My sister always seems to be carrying something that her sons have dropped.

The last few beachy shots have all been from a couple of rolls of Delta 100 pulled to 50 that I almost ruined by over developing. I was a sleep at the switch when I was mixing the developer. Instead of hitting the mark for Tmax dilution, I hit the mark for fixer dilution. Although the dilution actually ended up at the box recommendation for this film speed, I’ve found that a weaker, off-label dilution of 1+5 works a lot better. These shots were a pain to scan, and the highlights tend to be kind of blocky. But this one works well.

Hexar RF, XM Biogon 35, Efke 400 @ 250, Tmax Dev

Efke 400 Pulled to 250

In my continuing investigations of Efke 400, I shot a couple of rolls at 250 and developed them in Tmax Developer diluted 1+5 at 70 degrees for 5 minutes with 10 seconds agitation every minute. This seems about right for the film speed, but I was kind of surprised to see very little difference in either grain or tonality from shooting at the box speed. There’s nothing wrong with Efke 400 rated at 250, but at least in Tmax Developer, there doesn’t seem to be anything gained from the loss of speed.

Hexar RF, ZM Biogon 35, Efke 400 @ 250, Tmax Dev

Ekfe 400 Grain Pecularities

One of the things I’ve noticed about Efke 400 is the interesting grain structure. It isn’t that Efke 400 is particularly grainy, but the structure of the grain is kind of unique. Notice in both of the posted pictures that the evident grain isn’t limited to little white speckly bits. There’s some black in there too. HP5, which has a similar amount of grain, shows its grain mostly as little white bits. I’m not sure what that means, but after only a few rolls, I feel like I can already distinguish an Efke shot from something shot on another film quite easily, something which isn’t entirely possible with other 400 speed films. This would seem to make Efke a good choice for someone wanting a unique look.

Unrelated Optical Note

I didn’t expect the shot of the spiderweb to amount to much, but the Biogon’s excellent flare control allowed it to capture a really difficult subject. I’m always impressed by this lens.

Kate in the Rain, Hexar RF, ZM Biogon 35, Efke 400, Tmax Dev

I’ve been wanting to try Efke 400 for a while now, and I’ve recently struck on trying new films as a way to avoid buying new lenses, so I added a half dozen rolls to my last B&H order. I’ve only developed two of the rolls, but initial results seem really interesting. This film has got some character to it. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Despite some rather dire warnings in the marketing copy from various resellers, the film doesn’t seem particularly fragile. I processed and sleaved Efke according to my normal procedures, and I didn’t notice anything untoward. The negatives don’t seem to scratch particularly easily, so that’s a bonus.
• This film doesn’t appear to be HP5, although it produces similar results. I guess a previous version of Efke 400 was rebadged HP5. This doesn’t seem to be the case any more. I can’t comment on the internet rumor that it’s a new version of APX that didn’t make it to market.
• Although shadow detail seem fairly average, highlights roll off nicely with this film. This makes it easy to scan. It would probably also make it a good choice for beginners.
• While this isn’t a fine grained film, the grain pattern seems really even, much more so than the slightly clumpy grain found in some Tgrain films. I’d be curious to see how this film looks in an acutance developer.
• This stuff is cheap. $3 for 36 exposure roll is a bargain these days.
• The packaging is kind of hoot. Very retro chic. And the cassette ends pop off really easy; you might even be able to reload these cassettes if you really wanted to.

Developing Efke 400

The film box only gives times for D76 and ID11, and Digital Truth doesn’t give any times for Efke 400. HP5 times are supposed to be a good starting point, but no one has published times for HP5 in Tmax Dev @ 75 degrees, so I just made an educated guess. Tmax Dev 1+5 (my standard control-the-highlights dilution), 75 degrees for 6 minutes with 10 seconds rotational agitation every minute seems to do the trick. Looking back at times published for HP5, 6 minutes seems a little long for 75 degrees, but that’s what I wrote down. I’ll go with my notes, for now, but use your own judgment for off box times

Other than coming up with a time for your favorite developer, there’s nothing special to developing Efke 400. Digital Truth and Freestyle both suggest using water as a stop, which I do for all films anyway. A hardening fixer is also suggested, but Ilford Rapid Fix seemed to work fine. Treating the “wet emulsion with extreme care” is always a good idea. Just don’t drop it on the bathroom floor. As an added bonus, it seems like this film sheets water and dries more evenly than many films.

