Modern films and highly dilute developers

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I just finished Ansel Adams book "The Negative". He wrote about using dighly dilute developers as one method of compressing a high contrast scene. I am curious to know if this technique would work well with modern film/developer combinations, such as Delta 400 or TMY 400 films with Xtol or TMX developers.

-- Stephen Burns (sburns@oregontrail.net), January 24, 2000

Answers

Using modern time papers with variable contrast, I rarely see the need to compress the scenes when using Delta 400. Grade 0 will give a contrastrange of 1:64 or about 6 stops.

I do use a compensating developer with Technical Pan, which compresses the density range from 4 to 1.5-1.7.(Grade 0 or Grade 1 paper). It is the good old Rodinal 1:100 for 7 mins at 200C.

Hearing that people run into to trouble developing films with highly diluted Xtol (1:3 or thinner)because of too low amount of developer, I do not think Xtol will work for this.

The effect of compressing high contrast or call it compensation, is exhaustion in the highlights combined with little agaition.

Wolfram

-- Wolfram Kollig (kollig@ipfdd.de), January 24, 2000.


Yes, highly dilute developers will work with modern films and developers. You simply have to do some testing to determine what your optimum film speed and development time will be.

-- (edbuffaloe@unblinkingeye.com), January 24, 2000.

Photographers' Formulary has an improved version of FX-2 (I believe they call it SFX-2) which works well for compression development. They market it as a high acutance developer, but dilluted 50ml per litre it is also compensating. Because it contains glycin (which resists streaking) you can also back way off on agitation for additional compensation--they recommend 10 inversions for 20 seconds every three minutes. I've had good luck and extremely high sharpness with it.

-- Brian Hinther (BrianH@sd314.k12.id.us), January 24, 2000.

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