I see a couple of people asking why their bracketing doesn't show up
they way they expect it to on neg films... I think its important to
understand what exactly you're trying to accomplish... Usually people
are trying get "lighter" or "darker" prints by manipulating the neg
exposure, and that is counterproductive. If you want lighter or darker
prints, they have to be *printed* light or dark, and as always, the
better the neg, the better the print will be. When you shoot neg film,
you want to capture the most amount of information you can without
blowing out your highlights regardless of how light or dark the
resultant print will be. In fact the more exposure you give a neg, the
better your shadows will look! Not just in detail, but the "blackness"
of the blacks will look much better as well. The less exposure you give
a neg, the worse the print will look, with very, very few exceptions.
Ask any printer and they will tell you that working with a "fat" neg is
always the best...
If you really want to see the differences in exposure between frames,
you need to get a contact sheet made. 4x6 prints from the 1 hour place
will hardly ever give you any real info as far as exposure goes... Many
of the new machines start out with it making its best guess and workers
can only "fix" things they see are obviously wrong in the monitor. In
other words, even if you tell the people to make no adjustments, many
times that will mean that the machine will make its adjustments, and the
operators won't "correct" the bad guesses. Which way is better depends
on the person at the machine!:-)
So how do you get lighter and darker prints? Make the best exposure you
can, and then *tell* the lab what you are after. If they won't (or
can't) do this, its time for a new lab! Sometimes its easiest to just
get the whole roll processed and then bring back the negs for reprints
(along with the original for comparison) for the particular shots...
Of course the best way to get the prints looking the way you want them
to is to do them yourselves! With an OK film scanner and an OK printer,
you can get results that are far better than the typical 1 hour place.
IMHO doing it yourself is the best teacher you can have. Hope this
helps!
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