Efke 400 Samples

Conclusions and a Recommendation

Efke 400 seems to have a number of things going for it without any glaring faults to drag it down. It gives a look similar to TriX and HP5, although it is perhaps a bit more old-fashioned feeling in the look of its grain and the way it renders highlights. If that’s the look you are going for, check it out. Its low price also recommends it. This would be a great first B&W film for someone wanting to try their hand at developing their own. Those warnings about delicate emulsions might be just the thing to force a beginner to develop good technique. There’s enough here to like for a more experienced B&W shooter as well. Well worth checking out.

Agit-prop poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky

No, not that kind of Agit Prop; proper agitation. You know, that thing you do to make sure that your film gets developed evenly. It’s not a very glamorous subject, not nearly exciting as the miscellany of Unsharp Masking, but like anything else photographic, there’s more than one way to go about it.

Types of Agitation

• Rotation: Going in circles.
• Inversion: That’s turning it upside down.
• Lateral: Slide it side to side.
• Stand: No agitation. Just let it sit there and stew, for something like an hour.

Stand development seems to have a lot of adherents in the Rodinal crowd. It appeals to my lazy side, but not my impatient side, so I’ve never given this one much thought. It’s only practical with developers than you can dilute heavily, which is necessary because your extending development time from minutes to hours. Supposedly this results in very long tonal scales. Perhaps I’ll give this a shot when I get more patience. It’s on the schedule for after I turn forty along with large format photography and mixing my own chemicals.

Lateral agitation doesn’t seem to be very popular, but the idea here is that you slide your tank back and forth over the counter to create a wave that moves the developer around. If you ever developed prints the idea should be familiar. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work very well. I always end up with streaks around the sprocket holes when I use this method. If you think about it for a minute, a wave sufficient to redistribute the developer is probably going to leaving part of the film hanging dry for a bit; that’s not a good thing. The effect would seem particularly questionable if you are using deep tanks. Not recommended, but it might have some merits it your tank is too leaky for inversion and doesn’t have a paddle for rotation. Insert here bad joke about leaky canoes and no paddles.

Inversion seems to get all the love on the forums. And it does work. Turning things upside down does have a way of mixing them up, but - there’s always a butt - you need the right kind of developing tank, namely a stainless steel one with a good lid. Although you can invert Patterson and other similar tanks with autoload reals, these tanks have a tendency to leak. Also, the funnel lid on them prevents the developer from getting back into the tank proper - and thereby onto the film - in the most expeditious manner. This is fine for long development cycles, but for times short of 8 mins, you run the risk of uneven development. If you must invert, buy the old fashioned stainless tanks with the simple rubber lids.

Rotation is my favored method. You can only rotate really effectively if your tank is equipped with a paddle, although I suppose you could do a little darkroom bowling with a stainless tank; that would give you some effective rotation. The paddle method is far less leak prone though, mostly because the tank stays upright the whole time. Of course this only works if your tank has a paddle. This is one more reason to get a Patterson tank or something similar. Fancy auto loading reels and paddle agitators are where it’s at for the modern darkroom ;-).

How Often and For How Long?

Those streaks are a sure sign of insufficient rotational agitation.

The easy answer to “how often” and “how long” is written in the instructions for the film and developer of your choice. Most Kodak films seem to suggest 5 seconds agitation for every 30 seconds. Ilford seem to favor 10 seconds every minute. Ilford film in Kodak developer? You could split the difference, but I’d go with whatever is recommend for the film if there is a conflict. I think I can see a difference in my negs between the Ilford and Kodak methods. Following Kodak’s guidelines seems to get you whiter whites, but I’m entirely sure that the laundry standard should be applied to photography.

