After messing up the previous test roll of HP5 I loaded up the second roll and tried again. No light leaks during development this time! And no other mistakes either, thankfully.

My goal for these test rolls is to take careful exposure readings (I use lightme) and record how I was visualizing each shot. Then I can compare that with the resulting negatives and hopefully learn something!

This is a sculpture by Jim Damonie currently on exhibit at MIA. Displayed indoors under gentle, non-art-damaging levels of light, so I had to shoot pretty wide open. As a result the image is a little softer than I’d like. But, in terms of the metering I think this worked out well. I metered in dark area around the eyes, aiming to have that in Zone 2. There’s still detail around the eyes, but it is quite dark.

I struggled with metering this wooden tower that’s exhibited between the museum and MCAD school. The sun was bright on one side of it, while the other side was shaded. And the open areas between the wood beams was total shadow. For this one I took a few readings from different parts of the structure with the goal of keeping texture in the shadowed wood. It’s close. But I think it’s overall too dark.

Same structure as before, but here I took several readings and averaged them. I think if I’d asked my meter to give me an overall average reading it would have been about the same. I think this one is too light, making the whole thing kind of bland. f/11, 1/250 probably would have been right.

Here I had a fence that was getting sun on the side facing away from me.You can see some of the reflected glare from that post on the right side of the gate. In this shot I metered on that glare, setting it around Zone 8. I also wanted to retain the detail in the shadowed, bottom-left portion of the gate though. Which I think worked out OK here.

Here I swapped the metering and focused on that bottom left corner of the fence, setting it in Zone 2. It’s much darker than the previous shot, and the gate ends up looking a lot creepier.

Next up is making a contact sheet from these negatives to see how the exposure looks there. These scans all come from the Epson 750 that tends to ‘adjust’ things in mysterious ways.

These were shot using a Pentax Spotmatic ii with 50mm/1.4 Takumar. Developed in Rodinal 1+100 for 14:30 at 21C. Scanned with an Epson 750.

Full album

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