Digital BW, The Print

I don't think scanners want "thin" negs, and it's certainly not right
to say enlargers prefered dense negs. The use of "dense" and "thin" 
suggests earlier negs were never optimal for the darkroom . 

Exposing/processing B&W film with basic N/N+/N- controls, one can
almost always print "properly" on one standard grade of one's standard
paper, and of course those negs scan well.

For me, darkroom practice didn't imply accident or exploration.
Scanning facilitates lots of new interpretations of images, but
because of early exposure to basics of Zone System (I never got deep
with it) my negs have almost always enlarged the way I intended, had
the tonal scale I needed, were rarely challenges in the darkroom. 

John Kelly


> Scanners like different things than enlargers.  They far prefer thin
film to
> dense, for instance- the opposite of the choice for enlarging. It
may even be
> that they prefer thin to "properly" exposed.  I have been out of
shooting and
> developing for a time, but have in mind revamping my development
scheme to fit
> scanning, not enlarging.
> 
> James Irelan
>