Follow someone’s guidelines, whatever you do, at least at first. Slack off on the agitation and you will get uneven development and perhaps underdevelopment. On the other hand, super aggressive agitation will get you burned out highlights; developer gets used more quickly in the highlights, so bringing fresh developer to the highlight regions more frequently will develop the highlights proportionately more than the shadows. I think the same principle run in reverse is the idea behind stand development; low agitation allows developer to expire quickly in highlight regions but linger in the shadows, where it will continue developing. It seems like it should work, although there’s a fine line between reducing contrast and under-developing. I’ve experimented with increasing the interval between agitations when push processing, and it does seem to give you a little more density in the shadows. These are subtle effects though. Be prepared to experiment and risk a couple of uneven rolls.

Just a couple of notes before we get started. I’m going to limit this to 400 speed non-chromogenic 35mm films. There is nothing wrong with chromogenic films like Ilford’s XP2 or whatever Kodak is calling their chromogenic these days. For those of you that don’t know, chromogenic B&W films are actually modified color films designed to be processed in color chemistry. This is their great selling point with many of their adherents. You can also use your scanner’s DigitalIce dust/scratch removal on them, unlike with traditional B&W films. You do have to have access to decent color processing, though, and I find that to be their major flaw. I’ve had too many rolls ruinned for $2.50 at the drug store and nearly as many scratched to hell for $15 at the pro lab. Thank you, but no, I’ll stick with the films I can develop myself.

There’s also nothing wrong with film speeds other than 400, but 400 speed films are much better than they once were, to the point that their limitations are not the factor most likely to limit photographic quality, at least in 35mm. In other words, you aren’t likely to see much quality improvement shooting Fuji Acros instead of Tmax 400. As with all generalizations, this one has its exceptions, but I’ll leave that for another day.

There will be decidedly few illustrative pictures in this post; the pictures are purely for entertainment value and not intending as educational aides. You’d think there would be some comparitive value in posting photos shot with different films. You’d be wrong. For the most part, modern B&W films are extremely similar. Most of the differences come down to processing and post processing. The reasons for choosing one over the other mostly have to do with how much manipulation will be required to achieve a particular look under particular conditions. Choosing a film is like choosing a lens; the choice is rarely the part the makes or breaks the photo. Sometimes it is, though, which is why this is worth writing about.

Right. To the films. Apart from such recent entrants like Rollei’s expensive, presentation-boxed offerings, most of the films currently on the market are old friends, or at least the cousins of old friends as even films that share the same product name may not be the same from year to year. BTW, that Rollei film might make a nice gift for a film lover, hint, hint. Despite some financial shake ups, the major players remain Ilford and Kodak. Fuji also has a horse in the race, and Freestyle, via various factories in the former Soviet republics, has got a number of interesting offerings, particularly for the budget minded. For films that you are likely to find in stores though, Ilford and Kodak are pretty much it.

Kodak and Ilford each offer two non-chromogenic 400 speed B&W films; from Kodak we get the famed TriX and the ‘new technology’ tabular grained, much defamed Tmax 400 (TMY). Ilford offers HP5+ and the tabular grained Delta 400. There’s a certain degree of parity in these offerings, but there are differences; if TriX and HP5+ are twins, TMY and Delta 400 are at least step brothers, and one of them’s redheaded. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which.

Tri X and HP5

TriX - and by extension HP5+ - need almost no introduction. TriX in D76, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shoot it in your Leica or your Nikon F2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boring. Predictable. Capable of great results, particularly if you are willing to do a bunch of Zone System manipulations at exposure and during development. They are both fairly contrasty, so you are definitely going to have to do something Zone like if you shoot them in contrasty light. Both are also fairly grainy, grainier than 400 speed color films, but this combined with that sometimes nasty contrast can make them look very sharp, particularly when developed in an acutance developer like Rodinal. Both also tend to give you shadows that you could just fall into. A great thing for some photos, but shadow detail is not the only thing in the world or even in photography.

A Complication: All of the above is true of both TriX and HP5+ except that it’s more true of TriX.

