I like toes and shoulders

>
>Film has a limited exposure range. Traditional B&W negative films can
>record 4 to maybe 5 stops on the linear portion of their H&D curve. Below
>that is the non-linear "toe" region, which has a lower log D per log
>exposure slope than the linear portion and therefore compresses the scene
>luminances (shadows) that fall there. Above the linear portion is the
>"shoulder" region, where the slope is again lower than the linear portion,
>which compresses high-luminance values (highlights) that fall there. Since
>the average daylight scene has 10-14 stops of luminance variation, it is
>clear that you cannot fit all of the scene luminance values onto the linear
>portion of the curve.
>
>By using "minus" development, one can squeeze more scene luminance values
>into the linear portion of the curve, at the expense of overall lower
>contrast (i.e., less separation of tonal values in the linear portion, and
>very low separation in the toe and shoulder regions). Also, modern films
>(in particular, T-Max) have longer linear portions. In fact, it is hard to
>find the shoulder with TMX and TMY -- density just keeps climbing. So:
>Given a modern, long-density-scale film [NOT necessarily
>long-EXPOSURE-scale], and a suitable low-contrast printing process, the
>answer to this question is a qualified No, it doesn't matter much -- you
>can slide things up and down the curve (within reason) with little effect
>other than printing time. However, with traditional films (and
>particularly with HP5+), you do need to be careful where you place things
>because these films do not have excess headroom.

For some reason prints from TMX and TMY negatives look funny to me.
They look sort of...too perfect or modern or something. Maybe this
is because of the absence of toe and shoulder characteristics you are
talking about. I have resisted switching to them because of the
"look." I wonder if I have just become habituated to seeing older
prints as the standard, so prints made from newer films look weird. I
wonder if anybody else has this problem? Can we outgrow it? Should
we?

I remember going to a show of landscape photographs here in Houston.
They were lovely, but they had this quality of being sort of too
thin-looking or something. IT's hard to describe. I thought, "I bet
that's T-max," and then found out it was. On the other hand, I saw
some of George Tice's photographs and they looked "right" to me, and
I think he told me that he used Tri-X. He photographs at dusk a lot,
and so there are a lot of areas that fall in the toe. But it seems
strange that "right" should mean "poor separation"! Maybe i need to
get over this.

--shannon
Received on Thu Sep 29 14:01:40 2005