Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/09/25

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Diluting developer: was: Ilford delta 100 dev. suggestions
From: "Mārtiņš Zelmenis" <martin@lrpv.lv>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 09:56:06 +0200

Your suggestions about the _brick of film testing_ are right - nothing else
is going to give you peace of mind, unless you find out _the true behaviour_
of your negative material!

What was right about _old_ (not at all _bad_) films (like Tri-X), is not
necessarily true about the new generation films (like T-Max, Delta), so I
think you should go ahead with your experiments, find out the right
dilution/graininess balance. After all, graininess is a matter of taste.

And printing (not scanning) your negatives will give you all the proof you
need! (In order to make the whole process shorter you may even try printing
your b/w control stuff on colour paper in some regular commercial
photofinishing lab that allows the customers (you) supervise the process
(stand behind the operator and instruct him about your needs). Only then you
should be able to know the behaviour of colour paper used in the process,
too.


Martin



Could those of you who do a lot of darkroom work talk to me about this
dilute developer thing? I was sort of under the impression that longer
developer times resulted in a general increase in the size of film grain.
Generally I'm looking to push grain size down as much as possible.

I tend to be using Delta 100 and Delta 400 (shot at 200) and Delta 3200
(shot at 1600) and processing in XTOL. Over the weekend I shot TMAX for the
first time and I'll be interested to see what happens with it. I figure
using its own developer is the best trick for it, right?

I know these are probably pretty basic and old questions but I'm trying to
grapple with the science that's involved here
Best regards,

Adam Bridge

PS: This is probably my own cheapness at work but it bugs me to have to do
tests on 24 exposure rolls. I know that I should be processing test shots in
the same way that I'll be doing my real rolls - but everything screams:
wasting money wasting money at me. Sigh.

I assume to do my own tests I should buy a brick of film (which I assume
will all be from the same production run - is this assumption correct?) and
then create a standard test scene that has a generous dynamic range to it,
shoot it the same way every time, and then process the film in a variety of
different ways (making careful notes along the way.)

What I'm not sure about is how to then evaluate what I'm seeing in the
negatives.

Okay - now I've revealed my true inexperience at this - but hey - how else
do I learn? <grin>

Thanks for your answers.

Adam Bridge

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Replies: Reply from Mark Rabiner <mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com> ([Leica] test)