Tmax 400 (TMY) and Delta 400

If TriX and HP5+ are the old stalwarts, TMY and Delta 400 are the newer kids on the block. Although you will find some folks that have opinions about Delta 400, it doesn’t seem to have ever been a widely known film in the US. On the other hand, everybody has got an opinion about TMY, particularly if they haven’t ever tried it. It’s a much reviled film. If life was fair, Delta 400 would be widely hated as well, since they are really fairly similar. Both use tabular or Tgrain technology; I’ve heard that Ilford licenses this from Kodak, but that could be internet bunk. Tgrain is supposed to, and actually does, give you finer grain. According to internet conspiracy it was also developed as a low silver film in response to the rising cost of silver in the 1980’s. Whatever its origins, it works. Tgrain films are significantly finer grained than traditional B&W films. They also have extended near infra-red sensitivity and much larger exposure latitude (that’s what we used to call dynamic range back when photo magazines published huge charts of film data).

That extended near infra-red sensitivity can be interesting for portrait work as it can give you creamier skin tones and less apparent blemishes. But it’s the huge exposure latitude that’s the most useful and least understood feature of these films. To explain why, we need to detour back to those Zone photography people.

Zone photography developed in response to a problem that all digital photographers understand too well; the world often has a much larger range of luminance values than any particular medium can capture. Zone photographers pondered on this idea, scratched their long white beards, and then it came to them: “These films don’t respond to midtones in the same way that they respond to shadows and highlights. They kind of taper off on either end. There must be some way we can use that. Hmm . . . . what if we start monkeying around with our exposure and development times. Try enough combinations and we will find eventually something that works. Once we’ve done that, we will come up with a bunch of theories that will make it look like we know what we are doing. And then the one with the longest beard will get to claim that he invented it.” And so Ansel Adams became famous and we all learned to overexpose and under-develop when shooting in contrasty light. And it works. As long as you are shooting one frame at a time and individually developing each frame to account for changes in light. Unless you are really good at counting sprocket holes and cutting out individual frames in the dark, all that long-beard nonsense is practically worthless for most roll film work.

Despite it’s limitations, that long bearded nonsense actually worked sometimes and it gave B&W people lots of things to argue about and feel generally superior about. It was time consuming though, and it just wasn’t an option for photojournalists who were still shooting a lot of B&W when Tmax came on the scene in the 80’s. I was still watching cartoons back then, so I have no idea if they liked the stuff, but they should have. Here was a film that promised fine grain and such immense exposure latitude -something like 13 stops - that you really didn’t have to worry that much about doing the long beard dance when shooting. Everything was there on film. Every shadow and and every highlight. You just had to figure out how to print the stuff.

When I got into my first darkroom in the mid 90’s it was with pile of Tmax negatives to print. This is what we learned to shoot in school, and it’s what we learned to print on our own in between smoking cigarettes under the darkrooms vent fan. If it’s all you know, it doesn’t seem that bad. It wasn’t until after I found the internet that I learned that Tmax is nearly impossible to print, but in retrospect, I can see why people thought that if they learned on TriX.

A normal TriX negative looks like a negative of B&W print. Yeah, duh, I know, but TMY negative doesn’t look like that. Consequently, you can’t just shine light through it and make it look good. You have to do some other stuff, stuff that I haven’t done in ten years, so I’ve got almost no chance of remembering it now. But that’s fine, because now we have scanners. With a scanner, you don’t really have to do anything special with a TMY negative. You scan it, and it looks good. The highlights aren’t all blocked up and the shadows aren’t all murky. It doesn’t look quite as good as a perfect TriX print, but it looks more like it should more often than TriX does. And you don’t need to go buy VueScan or SilverFast or engage in any of the other modern equivalents of all that long-bearded Zone nonsense. OK, well that’s not entirely true. You do have to under-develop it a bit, but you have to do it that when scanning any B&W film. Or at least I have to for my ScanDual IV. The mumbo jumbo doesn’t come into play until you get into Photoshop. That’s when TMY and Delta require you to grow out that beard.

All that exposure latitude isn’t free. It costs contrast. TMY and Delta negatives are pretty flat, but there’s load of tonal info up in the upper ranges. This is part of the reason they are easy to scan. Where as TriX and HP5+ have got lots of detail in the shadows and in the highlight, TMY puts it all up at the top. Consequently, your scanner isn’t trying to decide what to throw away. It can’t get it all. It just doesn’t have that much range. But where it’s got range is up in the highlights, which is exactly where TMY and Delta put their info. You just need to move it around in Photoshop until it looks good.

