of difficulty recalling which filter is the most dense.
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Mark Feldstein |
Alex, I forgot to mention one point although you may already have a handle on this: If your negs are so thin that you can't see any detail in what would be the highlighted areas by looking at them on a light box, then you're going to be really hard pressed to get detail out of them no matter what contrast range you use. In that case, Kodak used to make a b&w negative "Intensifier" that helped at a bit of density to really thin negatives which might be worth a try for ya. Mark
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