If you are serious about black-and-white photography yet feel that your technical abilities are not getting anywhere you will have to recognize that what you've been doing before was probably wrong... or even worse, the adoption of bad habits from other photographers.

For example you may read that a certain photographer rates his ISO 400 Ilford HP5 Plus film at EI 200 whilst an equally admirable photographer rates his identical film stock at EI 650. In whose footsteps would you follow? Neither of course... photographic talents being equal, it's their equipment which has forced them to change the rating of their film. For example, the leading image to this article of "The Countess" on the narrow gauge Welshpool & Llanfair Railway in mid-Wales was taken on a Nikon F601 camera with everything on "auto"... but the Ilford FP4 (ISO 125) film was rated at EI 200 and printed on a normal grade 2.5 paper.

The image on the next page taken inside Daresbury Church in Cheshire of one of the five panes in the memorial window dedicated to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) author of "Alice in Wonderland" was taken on an Olympus OM4 with a 300mm Zuiko telephoto lens utilizing the camera's excellent spot-metering system, rating Agfapan 100 at a conservative EI 64 enabling a print to be made, again, on a normal grade 2 paper.

Note that these two admirable (but mythical) photographers I mention do not have special film stocks coated for their use, nor developers formulated from secret ingredients or papers with magical tones built-in. They use the same materials that you and I use... but they do so with a subtle difference. These two knowledgeable photographers have fine-tuned their techniques by finding out how "off-the-shelf" materials actually behave in practice, i.e. in their cameras as opposed to how they originally behaved in the manufacturer's test laboratory when they were being rated for sensitivity... two very different things!