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.