Pushing and pulling film.

wibbly

wibbly

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I'm wondering if I rate Tri-X at half box speed - what would happen if I set an exposure compensation of +1 on the camera, metered for the shadows and then had the film developed at standard box speed.
 
Over-dense negs?
 
wibbly said:
I'm wondering if I rate Tri-X at half box speed - what would happen if I set an exposure compensation of +1 on the camera, metered for the shadows and then had the film developed at standard box speed.
Click to expand...

WHY?

Way back in the day when I was photographing weddings the main problem was the "soot and whitewash" look when photographing a white bride's dress and the groom's black suit in bright sunlight.

What you got if you exposed the faces correctly was that the dress would be virtually all white with no details in it - the "whitewash" look - and the groom's suit would be all black with no details in it at all - the "soot".

I found by a lot of experimentation that if I used Tri-X Pan (rated at 400 ASA) and over exposed it by 4x ( setting my meter at 100ASA), by cutting the development time to approx 1/2 I got perfect results with full detail everywhere.:)

AAH - the good old days - thank God for Digital!:)
 
I haven't looked at the characteristic curve for TriX, but in general films don't have the same contrast over the whole exposure range; the curve is a usually an S curve. The shadows and highlight regions have lower contrast than the mid tones, with the overall slope of the curve determined by the development time. Therefore in principle, giving more exposure but without changing the development should achieve better separation of tones in the shadow areas (more contrast) but push the lighter tones up onto the flatter shoulder of the curve and give reduced contrast in the highlights. The negative would also be slightly denser, and the grain slightly more prominent (more exposure = more grain).

In practice, to be honest, the increased shadow detail would probably be the largest visible effect; but with more extreme overexposure you would get a very low contrast negative. I've done it a few times, and the results were never printable (to a half decent standard) in a darkroom with my limited skills.
 
petersmart said:
WHY?

Way back in the day when I was photographing weddings the main problem was the "soot and whitewash" look when photographing a white bride's dress and the groom's black suit in bright sunlight.

What you got if you exposed the faces correctly was that the dress would be virtually all white with no details in it - the "whitewash" look - and the groom's suit would be all black with no details in it at all - the "soot".

I found by a lot of experimentation that if I used Tri-X Pan (rated at 400 ASA) and over exposed it by 4x ( setting my meter at 100ASA), by cutting the development time to approx 1/2 I got perfect results with full detail everywhere.:)

AAH - the good old days - thank God for Digital!:)
Click to expand...

You could have simply split-grade printed them.

Thank god for multi grade paper.
 
FujiLove said:
You could have simply split-grade printed them.

Thank god for multi grade paper.
Click to expand...

It was a lot more complicated to use multi grade papers then - much easier to it the way I did.
 
Just a late thought on this. I don't know what you mean in practice by metering for the shadows, but those with long memories and a better instant recall than I have will remember that in the early 1960s, the standard for calculating film speeds changed, and all film speeds doubled overnight, with no changes at all to the film. So halving your film speed is actually just turning the clock back to 1960. Standard metering at 200 will give the same effects early photographers had.
 
It appears from looking at lots of info I've been googling setting film at half box speed is pretty normal, particularly for the likes of Tri-X. I'm wondering if I then add 1 stop of exposure compensation effectively gives me two stops over.
 
Two stops over can be neither here nor there for consumer C41, AFAIK. I used to set my Tri-X at 250 or 320 but now shoot it at 400. If you're effectively shooting at 100, maybe some compensation in developing might be a good idea? But the only way to know is to try it yourself...
 
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