All shots were from a Canon Elan 7ne with a 70-200 2.8 L IS. The lighting was from an Alien Bees 800 monolight. Exposure was at f9.5, 1/100 for a given ISO rating, the lens was set to 135mm. All film was from the same 35 mm 100 foot roll. For comparison, I am including some shots from my Canon 5D to see what a Full Frame digital camera can deliver.
Please note: Even though I loaded no more then 15 frames per roll for this test, the D76 1 to 1 development included 8 fluid ounces of D76 Full Strength and 8 fluid ounces of water. This is importand on full rolls to ensure that you don't exhaust the developer. I followed this practice here to ensure proper development.
All times were sourced from the Massive Dev Chart on digitaltruth.com.
Scanning was done with a Nikon Coolscan V ED. Settings were 4000 dpi, 16 bit gray, to a .tiff file.
Here is the full scene
Here are the crops
D76, Full Strength @ 400
D76, Diluted 1 to 1 @ 400
D76, Full Strength @ 1600
Diafine @ 1600
5D @ 1600
Conclusion:
If you are going to shoot Tri-X at ISO 400, then D76 1 to 1 is great. I think the image has more clarity then at full strength. If you want to shoot Tri-X at 1600, although the D76 negative looks pretty good, to me the Diafine image has a more gritty, B&W look.
It is interesting to see that the 5D can pull such detail out of a 1600 ISO image. Although a great camera, it does lack the dynamic range that film can deliver. Hopefully they will start looking to improve DR in the future instead of more megapixels.
And don't forget! If you want to have great film like this available 20 years from now buy some today and create some art!
2 comments:
Thanks for this straight-forward reporting. It both inspires me to do some testing on my own, and makes me more confident that my D76 1+1 mix is probably just fine!
I was trying to view the images, but all I get is a "?". Where might they be?
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