3 ms·

Nice to see 4x5 photography. Love the look you get from t-max.

• jrockway 10y ago
  Thanks! Tmax 100 is a difficult film. I tried overexposing it like crazy at first (which usually works well for B&W film if you're in doubt), but it doesn't respond well to that. You end up with no tonality; everything is black or white, and very contrasty. Now I meter the shadows, underexpose those by two stops, and check that the highlights are not too contrasty. This yields very good results. (My previous algorithm would be to take an incident light reading in the shadows, or expose the shadows as middle grey. It ends up being too much light for the film, you do have to take advantage of its "underexposure" range to get full tonality.) Acros seems to respond well to whatever exposure you throw at it, but it's significantly more expensive and yields identical results to Tmax when exposed carefully. (I save Acros for my pinhole pictures, where its amazing reciprocity characteristics are much appreciated.) Tmax 400 is a little different. Basically... if you expose it to light you'll get a great picture. It's my favorite film, but if I have a tripod, I might as well aim for a little bit more resolution. In some tests I did last weekend, the MTF-limiting function of my setup is actually the film, which is a nice place to be. These used large format lenses I've randomly acquired are some fine equipment.