Why did the sky turn very dark on my black-and-white film photo without a filter?
Asked 3/10/2012
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I shot the same scene on a digital camera and on Ilford Pan F Plus black-and-white film (ISO 50). In the digital version, a simple black-and-white conversion made the blue sky look light, which is what I expected from film with no filter. But the scanned print from the film shot shows the blue sky as very dark, almost black.
I did not intentionally use a yellow, orange, or red filter. Was this dark sky caused by the film itself, the scene contrast, or something done during printing/scanning?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
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Your printer appears to have done quite a bit of burning in of the sky area (and of the closer of the two rock faces, as well as some general vignetting). It's a pretty good job, but you can see some lightness close to the hill that wouldn't be there if the darkness was the film's response to the sky.
Panchromatic black-and-white film is generally more sensitive to blue than to other colours (although by how much varies with the emulsion, some being more sensitive to greens and others to reds than others). In order to get a substantial sky, you normally need to use some sort of colour filtration, normally in the light yellow to deep red range. Without filtration, a blue sky will normally be very light in tone, without much distinction between the sky and clouds.
When shooting black and white, you should consider a K2 yellow filter and a #25 "light red" (it won't look very light to you when you see it) to be standard parts of your kit. The K2 will render the sky more or less "normally"—that is, there will be a distinct tonality to the sky, lighter at the horizon and getting darker as you move up, with visible clouds. The #25 will give you a much darker sky and more dramatically contrasting clouds (assuming white clouds, of course). There are filters covering the range between the K2 and the #25, but they're sort of "neither here nor there"—they're not strong enough to really be dramatic, but are obviously filtered. To get the Ansel Adams-style black skies, you might want to use a #29 dark red filter.
You can approximate the look of filters when converting your colour digital images to black and white, but with a great deal more control over contrast than you can get with an ordinary optical filters.
Originally by user2719. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user2719
14y ago
0
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Most likely, the very dark sky was not caused by the film alone.
Panchromatic B&W films like Ilford Pan F Plus usually render blue sky fairly light unless you use a color filter such as yellow, orange, or red. Those filters darken blue skies and increase cloud contrast.
Based on the result you showed, the dark sky was probably created during printing or scanning rather than in-camera. A lab printer can “burn in” the sky area to make it darker, and scans can also add contrast. Signs such as localized darkening and vignetting point to post-processing in the print/scan workflow.
Your digital comparison also isn’t definitive, because B&W conversion methods vary a lot. In Lightroom, using the color mixer can darken blues in a way similar to using a filter on film.
So the likely answer is: the sky was made darker mainly by printing/scanning adjustments, while true dark skies on B&W film are usually achieved with a yellow/orange/red filter.
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