Would you believe that they gave me an English degree, with honors no less: lay vs lie.

Does anybody know how to print B&W from an Epson R2400 on Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl? I’m following the instructions outlined in the Ilford PDF, but I’m getting a lot banding. It’s not the printer or the inks, as I can switch back to Epson Premium Luster with no problem. It seems like it must be a software setting, but I’m setting things as instructed.

Thoughts or advice appreciated.

Update: Uh, installing the profile helps. DOH!

Just a couple of notes before we get started. I’m going to limit this to 400 speed non-chromogenic 35mm films. There is nothing wrong with chromogenic films like Ilford’s XP2 or whatever Kodak is calling their chromogenic these days. For those of you that don’t know, chromogenic B&W films are actually modified color films designed to be processed in color chemistry. This is their great selling point with many of their adherents. You can also use your scanner’s DigitalIce dust/scratch removal on them, unlike with traditional B&W films. You do have to have access to decent color processing, though, and I find that to be their major flaw. I’ve had too many rolls ruinned for $2.50 at the drug store and nearly as many scratched to hell for $15 at the pro lab. Thank you, but no, I’ll stick with the films I can develop myself.

There’s also nothing wrong with film speeds other than 400, but 400 speed films are much better than they once were, to the point that their limitations are not the factor most likely to limit photographic quality, at least in 35mm. In other words, you aren’t likely to see much quality improvement shooting Fuji Acros instead of Tmax 400. As with all generalizations, this one has its exceptions, but I’ll leave that for another day.

There will be decidedly few illustrative pictures in this post; the pictures are purely for entertainment value and not intending as educational aides. You’d think there would be some comparitive value in posting photos shot with different films. You’d be wrong. For the most part, modern B&W films are extremely similar. Most of the differences come down to processing and post processing. The reasons for choosing one over the other mostly have to do with how much manipulation will be required to achieve a particular look under particular conditions. Choosing a film is like choosing a lens; the choice is rarely the part the makes or breaks the photo. Sometimes it is, though, which is why this is worth writing about.

Right. To the films. Apart from such recent entrants like Rollei’s expensive, presentation-boxed offerings, most of the films currently on the market are old friends, or at least the cousins of old friends as even films that share the same product name may not be the same from year to year. BTW, that Rollei film might make a nice gift for a film lover, hint, hint. Despite some financial shake ups, the major players remain Ilford and Kodak. Fuji also has a horse in the race, and Freestyle, via various factories in the former Soviet republics, has got a number of interesting offerings, particularly for the budget minded. For films that you are likely to find in stores though, Ilford and Kodak are pretty much it.

Kodak and Ilford each offer two non-chromogenic 400 speed B&W films; from Kodak we get the famed TriX and the ‘new technology’ tabular grained, much defamed Tmax 400 (TMY). Ilford offers HP5+ and the tabular grained Delta 400. There’s a certain degree of parity in these offerings, but there are differences; if TriX and HP5+ are twins, TMY and Delta 400 are at least step brothers, and one of them’s redheaded. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which.

Tri X and HP5

TriX - and by extension HP5+ - need almost no introduction. TriX in D76, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shoot it in your Leica or your Nikon F2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boring. Predictable. Capable of great results, particularly if you are willing to do a bunch of Zone System manipulations at exposure and during development. They are both fairly contrasty, so you are definitely going to have to do something Zone like if you shoot them in contrasty light. Both are also fairly grainy, grainier than 400 speed color films, but this combined with that sometimes nasty contrast can make them look very sharp, particularly when developed in an acutance developer like Rodinal. Both also tend to give you shadows that you could just fall into. A great thing for some photos, but shadow detail is not the only thing in the world or even in photography.

A Complication: All of the above is true of both TriX and HP5+ except that it’s more true of TriX.

