On Quality

 Every now and then I like to do a reset, go back to basics and discard accumulated bad habits, tighten up the work flow. I did that in 1997-98 when coming back to serious photography after a long break. I've made an effort recently to do this again, after a shorter and more partial break.

Much of the effort has gone into analog photography, in part because most of the point of going back to analog is to slow down and work the process, to previsualize. As usual, there was some reading involved. We never need to stop learning. In this case I worked through some things marginally relevant to what I do. One of the more useful references was mostly aimed at medium and large format film photography. I've never had the patience to stick with large format for very long, and medium format is too constraining for what I wish to do right now. So instead I'm taking some of the concepts and applying them to 35mm film. That requires tighter control, because any minor deviation from perfection shows on the small negative when it's enlarged or scanned.

Many of us were taught early that with B&W negative film, it's expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights. Taken to extremes, that becomes the zone system which is very valuable to understand, harder to implement with the more agile small camera except as intuitive background info. But then look at the vast majority of work posted on the internet, and most folks are rating film at one EI (usually underexposing) and usually doing one processing time. That's not going to give best results in the full range of lighting conditions.

I'm currently using three different ways of doing things depending on the type of available light. Some of the early results have been processed these past three months, on a couple of different types of film, and a very few printed. Just now I scanned a negative from two months ago. I just saw the payoff for the work.

I need to spend more time on this, scan a few more, later post a couple. I like what I'm seeing so far. Full tonal range, from black to white, subtle grays. Considering it's Tri-X in Rodinal, the grain is surprisingly pleasing.

Just when I was thinking of shooting more digital... this set of analog work needs to be taken to completion. I have some tentative plans for this, and at the moment it's looking promising.