Sounds great, right. Well it gets even better. Since TMY and Delta have much lower grain to start with, the scanner’s propensity to enhance grain isn’t nearly as much of problem. Instead of getting big popcorn kernel blooms of grain like you sometimes get when scanning TriX, instead you get grain that looks more like TriX printed.

OK so more dynamic range, less grain, easier scanning. What’s the catch. Well . . . ok, so sometimes in flat light, Delta and TMY just end up looking flat. And sometimes in that light where TriX or HP5+ will give you great shadows, Delta or TMY will give you kind of muddy midtones. I haven’t quite figured this one out yet, but I’m still thinking on it. It could be the difference in spectral response; near infra-red is strange stuff, and we aren’t used to thinking about it. So maybe that near infra-red sensitivity that’s great for portraits is not so great for everything. Maybe.

Which One is the Best: Tri X, Delta 400, TMY, HP5

At this point you may be asking yourselves, “Hey, uh, Matt, when are you going to tell us which film to buy?” Good point. Here’s my recommendations:

• If you are shooting in contrasty light, go for Delta or TMY.
• If you want grain or edge effects, go for HP5 or TriX.
• For portraits, Delta or TMY.
• For that great B&W look with a high failure rate, TriX or HP5+.
• For occasionally weird and unpredictable midtones, definitely Delta or TMY.
• For purist cred, TriX in D76. Sorry, there’s no purist cred in HP5+.
• If you don’t know what you want, go for Delta or TMY and sort it out in post.
• To support the one major company that seems committed to B&W, Delta or HP5+, but develop in the TMax Developer or Xtol, just to hedge your bets.

So what do I prefer? Well, I like to shoot one thing until I get sick of it, and then switch to something else. Like I said they are all pretty similar. I sometimes really like the way TriX looks, but I know I can depend on Delta. The Ilford films dry cleaner too; water sheets off them better, which is important for scanning, since any amount of crud on the negative means hours of spotting in Photoshop. For what it’s worth, I just order a bunch of HP5 and Delta 100. Yeah I know, I said there wasn’t any point in 100 speed films, but it will be summer soon, and Illinois doesn’t seem nearly as hazy and Missouri. Maybe the 100 will work out OK. I’ll let you know at the end of the summer.

Developing your own B&W is fun and easy to do in as little as 27 simple steps! Follow these instructions for developing your own rolls of Delta 400.