Tmax 400 (TMY) and Delta 400

If TriX and HP5+ are the old stalwarts, TMY and Delta 400 are the newer kids on the block. Although you will find some folks that have opinions about Delta 400, it doesn’t seem to have ever been a widely known film in the US. On the other hand, everybody has got an opinion about TMY, particularly if they haven’t ever tried it. It’s a much reviled film. If life was fair, Delta 400 would be widely hated as well, since they are really fairly similar. Both use tabular or Tgrain technology; I’ve heard that Ilford licenses this from Kodak, but that could be internet bunk. Tgrain is supposed to, and actually does, give you finer grain. According to internet conspiracy it was also developed as a low silver film in response to the rising cost of silver in the 1980’s. Whatever its origins, it works. Tgrain films are significantly finer grained than traditional B&W films. They also have extended near infra-red sensitivity and much larger exposure latitude (that’s what we used to call dynamic range back when photo magazines published huge charts of film data).

That extended near infra-red sensitivity can be interesting for portrait work as it can give you creamier skin tones and less apparent blemishes. But it’s the huge exposure latitude that’s the most useful and least understood feature of these films. To explain why, we need to detour back to those Zone photography people.

Zone photography developed in response to a problem that all digital photographers understand too well; the world often has a much larger range of luminance values than any particular medium can capture. Zone photographers pondered on this idea, scratched their long white beards, and then it came to them: “These films don’t respond to midtones in the same way that they respond to shadows and highlights. They kind of taper off on either end. There must be some way we can use that. Hmm . . . . what if we start monkeying around with our exposure and development times. Try enough combinations and we will find eventually something that works. Once we’ve done that, we will come up with a bunch of theories that will make it look like we know what we are doing. And then the one with the longest beard will get to claim that he invented it.” And so Ansel Adams became famous and we all learned to overexpose and under-develop when shooting in contrasty light. And it works. As long as you are shooting one frame at a time and individually developing each frame to account for changes in light. Unless you are really good at counting sprocket holes and cutting out individual frames in the dark, all that long-beard nonsense is practically worthless for most roll film work.

Despite it’s limitations, that long bearded nonsense actually worked sometimes and it gave B&W people lots of things to argue about and feel generally superior about. It was time consuming though, and it just wasn’t an option for photojournalists who were still shooting a lot of B&W when Tmax came on the scene in the 80’s. I was still watching cartoons back then, so I have no idea if they liked the stuff, but they should have. Here was a film that promised fine grain and such immense exposure latitude -something like 13 stops - that you really didn’t have to worry that much about doing the long beard dance when shooting. Everything was there on film. Every shadow and and every highlight. You just had to figure out how to print the stuff.

When I got into my first darkroom in the mid 90’s it was with pile of Tmax negatives to print. This is what we learned to shoot in school, and it’s what we learned to print on our own in between smoking cigarettes under the darkrooms vent fan. If it’s all you know, it doesn’t seem that bad. It wasn’t until after I found the internet that I learned that Tmax is nearly impossible to print, but in retrospect, I can see why people thought that if they learned on TriX.

A normal TriX negative looks like a negative of B&W print. Yeah, duh, I know, but TMY negative doesn’t look like that. Consequently, you can’t just shine light through it and make it look good. You have to do some other stuff, stuff that I haven’t done in ten years, so I’ve got almost no chance of remembering it now. But that’s fine, because now we have scanners. With a scanner, you don’t really have to do anything special with a TMY negative. You scan it, and it looks good. The highlights aren’t all blocked up and the shadows aren’t all murky. It doesn’t look quite as good as a perfect TriX print, but it looks more like it should more often than TriX does. And you don’t need to go buy VueScan or SilverFast or engage in any of the other modern equivalents of all that long-bearded Zone nonsense. OK, well that’s not entirely true. You do have to under-develop it a bit, but you have to do it that when scanning any B&W film. Or at least I have to for my ScanDual IV. The mumbo jumbo doesn’t come into play until you get into Photoshop. That’s when TMY and Delta require you to grow out that beard.

All that exposure latitude isn’t free. It costs contrast. TMY and Delta negatives are pretty flat, but there’s load of tonal info up in the upper ranges. This is part of the reason they are easy to scan. Where as TriX and HP5+ have got lots of detail in the shadows and in the highlight, TMY puts it all up at the top. Consequently, your scanner isn’t trying to decide what to throw away. It can’t get it all. It just doesn’t have that much range. But where it’s got range is up in the highlights, which is exactly where TMY and Delta put their info. You just need to move it around in Photoshop until it looks good.

