Re: Dichromate dilution and speed

Given that what I did spell out very clearly was so completely
misconstrued, I think it may be useful to spell out all the connections
that I didn't spell out clearly but left for people to deduce
themselves, assuming it was straightforward and self-explanatory. Here's
the whole story of my involvement in this thread:

1. I got into this when I read an assertion that it's not the case that
lower concentration necessitates longer exposures.

2. Holding everything else constant, and using a contone negative, I
demonstrated that lower concentration does necessitate longer exposures.

3. Then the question came up whether maybe that relationship may be
different for digital negatives.

4. I tested that assertion and found that indeed, the relationship
between speed and concentration isn't as clearcut for digital negatives,
at least for me in this one little test. I couldn't draw any conclusions
from it related to the question except that....digital negatives are
weird.

5. While this doesn't prove anything in any rigorous way, it makes me
willing to believe that (a) Sam's times with low concentrations may well
be shorter than might be expected with contone negatives and (b) if they
are, I'm quite willing to believe that the reason for this may be
because digital negatives don't follow the usual rules. This makes a lot
more sense to me than the other reasons people were proposing for the
(speculated, but not yet demonstrated) shortness of Sam's times relative
to what they would be for saturated dichromate.

6. None of this, I repeat, NONE of this, has any bearing whatever on the
question of whether low concentration "works," much less does it say
anything one way or another about Sam's method. The whole thing for me
was this isolated question about the relationship between speed and
concentration, and to the extent that I've taken it, I'm satisfied to
believe that the relationship holds for contone negatives but not for
digital negatives.

7. No other conclusion or interpretation should be drawn from this.

Katharine Thayer
Received on Thu Dec 4 18:43:43 2003