Just found out I can't post from the archives. Dumb me... Trying again, better late then never: Hi Skip, Since the films were the same I think the lesser contrast of the FD pictures could be explained as follows. First there is the flare. Flare is light being scattered all over the place and can be caused by poor lens coating (and also by excessive dirt inside an old lens). A 7 element lens has 14 surfaces. If each of these surfaces reflects a few % of the light there is a lot of light travelling in wrong directions. If there are strong highlights these act as a source for even more light ending in the wrong place. If no lens hood is used, also light coming from sources outside the frame starts reflecting inside the lens. The result of this flare in your case could be that the dark parts of the picture received enough light for the fiilm emulsion to start lightening up, but since the "true" light beams from the darker parts are only a portion of the received ligh on the emulsion, there should be a whitish veil, or at least a reduced contrast. A second cause could be the exposure. From your remarks I had the impression that the Canons lightmeter could use some recalibration and was underexposing at least one stop. Now printers don't want to send back pictures that are too dark, so the printing machine corrected it during the printing process. Print film has quite a wide latitude, so you hardly recognise it as a correction at first sight. The film characterics however are not linear in the entire range. With this I mean that in the middle of the range 1 stop difference in reality is close to 1 stop difference on the film, but in the extremes of the range, 1 stop difference in reality is perhaps only 0.2 stop difference on the film. This could result in that despite of using the same film, the well exposed film printed normally has a higher contrast then the wrong exposed film printed with correction. A third reason could be that you used f16 with the FD and f11 with the FA. Diffraction effects in small lens openings can reduce contrast slightly. At f16 this is hardly noticeable, but it could have slightly enhanced the two previous reasons. For getting things right in high contrast scenes Suda's valuable film suggestions and your own idea of picking up the best possible exposure with the ML button (that's what it's for) could do the job. Hope to have been helpfull, Erwin - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Visit the PUG at http://pug.komkon.org.
