Resiliance

About a month ago, I found about 20 4x5 slide holders. Since until last fall, I hadn't done any developing since 2006 and therefore not taken any 4x5s since then; these were old so I wasn't expecting much when I developed them.

The negatives were very dense, probably their age and terrible miss-treatment; they'd been in a box in the woodshed since 2006 which means freezing in the winter and really hot in the summer.  But the wonder of digital technology is that one can fairly easily capture all the available information a negative has to offer, however traditionally 'unprintable'. These would have needed something like grade 6 paper - if such a thing existed;  the film base was so dark that there was very little difference in opacity between the highlights and the shadows. They looked as though they had been accidentally exposed to light. However, if you tell the scanner's AD converter how to interpret even these terrible negatives, it will generate a nice smooth 256 interval scale between the shadows and the highlights, regardless of the negative's overall density.

Here's one that was taken in about 2002.

  
The developer is Xtol (or EcoPro), 1+1.