Hi,
I was just wondering if any of the fine people here can help....

I took 7 rolls of black and white into one of the top labs in my town. Film speeds included were 100,400,1600,3200. Each film I got back looks just like the other..very contrasty {which I like} but grain in every shot is huge even the 100 speed ilford delta which is supposedly very fine grain came out very dark and grainy.In fact almost every shot seems to be underexposed and jammed full of grain regardless of film speed.
I had slides done there too and they came back bang on perfect..extremely pleased showing great sharpness and saturation so I know now that the cameras meter is working fine and each shot as I alway try is composed/metered with care.

Could it be their chemicals? am I right in asking them to be redone? or some money back? I wouldnt care so much but those rools were of an overseas trip and I can tell if some of the shots had been done 'as usual' I could/should have some great shots.

Thanks for you help/replies
BEVAN.N.Z

Dear Bevan,

In the first place, what do the negatives look like? Are they grainy? Because if the negatives are grainy, then, of course, the prints will be also. If the negatives are not messed up, then I am not sure what else it could be. I would say the lab is at fault, but you said they did your slides okay, so I am not sure where the problem is. More information would be good.

Dzerzhinski

Obviously something's wrong here. Unfortunately the appearance has a lot to do with the developing process, and once developed can't be fixed. With traditional hand developing of B&W film, there are a lot of ways grain can be affected but there can be tradeoffs with sharpness. The type of developer, temperature and agitation can affect grain.

Very odd that all of the films look similar. What were the films? Delta 100 should be very clean from what I've heard although I haven't used it myself.

If you're going to scan them, I've found that it's best to scan the negative as a color transparency (slide) and then do the inversion and convert to B&W (using one of a few different methods) in Photoshop. Grain looks a lot better this way instead of scanning as a B&W film.

If the negs are dark and grainy, I would reckon that the lab has over-processed them. If this is the case, there is very little you can do. I have occasionally overprocessed film, sometimes deliberately (I've even pushed Pan F to iso200 with virtually no effect on grain!) but on the odd occasion when I have done so by accident, I was able to get reasonably acceptable, though slightly grainy, prints by using variable contrast paper and exposing for a short time at grade 5 before doing most of the exposure at grade 0, 1 or 2. Unless they are totally wasted, you may be able to salvage something in the darkroom but it may take quite a bit of experimentation.