I have recently been conversing with Joe (Finder) via email, and he sent me something that I thought was worth sharing, once I got his permission to post it here. He's been very busy lately but has been very involved in doing B&W photography. Here's his interesting comments:

There is one important way that B&W can be by far the least challenging photographic medium; If you use Tri-X film, then the exposure lattitude is astounding - you almost can't over-expose it.
I've learned that the range of printable densities available on photographic paper is something like 50:1, and that of Tri-X is in the hundreds. Vestal says that a Tri-x frame (or areas within it) can appear opaque black upon hold-it-up-to-the-light inspection, and still contain several stops-worth of detailed, printable image yet -- it just needs more exposure on the enlarger. So picture this:
Pick the darkest area that contains important detail, and expose one or two stops down from there - then on the enlarger you can print up the shadows for dark, rich, lively details, and whatever is off-scale white on the print is still 'stored' in the denser areas of the negative! From there you can go toward lower-contrast printing papers to attempt to squeeze the wider ranging negative densities into the paper's range, or start burning-in the the highlights. You can, like, dump a 30sec. overall enlarger exposure - then go on for four minutes worth of burn-in for the backlight sky! there's like, four or five stops-worth of highlight detail locked in the film, if you expose for the shadows! Tri-x only has two stops of lattitude back from neutral down into the shadows. This is why Vestal considers Tri-x to be a 200-speed film - that way you get three stops down from neutral-gray, you already have a ton of room up on top, and so it's just a matter of longer enlarger exposure times.
"Expose for the shadows" makes sense, but not for all B&W films - I guess with some of them, the negative highlight density just 'blocks-up' a couple of stops past neutral. Then they're left with crappy exposure lattitude - like color film.

When I asked him if I could post this to the forum, as I thought it had some interesting points this was his reply: > Well - sure, man! I'd love to think that the forum gang would be interested in the subject.

Remember, though: about the worst shadow detail you can get is in a 24-bit color, or 8-bit monochrome scan! So... one problem is that anyone who gets into this B&W art print thing can't very well post good representations of their works. ...to be honest with you, that's maybe one of the reasons that I drifted from the forum a bit - I'm so dissapointed in how my stuff looks scanned. But it was all the folks on the forum that really sparked my new devotion to photography in the first place!
I gotta get back to the forum!

J.P.

Thanks all, hope you find this as interesting as I did,( and I don't even do darkroom stuff!) Joe's a good dude, and I hope he can get back to us from time to time.
:-)>

Thanks for sharing this ; )

rawk on, tri-x it shall be if I ever shoot again!

I've got a roll prints taken on Tri-X Pan from Sept and finished in January. Some of those images are of my sisters wedding. Of course these were lab processed. And although I wasn't impressed with my photography work....I was impressed with the skin tones that I got from it. I was planning on trying some more since that was the first time I had used Tri-X and I wanted to try it again. Now I definitely will.

That's too bad... Tri-X isn't available here anymore (except in well hidden shops, where reloads are available)... :-(

Glad to hear Finder is doing well. He's always welcome back here.

Wow that's so odd, PC! The one time I tried Tr-X film I really disliked it for it's extreme grain and cause no shot was really well exposed. For some reason Ilford HP5 Plus has given me much better and evenly exposed results, with much more shadow detail. The Tri-X seems to get never extremely under/over exposed, but perhaps that means that it at the same time is never really spot-on....unlike for instance slide film, where it's easy to under expose, but when it's well exposed it's really really spot on. Perhaps it was just due to the fact that I've only done one roll sofar, so maybe I should try it again. Really weird to read the exact opposite of what I experienced :) Thanks a lot for sharing! =)

I remember that thread you posted about Tri-X Rork, after I posted this...I wonder why you and Joe had such different experiences? Weird, certainly! (But what else is new in life? - lol) :-)>