200-250

Are you developing you own film? If so you can try shooting at the
rated ISO and adjusting the developing time to best suit your film and
print processing.

One method is to create a standard target usually with full gray scale
patches, a standard large gray card and color patches. In carefully
measured lighting shoot an entire roll of the target. In the darkroom
cut the film so that there is at least one complete frame on each
snipit of undeveloped film. Now develop each film snipit individually
at the rated time and say +/- 10%; +/- 20$%; +/- 40%; ... etc. Now try
printing each of these film strips using standard B&W printing with no
adjustment in the developer. Once done, you should have squeezed the
full available tonal range on the film to the tonal range of the paper
and established an optimum development time for the snipit the
delivered the best images. Please note that there can be considerable
trial and error for each snipit until you narrow in on the printing
exposure time.

Anyway, the results of brilliant whites to rich blacks with great
highlight range and shadow detail are worth all the effort. As you
begin to standardize the process, you can minimize the work by buying
the film in bulk (or in matched emulsion numbers) and large lots of
paper. Eventually there is very little tweaking when you change "lots"
of consumables.

If all this is too much the you might try rating Tri-X at 320. It's
really pretty good for over exposure range, but too much overexposure
really caused the highlights to block up in my experience.

Regards,
Roger

Somewhere between 200 and 4000; depending on your goals and
requirements.

400 - I believe it says so right on the box

I always shoot Tri-X at 320..

--
Colyn Goodson

http://www.colyngoodson.com

It depends on the developer and the effect you are looking for.  A good
place to start is the "Massive Dev Chart", which gives possibilities
ranging from 50 to 3200.
    http://www.digitaltruth.com/devchart.html

The commercial labs I use offer a choice of TMax Developer and Ilfotec
DD-X.

I've gotten fantastic results at EI 200, EI 1600 and nearly all steps
in between.  A good lab, or a good working knowledge of your own
processing technique is the key; TX400 is fairly elastic when it comes
to pushing or pulling.

Michael

I generally shoot it at ISO 320 and develop normally. This is for scenes
with normal contrast. Best is to experiment with your camera/meter and judge
by the results.

Doug

The older b/w film people will remember the mantra for exposing b/w
film: 'expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights'.

This was based on the premise that development affected the highlights,
i.e. the blacker parts of the negative, more than the shadows, or less
dense parts of the negative.  If your exposure was sufficient to record
the shadows satisfactorily, then optimal highlight density was dependent
on your enlarger, and your printing style.  The enlarger could be either
condenser-illuminated, or diffuse-illuminated, and the two types yielded
quite different tonal values in the print, particularly in the shadow
tones separation, due to the 'Callier' effect (something for you to look
up).

I suggest that you choose a suitable subject of the type you want to
photograph, e.g. a landscape, and take a series of exposures from about
160 or 200 ISO up to 800 or so, and then process the film.  Look for
shadow detail and density first, and note the speed that gave you the
best result - not too dense, but good tonal separation.

Next, look at the highlights in that frame, or the print from that
frame, and decide if the tonality is ok or not.  If the print is too
harsh, reduce ( or get your lab to reduce) the development time by 10%,
or if the image is flat, increase by 10%, and go round again.  

The commonest mistake less experienced photogs made was to underexpose
and try to correct in development, specially if the shot was at the
rated film speed.  It wasn't unknown for film makers to rate their films
at a somewhat higher speed to gain a competitive edge, and if the camera
shutter was a but fast, or the lens lost a bit of light, the result was
underexposure, and the usual response was to increase development time
when the proper response would have been to lower the effective ISO.

This relationship between exposure and development time is the key to
getting outstanding tonality from b/w film, and it's not fixed, as the
indicated speed and development (and modern color film processing) would
have you believe.  The camera (internal reflections in the body),
shutter accuracy, aperture accuracy, lens flare and transmission
percentage (some older lenses can have significant transmission losses),
meter calibration and method of use, and subject type all have a bearing
on the exposure/development combination.

Ansell Adam's Zone System is built on these premises.  Of course with
roll film you can't individually treat each negative, but you can try to
take the same sort of shots, not mix landscapes and portraits, for
instance, on the same film, and if you have established optimal
development times for different subject types and process accordingly,
the results will be fabulous.

Of course, this approach won't make a lot of sense to younger photogs
who have grown up with machine processing of color films, but it was the
way it was done in the past.  Aaahh, the old days ...  but I wouldn't
swap  my digital camera and computer for those days now.

Colin D.