[rollei_list] Idle Musings on Darkroom Chemistry, B&W
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Leica Users Group <lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:52:29 -0400
At 11:45 PM 7/23/2007, Phil Swango wrote:
>Hoppy, I scanned these with an Epson 3170 flatbed. It's very smooth with
>BW, probably because it uses a cold light source. Not so great with color
>because of limited Dmax. The (small) print I made for the dog's owner
>looked great. I've heard other people complain about the Nikon scanners
>with BW, for the same reason.
>
>Diafine is an interesting developer. It's a two solution developer. The
>first bath is hydroquinone, for 3 minutes, without concern for temperature,
>emulsion type or EI. The second bath is the activator (sodium sulfite),
>also for 3 min. This was my first try so I'm not ready to jump on the
>bandwagon yet but I was pretty happy with the results.
Good heavens! You guys are getting my thoughts
astray with your application of older
formulations. I am months away from getting my
darkroom up and running again save in the most
primitive of manners, but here are some thoughts:
a) The available literature is massive but I
would suggest that the necessary books are:
-- The Gevaert Manual, published in multiple
editions until Agfa bought out Gevaert in the
1960's. These were printed by the gazillion and are quite available used.
-- The Photo Lab Index, or PLI. This one was a
volume with annual updates, produced until fairly
recently (1985? 1990?) PLI contains a slew of
technical information on various manufacturers
and was intended to professional labs. It does
leave out some of the smaller producers of photo
chemistry. Go down to the next camera store in
your neighborhood which is closing and score a
copy for $5. (I was gifted two copies in this
way, and that was ten or fifteen years back.)
-- CHAMPLIN ON FINE GRAIN. This is a Pre-War
book but is really informative and helpful. It
is a monograph and is readily available used.
-- There are two books whose name escapes
me: 150 BLACK AND WHITE FORMULAS and 150 COLOR
FORMULAS, perhaps? (Yes, I have copies and I saw
them three weeks back when doing my final
lock-and-load for my move to Richmond, but these
are now within one of those nine boxes in my
garage marked "Darkroom") These include the
English Crawford recipes, one of which, #7, I especially recommend.
-- There used to be a firm in New England which
sold photo chemistry and which advocated
measuring these with teaspoons and the like. I
believe that there name was Zone Seven (no, no,
no: they were NOT Zone VI and had no connection
to them to my knowledge). They went out of
business about the time RA-4 came out. They
published an EXCEEDINGLY helpful series of
newsletters. I have a complete run, again in one
of those nine boxes. They published both B&W and color formulae.
b) Diafine is a fascinating formula and can
produce really great results but over the years
many folks found it uneven and frustrating. Some
never had a problem using it. Others found it
unpredictable. My own experience is that Diafine
is an interesting developer but I just do not like two-bath developers.
c) I personally love XTOL but it is
frustratingly hard to obtain except by mail order
save in larger cities. There is a generic
formula which was discussed here on the LUG some
years back -- I still have this, somewhere, I
suspect. XTOL stores really well but only if
properly mixed and only if stored in airtight
bottles filled to the neck. I have had some last
as much as two years when so prepared. But,
again, it is cheap, and why run the risk? Dump
and mix a new batch and I do not share Mark
Rabiner's fear of the fumes. But, then, I drink
orange juice, so who am I to say? <he
grins> XTOL always works well with me with tap
water but I respect Brian's experience: I am
having a hell of a time taming the water in my
55-gallon aquarium at present due to oddities in
the local water supply, though my Silver Dollars
and Parrot Fish do not seem to mind the problems
so long as they get fed. (My local water here is
rather base and is laced with some ammonia and
nitrites, no-no's for the fresh-water
aquarium. Thus, the standard fix, a 25% water
change, doesn't help much.) I had a hell of a
time with TMX until I only developed it in
developers with distilled water, after which heaven was assured.
d) Rodinal is a great developer. Grain like
golfballs but, what the hey, it works
well. Ctein used it with TMX back in his CAMERA
AND DARKROOM days and I'd have to dig and dig to
find the article, but this worked REALLY well for
me. And the older bottles have REALLY long
legs: I have a bottle from around 1962 which
still performs perfectly. Rodinal dates from
1893 and is still a wonderful product today. See
CHAMPLIN ON FINE GRAIN for discussion.
e) Kodak's D-76 is the standard. It is
easily obtained and, even better, it is easily
mixed up from scratch by folks like me who have
buckets and buckets of raw photo chemistry
about. (PHOTOGRAPHERS' FORMULARY is still about
and happy to do business, and their version of
Rodinal, by the way, is a most worthy
purchase.) I use it at 1:2 as Mark Rabiner
recommends. It is a really happy developer and
is rather tolerant if you neglect to perfectly
observe the recommended temperatures.
f) I never have liked HC-110 that much as my
results with it have been very uneven. It was
developed for use by small-volume labs which
required consistency such as newspaper labs, and
for them it worked quite well. In my experience,
it is not really a happy developer for work in a home darkroom.
g) We have not discussed Acufine. I have
had some really solid results with this but, again, your mileage may vary.
h) I have some boxes of the older EFKE
powder developers. I do read Russian fairly well
but I have never struggled through the writing on
the boxes to figure this stuff out. Someday,
when I have it on hand (those nine boxes, again!)
and meet up with a Croat or a Serb, I might try it.
i) We will discuss color processing at
another time. Two short notes: EP-2 I do from
scratch chemistry but I cannot do this with
RA-4. And I have printed a lot of Ilfochrome: I
understand how masking works but I just have
never felt it necessary to play around with this.
I have taken the liberty of cross-posting this to
the Rollei List, where we have some
photochemistry mavens. A bunch of those on the
LUG are on the Rollei List but if we stir up the
Old and the Dead on the Rollei List to provide
interesting comment, I will repost these answers on the LUG.
Wow! Sorry to have rattled on so long. Darkroom
experience is a bit like combat experience, in
that everyone's own life history is different and
that there are no straight answers. I have
interviewed hundreds of veterans from dozens of
wars and they all have just their own tale to
tell. Well, the above is my own
experience: after all, "there are a million
stories in the Naked City, and this is mine".
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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