CHAPTER 6

DEVELOPMENT

 

Placing an Important Shadow Area on Zone III guarantees that your negatives will be properly exposed but that's only the first step toward creating a perfect negative. In this chapter, we will consider the effect this has on all of the other values of the scene you are photographing.

The two important questions are:

  1. Where does the Important Highlight Area fall on the Zone Scale?
  2. How does this affect your development time?

As we learned, the rule is: Develop for the Highlights. This means that the correct development time for a given negative depends on the amount of contrast in each scene you photograph.

At this point, photographers with 35 mm cameras begin to wonder how each frame of a roll of film can be developed ...

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