Re: Poor man's densitometer

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From: Shannon Stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 03/14/01-04:24:13 PM Z


In thinking about judging a negative intuitively versus using a
densitometer, i am reminded of the fact that for a long time nobody even
had a light meter. My grandfather in the thirties shot a lot of film with
no light meter. (And a lot of these are unprintable except by the most
laborious, time-consuming exertions; I've tried.) And of course nineteenth
century photographers did it all by guess and by gosh. Brassai said that
his night time exposures outside in Paris took about the length of time it
took to smoke a cigarette. Nowadays most photographers use light meters.
So, I wonder if in the future, densitometers will be considered standard
equipment the way light meters are today? Probably when light meters first
came along, some photographers scorned them as needless expensive crutches.
Maybe they genuinely didn't need them, having been shooting by the seat of
the pants for decades. But, I intuitively know that i need help learning
to read negatives for alt process! Help from a machine that is. All my
friends are silver printers, and while one friend taught me to judge a
silver negative by eye, he doesn't do alt-process and so can't help me
there. Also, used densitometers are not all that expensive, compared to
the cost of pt/pd materials, say, or even the value of your time spent in
trying to print bad negatives.

--shannon


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