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  #71  
Old 30th May 2016, 11:56 AM
Lostlabours Lostlabours is offline
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Darkroom - Lustrum Press, although it's people like Linda Connor, Duane Michaels. Wynn Bullock, Ralph Gibson etc in the first book, I think there was a second as well.

Ian
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  #72  
Old 30th May 2016, 12:09 PM
Svend Svend is offline
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Originally Posted by Lostlabours View Post
Darkroom - Lustrum Press, although it's people like Linda Connor, Duane Michaels. Wynn Bullock, Ralph Gibson etc in the first book, I think there was a second as well.

Ian
That's the one! Thank you Ian. I have searched the web for that several times to no avail. I'm pretty sure it was vol. 2 that I read. I will order that today.

Svend
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  #73  
Old 30th May 2016, 12:22 PM
Lostlabours Lostlabours is offline
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It's called Darkroom2 again Lustrum Press.

Ian
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  #74  
Old 30th May 2016, 12:35 PM
Svend Svend is offline
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Got it! Found vol. 1 used, and vol. 2 new on Amazon. Placing the order now for both...

Thanks Ian. Much appreciated. Looking forward to reading these.

Svend
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  #75  
Old 20th January 2017, 04:51 PM
Svend Svend is offline
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Originally Posted by Phil View Post
Svend - softly softly catchee monkey is the way I approach Rodinal.
My old Agfa sheet for it says continous gentle agitation for the first minute and then ONE gentle tilt (inversion) every 30 seconds. Seems to work. Slosh it around and it just emphasises the old Rodinal oomph - great looking negatives, but quite hard looking. Gentle agitation really seems to tame things quite well.
Phil - if you're still attending this thread, a quick update on my first film in Rodinal: tried it with PanF in 120 rated at 50, dil. 1+50, 10.5 min. at 21 deg., agitated continuously first 30 sec., then one gentle inversion every minute. This may seem rather timid to some, but it was a winter scene with high contrast range - waterfalls, streams, ice and snow - and I didn't want to blow out the highlights or lose shadows. Better to start gentle and end up with too low contrast, which is salvageable, than the opposite which is just gone-gone. And it was PanF which has that contrasty reputation. Turns out it was a good call, as there was lots of detail retained at either end of the range. Tonal scale is good, if a just a tad compressed. Negs all look a bit thinner than I usually like them, and lack a bit of snap, but I can work with them and should get some nice prints. Next time I will rate the film at 32 to give it a bit more exposure, but keep the time the same - should amp up the crispness a tad too. Sharpness seems great under the loupe. With this film at least, I will keep the agitation the same for now as it seemed to work very well, esp. considering the rather challenging tonal range of some of the scenes (shadows under the cliffs, snow capped rocks, frozen ice walls).

Overall, I like what I see. A good first crack with this developer. I will scan a few this weekend and see how they look on screen.

Thanks for your help on Rodinal.

Cheers,
Svend


PS -- do you use it much with FP4? If so, how does it work with that film?

Last edited by Svend; 20th January 2017 at 04:58 PM.
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  #76  
Old 25th July 2017, 09:40 AM
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Keith Tapscott. Keith Tapscott. is offline
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Originally Posted by SvendN View Post
This post is the first of at least two regarding my quest for an alternative to my usual D-76 / ID-11 developer (let's call them the same). Not that I am having problems with it, but along with Perceptol (for about one-third of my films), they are all I’ve ever used. So it’s time for a change.

More to the point, I am hoping to find a developer with a different “look” to it. Attributes of importance are tonality and sharpness, with fine grain being of lesser priority (but I’ll take it if I can get it). Tonality is probably the main thing that I am after here.

The developer should be general-purpose, as I use roll films exclusively and therefore may have scenes of varying contrast on the same roll. Subjects can be landscapes, nature, close-ups, city scenes / street photography, architecture, travel. No studio stuff or portraits.

Format is 135 and 120; films are traditional grain and T-grain, depending on the look I am after and the format. I favour FP4, HP5 and Tri-X (interchangeably), as well as TMY-2, and intend to experiment with PanF and Acros soon. Output is scanning and digital printing for the time being, with a proper darkroom on the distant horizon when I have more space and more time. This means the negs should be developed to suit both digitizing and silver printing. Max print size is 11x14 from 135, and (rarely) up to 20x24 from 120.

BTW, I always use the above developers diluted, one-shot – usually 1:1, and sometimes 1:3 if I want some highlight control. So I am negating the solvent action somewhat and getting better sharpness than stock, at the expense of grain.

That said, after much reading of Thornton, Anchell and Troop, and poking around the wider web, I have narrowed it down to a short list: Crawley’s FX-15 or FX-37; and Kodak Xtol. I kicked around the idea of Pyrocat HD, but it seemed to be not as versatile, not so “general purpose” as the others (feel free to correct me on that), and a lot fussier to mix and use. Two-bath brews also seem very appealing and versatile, but I get the impression they result in a rather compressed tonal range not really appropriate for bringing out the best in flat light scenes (again, correct me if that’s false).

I will start a separate thread about Xtol (there seem to be a rash of Xtol threads on the board these days), so for the moment I’d like to hear back from anyone who has experience with the Crawley formulas.

FX-15 (aka Acutol S) seems to be a strong candidate for an D-76 replacement. Reading the Acutol S reviews and background info, it checks all the boxes for me – good sharpness, nice tonal gradations, speed increase (a bonus!), solvent action for fine grain, and easy to mix. The main question then is: will I notice any significant visible difference in the tonality of this vs. D-76 @ 1:1? Anchell & Troop state that this developer offers significant improvement in image quality over D-76. Has this been borne out in practice? Do they mean only wrt. sharpness and grain, or does that also include other attrbutes? They don't say.... Any comments on this are most welcome.

FX-37 (similar to FX-39), on the other hand, is said to be excellent for T-grain films, but less suited for traditional grain. Also, it seems to work best for medium speed films, and not so well for 400 and up. Are these two assertions correct? Does anyone use this formula for faster films and/or traditional grain films? As with my questions above, how does the tonality appear?

Thanks in advance for your patience reading the long-winded preamble (takes me a while to get to the point sometimes ), but I thought it best to put as much background info as possible at the beginning to avoid the inevitable questions later on (what films? what subjects? etc....). If I am totally off-base here in my short-list selection, and should be looking in another direction entirely, then feel free to drop any recommendations you may have.

Looking forward to hearing back....

Best,
Svend
I just buy packaged D-76 or ID-11, which ever is cheapest at the time of purchase.
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  #77  
Old 25th July 2017, 07:40 PM
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Miha Miha is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith Tapscott. View Post
I just buy packaged D-76 or ID-11, which ever is cheapest at the time of purchase.
Which for a long time has been Kodak.
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