Black and whites

[Alpha]

Alpha; the film is kodak, I took it to my local camera shop as I don't have a darkroom of my own yet, and I scanned it with my husbands scanner/printer/fax.

Which Kodak film?

The scanning is potentially one of the reasons these look so bad. Did you scan the negatives? It doesn't sound like your multi-purpose printer is capable of scanning negatives.

 

[Petraio Prime]

Cloudy days are not the best for B&W. You need texture, shadow, contour, and depth for most subject matter. So, on cloudy days you just wait for sun...

In fact, there are some days when the weather is so bad that you shouldn't take any photos at all! This is silly dogma.

Well, not something like this, anyway. The background just is distracting and everything mushes together.

 

[Petraio Prime]

Alpha; the film is kodak, I took it to my local camera shop as I don't have a darkroom of my own yet, and I scanned it with my husbands scanner/printer/fax.

Which Kodak film?

The scanning is potentially one of the reasons these look so bad. Did you scan the negatives? It doesn't sound like your multi-purpose printer is capable of scanning negatives.

Conventional B&W film is not best for scanning. It is intended for printing. Chromogenic films (color or B&W) do much better.

 

[Alpha]

Conventional B&W film is not best for scanning. It is intended for printing. Chromogenic films (color or B&W) do much better.

Everything about this sentence is wrong.

 

[Petraio Prime]

Conventional B&W film is not best for scanning. It is intended for printing. Chromogenic films (color or B&W) do much better.

Everything about this sentence is wrong.

Sorry, B&W films don't scan as well as chromogenic ones. They tend to show excessive contrast and grain compared to chromogenic films.

There is no reason to use B&W film if you intend only to scan it. You can use Ilford XP2 B&W chromogenic film if you want, but why not just use color neg and have the option of B&W or color later?

 

[Alpha]

Conventional B&W film is not best for scanning. It is intended for printing. Chromogenic films (color or B&W) do much better.

Everything about this sentence is wrong.

Sorry, B&W films don't scan as well as chromogenic ones. They tend to show excessive contrast and grain compared to chromogenic films.

There is no reason to use B&W film if you intend only to scan it. You can use Ilford XP2 B&W chromogenic film if you want, but why not just use color neg and have the option of b&W or color later?

Normally I would be happy to argue with you until your fingers bled or you got so angry that you began erratically bolding certain words to indicate that you were yelling them at the computer screen. However, the opinions you've espoused in this thread are so fundamentally wrong that I just can't stoop to dignifying them with a proper argument.

OP, I would highly recommend you disregard everything this man says. At least for the purposes of this particular thread, I certainly will from now on.

 

[Petraio Prime]

Everything about this sentence is wrong.

Sorry, B&W films don't scan as well as chromogenic ones. They tend to show excessive contrast and grain compared to chromogenic films.

There is no reason to use B&W film if you intend only to scan it. You can use Ilford XP2 B&W chromogenic film if you want, but why not just use color neg and have the option of b&W or color later?

Normally I would be happy to argue with you until your fingers bled or you got so angry that you began erratically bolding certain words to indicate that you were yelling them at the computer screen. However, the opinions you've espoused in this thread are so fundamentally wrong that I just can't stoop to dignifying them with a proper argument.

OP, I would highly recommend you disregard everything this man says. At least for the purposes of this particular thread, I certainly will from now on.

Well, sorry you are wrong, and quite wrong. A B&W negative is composed of silver particles; a color negative is composed of dye clouds. The light passing through them is affected differently. Without going into detail, the net result is that B&W negatives tend to scan with more grain and contrast than they show when conventionally printed.

This is true.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

But she didn't scan the negatives. :er:

 

[Alpha]

But she didn't scan the negatives. :er:

Would you mind pointing out where that's been said?

 

[Petraio Prime]

But she didn't scan the negatives. :er:

"Alpha; the film is kodak, I took it to my local camera shop as I don't have a darkroom of my own yet, and I scanned it with my husbands scanner/printer/fax."

 

[Derrel]

On cloudy days, the light will be soft, so it's usually necessary to bump up the contrast to compensate for the typical flat lighting found on cloudy days. If you're working in color with positive film (ie, slide film) or digital capture, you can expose over or under on a cloudy day, and get a wide range of "acceptable" results, from pastel over-exposure looks, to more moody underexposure looks (within reason,of course).

When shooting color negative film or B&W negative film on an overcast day, a normal exposure will usually yield a rather flat, dull-looking shot. That type of result is however, pretty easy to work with in post production, as you can see by gsgary's punching up of a flat shot to a level more like what we'd want to see, with some deep blacks, some bright whites, and a good amount of contrast between the middle and lower tonal values.

 

[Petraio Prime]

On cloudy days, the light will be soft, so it's usually necessary to bump up the contrast to compensate for the typical flat lighting found on cloudy days. If you're working in color with positive film (ie, slide film) or digital capture, you can expose over or under on a cloudy day, and get a wide range of "acceptable" results, from pastel over-exposure looks, to more moody underexposure looks (within reason,of course).

When shooting color negative film or B&W negative film on an overcast day, a normal exposure will usually yield a rather flat, dull-looking shot. That type of result is however, pretty easy to work with in post production, as you can see by gsgary's punching up of a flat shot to a level more like what we'd want to see, with some deep blacks, some bright whites, and a good amount of contrast between the middle and lower tonal values.

But that distorts the mid-tones, which I find less than desirable (same as zone system expansion, essentially). This is why I suggested avoiding soft light for B&W subjects of this kind. You end up with blah tones or distorted ones, neither of which is particularly appealing.

 

[Alpha]

I'm not really convinced yet that the images we're seeing here are faithful representations of the negs. I think we need more information from the OP.

 

[dreams of film]

I scanned the print.

 

[Derrel]

I scanned the print.

Well, unless the print is a master-level quality print, it's usually better and easier to scan the negative, especially if it's a color negative. Today, mass-market color or B&W prints are usually middlin' in quality, and scanning them doesn't produce a very good image.

I'm not so contrarian that I'll deliberately disagree with others who I normally disagree with, just to be obstinate or to make "a point" or to cause others to think or question their values, so I'll have to agree with P-P that chromogenic B&W negatives DO SCAN BETTER than silver-based, traditional B&W film stocks like Panatomic-X, Plus-X, Tri-X, HP-5,or Verichrome Pan,etc,etc. I have scanned all of those old-style,silver-based B&W films, and they ALL look grainier than they shoot, and they do not produce the tonality they do when printed conventionally, in a darkroom. The dye-based monochrome emulsions from Ilford and Kodak are much easier to scan, with much lower graininess and better tonality than the silver-based old-style films. And color negatives make good scans and convert well to monochrome.