Digital BW, The Print

I too use color neg for most work these days and for the same reasons. 
Even across various film sizes it works well. I am sitting right now
about 4 ft from a Quad 17x26" print from a 35mm color neg and it is,
in my estimation, quite literaly beautiful. Almost everything I do now
is either 120 color neg or 35mm color neg dependent on purpose and
what I can physically take with me for use. Even view camera use is
with a 120 roll film holder. It works and processing is nearly
universaly available while traveling. Not an insignificant thing today
given the security climate and x-ray potential.
The only difficulties inherent to smaller negs that I see are the
grain(dyecloud) issues that must be overcome with sizeable
enlargement. That is also doable. The modern color films have very
good resolution.

That said--No, I don't make claims it's as good as large format
anything, but then what is? And just how many images can be taken with
traditional large format? And how many actually would be? 

Regards
Duane


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Frank Kolwicz
<kolwicz@e...> wrote:
>
> Josh,
> 
> I work with almost identical hardware and subjects. In my case
landscape and nature close-ups are printed from Kodak Portra 160 films
(NC or VC) with a Pentax 67, scanned with a Minolta SM Pro, worked in
Photoshop 6 and printed via either Epson 2200 with MIS 7600 inks
(color or QTR B&Ws) or an 1160 with MIS FS-N quadtones.
> 
> I decided on Portra when a friend was setting up his scanning
workflow and did some film tests to see what film gave him good scans.
What impressed me was his test of film contrast range: he got 13 stops
of contrast range with at least some detail from the Portra! Having
been a transparency shooter for almost all of my previous years,
working with 5 or 6 usable stops of contrast range, I felt like my
landscape world had suddenly doubled opportunities for shooting. All
of a sudden I was out shooting at mid-day, in full sun with dark rocks
in shade and glaring wet sand in the same frame. A very liberating
experience and I'd never go back.
> 
> I've also shot some B&W negatives (Tmax 100) and I found them harder
to scan (dark dark areas of film are denser than color negs and that's
hard to read with my scanner, so you lose detail in the highlights of
a print). Maybe custom exposed and developed B&W tailored to your
hardware/workflow would be as good or better, but then you won't have
the option of making both B&W and color from the same frame.
> 
> Frank
> 
> ______________________________________________________________
>    From: "joshscapes" <joshrandall@j...>
> Subject: film for medium format scanning
>