JBrunners guide #1 Magic bullets for B&W beginners.

Thanks, J.

I may not use it as a handout, but I am definitely going to show it to the D.H.

JBrunner said:

In this article, I am going to lay out a camera, lens, exposure, film, developing, paper and printing regimen that will speed you on your way to achieving print Nirvana....

...Summation: There is no camera, no lens, no film, no developer, no kind of developing, no paper, and no printing method that will make your work sing in the beginning. All the really cool stuff on APUG about developers, stand developing, pre-flashing, split grade printing, yada yada, is great reading, but can be usefully applied and evaluated only by the photographers here that have the discipline, consistency, and experience that allows the tiny little differences these things offer find a useful place in the tool set.

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Absolutely.

The one real key to "Nirvana", however, is in the realization that ... YOU! You, yourself, inexperenced, thrashing through the widerness ... have the capability of producing FINE work, and YOU WILL, although you may not appreciate it at the time.

Your creativity will truly be stifled if you do something that just rocks, but you don't know what you did. Don't be a someone with a thousand monkeys with typewriters hoping that one of them writes MacBeth.

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Is OK with me. I don't expect to write anything a complex as MacBeth ... but all though my work, there have been passages that might well compare.

... "Don't know what (I) did?"

To me that translates to "mystery", and that to me, is VITAL.
I don't think I've ever really understood any ... most ... even a few of the factors... that produce "successful" (to me) work.

More and more I am amazed, and mystified. i've been able to discipline myself to concentrate on the successes, and to let the rest fade into the background.

The successes make it all worth while - more than.

I love this miraculous "photography"... whatever it is.

Great advice Jason.... It would have saved me tons of dough when I was starting out as well all those years ago in 1989. It's also advice I can say I have evolved into using. I have two films that I use for nearly all my work Fuji Neopan-400 and Fuji ACROS. These films manage 95% of the work I do. Other films I use on rare occasions are TMY-II, and HP-5+. I stuck with the fuji because they deliver very high quality, and have the benefit of being over 1/3rd cheaper than Ilford or Kodak films!! I also have pretty much settled on two developers for those films also. Pyrocat HD for my Neopan-400 film, and Diafine for the ACROS. I am getting consistent results, and that's the main driver for me is consistency, and the same look and feel to the images they make. Paper is another area where I have gone all over the map and back. At this point, I am settled on Foma 123 Variant velvet matt as it's such a wonderful paper and works very well with my subject matter of late. It tones well, has good quality, and is also decently priced.

Now that ADOX has re-introduced the old Agfa MCC111 paper, I may try that in the future, but I am liking matt papers more and more so may not go down that path. Like Thomas has said, having a cohesive body of work that has the same paper base, and color goes a long way to helping you form a style, and also helps with potential gallery representation. Flailing around from one emulsion to the next will not get you very far, and can make bodies of work look disconnected.

Narrowing your focus down to a few materials and knowing them inside out is the best way to proceed and something I truly wish I had done earlier in my photographic journey. YMMV.

A.

Jason, well done man. I downloaded the pdf version to take to a photo teacher I know so she can use it in her classes. She does make recommendations that you pointed out in terms of chemistry and paper. The classes don't get too much into different lenses and such, but it's good info in case the students want to pursue film further. Also, for what it's worth, the newbs are just being victims of advertising to some extent - that's not a total excuse, but sales is sales and if it confuses the newb, well, the sale has been made anyway - that's how I eventually saw it when I was paper-hopping/developer-hopping, and all those other gyrations. Simplify and standardize was something I learned working with steel, and it carried over to film. Sounds weird, I know, but it's true.