1. Make yourself a good stiff drink. Whenever you get bored waiting on time to slip by, take a drink. It keeps you from trying to multitask, and multitasking is the death of film development.
2. Wash your hands. You don’t want all the oils and dirt not to mention lotions that normally coat your hands all our over your clean negatives.
3. Put the Patterson tank, two reels, the funnel like lid (we use the flat lit later), two rolls of film (Delta 400), the bottle opener and the little orange scissors in the changing bag.
4. Close up the changing bag and load the reels. If you find you have forgotten something, like the lid, you can push the film off into one corner, fold the bag over it and open up the bag without exposing the film.
5. Load the film on the reels. Put the lid on the tank.
6. Get out the pyrex mixing cup with the piece of masking tape on it. The top edge of the masking tape marks 600 ml, which is how much liquid it takes to cover two rolls of film.
7. Pour 100 ml of TMax Developer into the pyrex. Fill to the tape line with distilled water.* Stir.
8. Use the thermometer with the big ball of tape on the end to take the temperature of the developer solution. Use hot or cold water baths to get it to 75 degrees. **
9. Take a drink while waiting for the developer to get to the right temperature. Be paitent, and drink your drink.
10. Once you have hit 75 degrees, pour the developer mixture into the tank, set the timer for 5 minutes and agitate gently with the paddle thing for the first 15 seconds.
11. Keep agitating for 5 seconds every thirty seconds. Drink your drink and rinse out the pyrex in the intervals
12. Dump the developer solution down the drain. Yes, it’s bad for the environment, but it’s no worse than dish washing detergent.
13. Fill the tank up with plain distilled water. This is your stop bath. *** Set the timer for 1 minute. Agitate gently. Go mix your fixer.
14. Drink your drink.
15. Give the pyrex another rinse. You need to pour in 125 ml of fixer, but this measuring cup doesn’t have a 125 ml mark, so just aim for the spot between 100 & 150. This part isn’t rocket science particularly since you are only going to use this fixer once, it won’t matter if the dilution is slightly off****. Fill to the tape mark (600ml) with distilled water. Stir and check the temperature. Ideally, the temp should be the same as for the developer, but as long as it’s warmer than 68, it’s fine.
16. Dump out your stop bath. If the time has gone over, that’s fine. Pour in the fixer. Set the timer for three minutes. Agitate as you did with the developer.
17. When the three minutes is up, dump the fixer down the drain. The film is now light safe, so you can pop off the funnel lid. Take a peek if you are anxious.
18. We wash with a modified Ilford method using 7 baths of distilled water. This means you need about a gallon of water. You should have checked before you started developing, but you’ve been doing all that drinking. If you are short of water, you can use tap water for the first few baths, but you will probably end up with some water spots on your negs.
19. Fill the tank with enough distilled water to cover the reels. Use the tupperware type lid to seal it off. Check the seal otherwise you will have water all over the place. Flip the tank over vigorously 60 or so times. Dump the water. It should be purple. Repeat for a total of three washings.
20. Do three more washings the same as above, but let the water sit in the tank for three minutes - lots of drinking here - before doing the inversions. The water should be geting progessively less foamy and purple.
21. You should have washed 6 times. Did you lose count? Then do another.
22. While the water is sitting, mix up a batch of the super secret rinsing formula. 100ml rubbing alcohol (the 91% kind), 3 ml of photo-flo (use the syringe), and 500 ml of distilled water. Give this a swirl.
23. After dumping out the last bit of wash water, dump in the rinsing formula. Be gentle. It’s like a beer. It will foam, but we don’t want a head on it.
24. Let the film sit in the rinsing agent for a few minutes. If the house is particularly dusty, now’s the time to go run the shower for a few minutes to settle the dust.
25. There are two hooks in the shower stall. Hang the negatives from these using the clips that are on the bathroom shelf.
26. Use the giottos rocket blower to blow the water off the negatives. This is harder than it looks, but take your time. Between the distilled water, the rinsing formula and the blower, there should be very little water crud left on the negatives when we go to scan. You can tell this is important because the process is way over engineered here. Any sane person would have just used method and backup method, but spotting negs in Photoshop is a pain in the ass and leads to deep metaphysical doubts, which just leads to buying more digital cameras. So take your time and blow all the water off those negs.
27. Close the shower stall. Close the bathroom door. Wash out all your tools. Make another drink. ***** Your done. Thanks for the help.

Impertinent Questions

* Er, doesn’t the bottle say mix 1 part developer with 4 parts water? Yes, but the bottle is wrong. The people at Kodak don’t know that everyone scans their B&W film these days, and that lower density is easier to scan.

** Isn’t 75 degrees kind of hot? Yes, but it keeps the developing time short and it seems to make the film look prettier.

*** Sir, why don’t we use stop bath? Because we aren’t smart enough to be able to mix three kinds of chemistry in one day.

**** Why do we only use the fixer once? Fixer is cheap. Exhausted fixer is bad. End of story.

***** What kind of drink? Whatever kind you like.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the kind of tonality I’d like to see in my B&W photos both digital and analogue. The creamy tonality, deep blacks and detailed highlights of photography pre-1970 has always made me wonder if light was somehow different before I was born. I’ve never reliably been able to reproduce the look I’m after either in the darkroom or digitally. After reading one of Mike Johnston’s old Sunday Morning Photographer columns over on The Luminous Landscape, I decided to give pulled TriX another shot. I picked up half a dozen rolls of TriX the other day thinking that if I didn’t have success pulling them, I’d just repurpose them as lowlight rolls to be developed in Diafine, something for which long experience has shown TriX to be eminently well suited.

Now, it should be noted, that the article mentioned is primarily about getting your photos to glow, which we all know is something you can really only accomplish with Leica lenses. Glow is an incredibly loaded term, and I’m fairly certain that no one factor is fully responsible for its presence in a photo, but I long ago decided that the quality of light is the most important factor. I’m also fairly confident that I can at least spot and sometimes create that kind of light. What eludes me is the kind of tonality that often accompanies glow in the very best photos. I’ve tried many different film and developer combinations, but I’ve always avoided pulling films due to the speed penalty. In the past, low light work dominated my photography. It doesn’t play quite as big of a roll anymore, and I’m less concerned with always being able to capture a photo than I once was, so the loss of a stop of speed isn’t as big of a deal to me now.

