The Bench in Black and White

“The Bench” got another treatment in February when, as the post in the snow, was lit by that wonderful late-afternoon sun. The light comes through just over my neighbor’s house for about 10-15 minutes about an hour before sunset and creates this great light.
I looked out my office window and saw how nice the light was and grabbed my Kodak Retina IIa, that had a roll of the wonderful Kodak Double-XX black and white film it. I metered with an incident meter, because I wanted the highlights properly metered. I decided to allow most of the shadows to fall where they may.
Yes, I know what I should have done: metered for the shadows and adjusted the development to push the highlights down. But there was about probably 4-5 stops between the mid-tones and the shadows and there simply wasn’t enough room to pull the development that hard. And I also wasn’t going to ruin all the other photos on the roll….and I haven’t done any tests to see the exact development necessary for this situation. So I just took the photo.
I think that both turned out very nice, with just what I wanted, a very dark background with the bench properly rendered.

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