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Re: a lot of over-exposed negatives: what to do?



I want to concur with something Jeffrey just said: If you've got a large 
batch of negatives and realize that you don't know how to handle them for
good results, the best thing you can do is stick them in the freezer with
notes on how they were exposed. Then do brand new work 'from scratch' until
you are getting negatives that print the way you want. It's likely that
learning process will give you a much better idea of what can be done to
rescue the earlier negatives, if you still want to bother with them after
doing the new work.

To editorialize for a moment, one of the most frequent traps photographers
fall into is to spend more time struggling to print existing work when
they'd be better served to spend the time making new pictures that print
easily. There's no special virtue in struggling heroically to make prints,
and no shame in making negatives so good you can print them with your hands
in your pockets.

---Carl