Enough pre-amble. On to the test. TriX exposed at 200 with reduced development in D76 is fairly standard for the kind of tonality I’m looking for. I’ve got my TriX, but no D76 and no convenient way to get any. I do have a ton of TMax developer, which apart from being a bit more active is not all that different from D76. It will have to do for now in any event. Of course, no one has documented time, temp and dilution for TriX at 200 in TMax developer. Fine. I’ll make up my own time, temp and dilution. Normal for values for TriX at 400 in TMax are 6 minutes at 68 degrees in developer diluted 1+4. As a starting point, I take 20 percent off for scanning to keep the density from exceeding the scanner’s range. For the pull I need to further reduce development by about 20 percent, but times below 5 minutes are kind of dodgy for even development, so I can’t cut the time back sufficiently. Fine. I’ll cut the dilution. At half the standard dilution, 1+8 would be a good starting point, but with a 600ml tank, 1+9 is easier to mix. OK, so if I cut the dilution approximately in half, I need to double the time to get equivalent development giving me a time of 12 minutes. Twenty percent off of 12 minutes is 10 minutes. Take off another 20 percent and you get a time of 8 minutes. That’s my starting time.

The first two rolls at this time and temp look pretty good. It’s not quite the look I was going for, but it’s better than I’ve done with TriX before. The light I was working in was pretty contrasty, but I managed to hold detail in most of the highlights and still have details in the shadows. Midtones look prety good too. I might need to add another minute to the time, but I’ll need to do some more shooting in different light as well.

As a side note, a month or two of shooting with the D80 have raised my standards for detail. I’m not entirely sure that 35mm film is up to those new higher standards. I am, however, entirely sure that not having to de-spot every photo in PS is a major plus.

I haven’t been in a real darkroom in more than 10 years. Lack of darkroom facilities was a leading factor in the long vacation I took from photography. A couple of years ago I bought a changing bag; bathrooms have been my darkrooms ever since. I’m on my 5th bathroom/darkroom, and I’ll probably have another in next few months. Here’s a couple of things I’ve learned along the way:

1. Liquid chemistry is your friend. When you have no permanent facilties for mixing up large batches of powder - which are the only size powder batches worth mixing - you learn that saving a few cents buying powders isn’t really worth it.
2. Under the heading of every rule has its exceptions, Diafine is the easiest developer to use under adverse conditions. It deserves a place in every darkroom/bathroom.
3. It’s often easier to bring chemicals up to a higher temperature than it is to lower their temp down. Even in an apartment only a few degrees above freezing, a pan of hot tap water can bring all your chemistry up to 75 degrees pretty quickly.
4. There’s no such thing as a too big changing bag. Buy the biggest you can find.
5. Nalgene bottles are convenient for storage and mixing.
6. Pyrex measuring cups are also great for measuring and mixng. Just make sure you don’t use the same one for making cookies.
7. Dust and crummy water are your enemies. Hang your negs in the shower or other enclosed place. Develop and wash with distilled or bottled water. The cheap bottled water seems to work the best.
8. Rubbing alcohol is almost a good a surfactant as PhotoFlo, and it nevers leaves a residue on your negs.
9. With a roll of gaffers tape you can rig up a way to hang negs just about anywhere. Unlike duct tape, gaffers tape won’t pull the paint off your walls.
10. One of those pocket knives with a scissors and a bottle opener on opposite ends of the knife makes a really nice tool for cracking cannisters and cutting negs.
11. Real men use stainless steel reels, but the rest of use plastic autoloading reels. Loading stainless steel reels in a rubberized bag in 95 degree heat is a special kind of hell to be avoided at all costs.

I keep telling myself that I’m going to come up with a cool way to pack up all my darkroom kit into something self-contained. Maybe a pelican case or an old hard sided suitcase. Ideally the scanner would fit in their as well. Maybe for darkroom/bathroom version 7.


fresh from the basement bathroom, just hours ago