Sounds great, right. Well it gets even better. Since TMY and Delta have much lower grain to start with, the scanner’s propensity to enhance grain isn’t nearly as much of problem. Instead of getting big popcorn kernel blooms of grain like you sometimes get when scanning TriX, instead you get grain that looks more like TriX printed.

OK so more dynamic range, less grain, easier scanning. What’s the catch. Well . . . ok, so sometimes in flat light, Delta and TMY just end up looking flat. And sometimes in that light where TriX or HP5+ will give you great shadows, Delta or TMY will give you kind of muddy midtones. I haven’t quite figured this one out yet, but I’m still thinking on it. It could be the difference in spectral response; near infra-red is strange stuff, and we aren’t used to thinking about it. So maybe that near infra-red sensitivity that’s great for portraits is not so great for everything. Maybe.

Which One is the Best: Tri X, Delta 400, TMY, HP5

At this point you may be asking yourselves, “Hey, uh, Matt, when are you going to tell us which film to buy?” Good point. Here’s my recommendations:

• If you are shooting in contrasty light, go for Delta or TMY.
• If you want grain or edge effects, go for HP5 or TriX.
• For portraits, Delta or TMY.
• For that great B&W look with a high failure rate, TriX or HP5+.
• For occasionally weird and unpredictable midtones, definitely Delta or TMY.
• For purist cred, TriX in D76. Sorry, there’s no purist cred in HP5+.
• If you don’t know what you want, go for Delta or TMY and sort it out in post.
• To support the one major company that seems committed to B&W, Delta or HP5+, but develop in the TMax Developer or Xtol, just to hedge your bets.

So what do I prefer? Well, I like to shoot one thing until I get sick of it, and then switch to something else. Like I said they are all pretty similar. I sometimes really like the way TriX looks, but I know I can depend on Delta. The Ilford films dry cleaner too; water sheets off them better, which is important for scanning, since any amount of crud on the negative means hours of spotting in Photoshop. For what it’s worth, I just order a bunch of HP5 and Delta 100. Yeah I know, I said there wasn’t any point in 100 speed films, but it will be summer soon, and Illinois doesn’t seem nearly as hazy and Missouri. Maybe the 100 will work out OK. I’ll let you know at the end of the summer.

For a fine photo of yours truly, check out this pic by a friend and colleague. Notice the skill with which I hold the camera, caress the shutter, etc, etc, etc. Pay particular attention to the rare and arcane left eye technique. Truly a master at work if I do say so myself, and I do. Oh, and Anthony isn’t a bad photographer either.

Quick Optical Note: For the last 9 months I’ve been alternating back and forth between using the ZM Biogon 35 and the 50 Hexanon. I’ll stick one on the camera and leave it there for a month or two or three, and then, when my mood changes, switch to the other. One of the interesting outcomes of this is the cycle of surprise - as in “Wow, that lens is really good” - that comes when switching back to the other one. After going through this a couple of times, I’m fairly comfortable with saying that the Biogon is the better of the two. Both are excellent, but the Biogon just seems more consistently snappy and three dimensional. Despite my preference for the 50mm focal length, if I had to choose one lens, I think it would have to be the Biogon. Of course, with the long contrasty days of summer coming on, the slightly duller Hexanon may retake the lead.

This guy ran right through my bleak mid-western suburban landscape.

I’ve got a number of half-baked ideas for posts banging around in my head. I’m noting them here, so that I don’t forget.

• A post about the difficulties of portraiture, the role of employment in changing idea of self and the growth of the media culture, along with thoughts about Arnold Newman’s environmental portraiture and its relationship to changes in the newspaper/magazine business. Referrences to the Stranger a Day site and Alec Soth’s blog.
• A post about choosing B&W films.
• A post about Robert Adams, a photographer who I know almost nothing about.
• A post about print sizes, print presentation etc etc etc. References to William Gedney and Paul Butzi with apollogies to folks that really like large prints.

So that’s whats coming up. I’m limiting my shooting for a while - got to do something thinking/editing - so I should have plenty of time to write.