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Why I am not wrong on this matter

The contents of your post makes not so much sense, as in it you are confusing some concepts, in a way not dissimilar to Antonioni´s:

What you say about silver halide contents in a photographic emulsion is irrelevant: what matters is not the total quantity of silver, but how fine the particles are, how uniformly distributed in the emulsion, the thickness of emulsion itself, the cyanines used to obtain a uniform spectral sensitivity, and the latitude of the whole emulsion.

That picture was shot under poor lighting, and the body was in a dark zone, under a bush. The B&W film used by most professional photographers of those days was Kodak´s Tri-X, ASA 400, which had a pretty sharp grain, and good resolution for its speed..., but it was not a Panatomic-X, which was a high resolution film, albeit much lower in sensitivity, just ASA 50. And that picture, given the light available, had to be shot with the lens wide open, where it is not at its best (a very good lens, in ideal conditions, with its diaphragm closed at f/8, will give you 80 lines per mm, which will fall to 50 lines, or less, when wide open...), and at a low shutter speed, what is far from the ideal conditions for a high resolution shot.

And then, to crown the cake, when developing the film you must choose between high resolution, with good detail in the shadows (working at the foot of the Hurter& Driffield curve, at gamma 0.60, or so) and high speed, with increased contrast, but losing lots of detail. The standard film developer was Kodak´s D-76, which is good to increase both speed and apparent sharpness, but it is not a high definition developer.

At the time this film was done I was making my life as a scientific photographer, and I was always trying to squeeze the last drop from every emulsion in the market, both in B&W, infrared, UV, radiographic film, and colours slides and colour internegatives and, on that purpose, I was using a wide range of films, and many different developers, including some special, pyrocatechol based, formulae which allowed me to get rid of any grain in the emulsion, and to obtain high resolution images, with a very good range of shades..., but sacrificing some speed in the process: it´s always a tradeoff...

I have enlarged 35 mm negatives to more than 100 times their original size, so I know well what I am talking, at least on these matters. And what I said in my post is exactly what would happen: a high speed film, shot at f/2.8 or less, using a low shutter speed, with a hand held camera, will never allow you to get so much detail when enlarging. And much less if you are doing intershots, no matter how big the second camera you use to do that.

Sorry to contradict your beliefs, but that´s how things work.

Regards

BF


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  • Why I am not wrong on this matter - orejones 02:21:11 06/16/04 (0)


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