Quote:
Originally Posted by timor
Thanks Argentum, good post. As I understand what you are saying is that personal EI doesn;t have much of a meaning in this kind of discussion as there are multiple ways to expose and develop the same material. What counts is the final effect, a print.
Now you made me wish, that someone would do a densitometry of my standard negs
Mr. Sexton is rating TMX in D76 at ISO 64 and in Tmax Dev. at ISO 80 supposedly for the same results. So it is not even 1 stop. But is that telling us, that TMX is loosing more of the speed in D76 cause of it's stronger silver dissolving abilities ?
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yes its nice to have a densitometer (which I do) but that doesn't tell you how it will look when you print except that once you know what neg density just gives a pure white then you can do pretty accurate calibration from a single film test and interpret from there. So they do save time but at some expense and time graphing on a PC.
However you can achieve most of the above just by producing zone negs a la Ansel Adams and printing them as on page 49-51 of The Negative if you have a copy.
I would suggest that two different developers will have different activity but also t-grain films tend to produce longer toe with old developer formulas. Tmax dev is designed to give the shadows a kick which shortens the curve toe and means you start to get shadow separation sooner if you use TMax developer with a tgrain film. And that means you get a faster EI too. And you don't know if he is calibrating to a 10 stop range. You might think he is but you don't actually know.
HC110 and I guess the Ilford equivalents such as LC29 nearly always give a long toe which basically means an upswept curve. This can be a good or bad thing depending on your subject. For landscapes with cloud formations I think its a good thing because you getter higher contrast in the clouds where you really want it (providing you take care not to over expose). So one developer is not necessarily better than any other. Its about matching the film and dev to the subject and your vision of how you want it to look.