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One of my goals this year is to use 35mm B&W film in a diary camera in order to push myself through the learning curve.
This weekend I loaded up the Leica M2 with a 24 exposure roll of Tri-X 400 with the intention of pushing it to 1600. The scene was a local deli, Brents, on Saturday night and a rib-joint in Burbank on Sunday called Ribs USA.
Here are my keepers. For the techies, a write up of my process is at the bottom.
This roll was taken with my Leica M2 and Zeiss 50mm Biogon f/2.0. Most of the images are with the lens wide open at f/2.0 or f/2.8 @ 1/60th. The lighting was typically moderate restaurant lighting.
The developing was Clayton Chems F76+, dilution 1+19, 14:30 min @75F. Lowell Huff (the chemist behind F76+) recommends 1+19 11:00 min @75F “for push processing”. I assumed this was for one stop, so for two, I added another 30%. Normal dev is 1+9, 6:00 min @68F .
During scanning (VueScan) I measured a value of 2.09 for the Exposure Lock. The negs were a little thin, so I found myself pushing the Brightness setting to 1.5. I have found it better to push the brightness during scanning to avoid blocked up blacks.
Post in Lightroom/CS5 included small amounts of dodge and burn – artistic license to darken shirts, brighten faces, burn edges, etc… Very little was done with any constrast tweaking and no curves adjustments.
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