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Re: [OM] Developing B+W -- how many shots actually see enlargement?

Subject: Re: [OM] Developing B+W -- how many shots actually see enlargement?
From: Paul Wallich <pw@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 19:47:12 -0400
At 5:27 PM -0600 4/26/02, Daniel J. Mitchell wrote:


Most of my photos are B+W and I use ilford Multi - Grade
paper + filters.

So now I've got a darkroom set up, I'm torn.. I _can_ take lots of photos
now so I can experiment with things, and it theoretically won't cost me
much, because I can just do contact prints -- but I find that I'm barely
making any enlargements from the contact sheets because of the time it'll
take.
..
But taking the time to print up 36 4x5 prints is a pretty imposing
proposition -- what do people out there who have darkrooms do in this sort
of situation? Do you just do contact sheets then enlarge the "good" ones to
8x10? All of them to 4x5 and pick through them there? Something in the
middle?  Do you just get an 'eye' for the ones that're worth enlarging,
because at the moment I can certainly tell the duds at 1:1 size, but there's
a lot of others that might be worth blowing up, but there's still a lot of
them to make up intermediate sizes of before I go the whole way.

Hopefully it's somewhat clear what I'm asking about here..

It's been a while, but I used to find that I could determine the duds from the contact prints but had to print up the others for real (say 4x5 at least)
to find out whether they were what I thought they were. On the other hand,
if your exposures are consistent and you're not going for the ultimate print
from each negative you can bang them out pretty fast -- time in the developer
is pretty much the limiting step. (Way back when, that was 1:30 for optimum
contrast, so even a full roll would be less than an hour.) It's probably worth
it to get a loupe so you can examine the contact sheets or the negs more closely, but if the cost of paper isn't an issue, just knock out a bunch of
8x10s (6x9 plus border tends to look pretty good).

This phase won't last all that long, because you'll learn to read the contacts
and the negs better, but it's worth doing for a while. And for the prints that seem to merit it, you can go back and spend an hour or two getting it just right.

paul

--
Paul Wallich                                            pw@xxxxxxxxx

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