The perfect look for 5222

[joaquin del paso]

Hi everyone, I study at the polish film school and next month we have to do our second film shot with the kodak 5222 35mm negative.

 

I was not satisfied with the results of the last short film, since the developing was extremely contrasty and the range of grays was very small.

 

After doing some tests in the lab I realized that their "standard" gradient for b/w is 70 which is very very contrasty, I want to try developing at 55 or maybe 50 to get a big range of gray tones.

 

The questions are the following:

 

1-How can I calculate the exposure relation with this pulling process? How much should I overexpose and is there a way to find out? Or it just depends on the tests of the lab?

 

2- Someone told me that I can print this stock in color positive and do bleach bypass to get a very big range of grays in the negative plus dark blacks and real whites in the positive. Has anybody tried this?

 

Thanks for any information you can share!

 

Joaquín

[Dirk DeJonghe]

The standard gamma for B&W is 0.65. This, combined with proper positive printing and processing should give you perfect B&W results with good whites and deep blacks with detail. You should ask for a sensitometric strip, give them a few feet of your stock to do it. The lab should be able to expose the sensitogram and plot it.

 

You should also search the proper exposure value after their process is adjusted to the proper gamma (usually 0.65). Do this by exposing a grey chart at minus 4 stops, and then bracketing per one third stop. Go up to a full stop overexposed and maybe one third underexposed. Ask the lab to read the densities of this exposure test. The exposure that will be closest to 0.08 to 0.10 over D-Min is the value to use. Make the chart large enough so it can be read on a densitometer (about 1/3 to 1/2 of the frame).

 

Underexposed B&W negative will never give nice blacks, overexposed stock will show more grain (opposite to how color negative works).