Hands up! Who remembers Fry's Five Boys Chocolate? You know. The one with the picture of the five expressions on a boy's face as he anticipated, enjoyed, then reminisced about the pleasure of the chocolate bar. I often see a photographic four face equivalent.

I stand there in front of a new group of keen monochrome photographers. The place is packed. The first audience at the beginning of the day is full of vim and vigour, keen to be out and round the NEC hall for the Focus on Imaging exhibition after this Ilford Masterclass. By the end of the day, for my final class, they come in very glad to be able to rest their weary feet after a day around the hall.

But all audiences, fresh or tired, young or old, North or South, display the same four reactions at the same point fairly early on in the class. It comes when I make the point that you can't make a fine print from a coarse negative. Most of the negatives that come through the door of my professional printing service are still pretty coarse - underexposed and overdeveloped, burned out highlights and empty shadows with harsh graduation, graininess and poor sharpness.

There are many people who believe that if they can just learn the magic secret, as alchemists strove for the spell that would turn base metals into gold, they will be able to turn out prints with deep luminous detailed shadows, gleaming graduated highlights, and a full rich palette of well separated tones between; that there is some mysterious black art in my darkroom that I hide away from innocent eyes. If only they can learn it, they will suddenly be able to turn their negatives into the glowing prints they envisaged at the moment of making the camera exposure.

Sorry. The answer's in the negative. Literally. An improperly exposed and developed negative will never make a true fine print. Acceptable, even good, yes. Fine, no. Of course there are those who would like to con us into thinking that there are such black darkroom arts, because it justifies a 'guru' position. The current alchemist's spell is split grading. People are using this convinced that they are uncovering print tones with it that unachievable by simple straight print exposure methods. Wrong. It just takes longer to achieve exactly the same result. But the self-delusion makes it feel good as we wrap ourselves in the emperor's new clothes.

Sorry, we can perform rescue jobs on inadequate negatives by devices like extreme dodging and burning, condenser and semi-point source illumination, multiple grade printing, preflashing, controlled fogging, latent image pre-bleaching, selective toning and post bleaching to get some kind of result. But the fine negative prints like a dream without all this hocus pocus, and if we care to apply judiciously a few special techniques to it, the resulting print will shine on the wall as if back-illuminated. We won't need any of the so-called 'creative' tarting up against which I had my rant in Ag magazine.

As I look around I see the four reactions writ large on the faces. Not the Fry's Five Boys, but the Photo Four Boys.

The first, a tiny minority, look comfortable. They know the system and feel at ease with it.

The second, another minority, are those who prefer to rubbish and dismiss what they don't understand or can't do. It's a sort of photographic xenophobia. 'Let's pretend I am superior, then I won't have to admit my ignorance'. Like xenophobes, they tend to be loudly outspoken and overbearing. We saw a good deal of the same thing among many senior business executives who insisted that their staff use PCs, indeed used IT efficiency to cut staff numbers, yet never had a VDU on their own desk and insisted on shorthand dictation to a secretary for frequently revised drafts.

With the photographic zone system xenophobe, expect to hear him speak disparagingly of zone system users as 'technical nerds', 'zone system techies', 'anoraks' or similar patronising clichés. The only trouble with these people suffering from a superiority complex is that when you actually see their pictures, you realise that they don't have the right to be patronising about anyone!

The third group of faces is another minority. On these shine disdain. "I am an artist", the faces silently shout, "and deigning to admit that craft skills can have any place in art would instantly destroy my psued status. Just let me find a new gimmick to cause shock, and I will be ecstatic".

Then there's the rest, the majority. The expressions on their faces hover somewhere between total bafflement, blind panic, and utter boredom.

When I ask, by a show of hands, how they decide what film speed to set on their camera when loading a film, the great majority of the group always let the cassette bar code set it for them on electronically controlled cameras, or they set it from the speed printed on the film box with older cameras. A few don't. They seem to uprate the speed. It seems macho somehow to do that.

When I ask the group what negative development time they use, they say "what the maker prints in the instructions". When pressed, most admit to giving 'a little bit extra, just to be safe', which actually means, of course, giving 'a little bit extra just to make things worse'.

Most of the people in the Masterclass room, other than the few committed zone system users, it transpires, have no understanding at all of the link between subject brightness range, film speed, exposure, and development time, and that all these are variables. Many have spent big money on the latest camera systems with 'deadly accurate' microchip controlled exposure systems (steadily more sophisticated ways of getting the exposure precisely wrong it seems sometimes).

Continued ...