Hi Alex,

Have you ever thought of using a hood in lieu of a filter? It does rather well to bring maximum contrast to your exposures, although it doesn't alter the color contrast like you do with your yellow filter, obviously.

It may sound crude and unexciting, but when I have a camera that I don't have specific filters for, I just use a filter larger than the lens thread in front of the lens and take the picture. It's hardly elegant, but it works.

- Thomas

Quote Originally Posted by Alex1994 View Post
Hi

I am a B&W shooter, almost exclusively FP4+ which I soup in D-76 stock as per manufacturer's instructions. My main SLR is an OM which gets me by very nicely. I usually use a medium yellow (K2) filter for all my photos to get the contrast good. However, I also have a Minox 35 GSE which I want to use for B&W. Minox never made any colour filters for this camera, none are available bar the UV filter they made. My question is this: seeing as I won't be able to get a coloured B&W contrast filter on the Minox, what is there to be done about contrast? I usually scan my negs before printing (heresy I know) and a set of photos taken without the yellow filter looked distinctively worse than the ones with filter (lower contrast, more haze etc). Is the effect being exaggerated by scanning (never printed pics that had no filter) and if not can it be corrected for when printing using higher contrast grades? (for the record I'm using a colour enlarger) There must surely be a way of making them look good without filter, since plenty of people use Minoxes for B&W.

Thanks in advance

Alex