Fomapan 200 5x4 - First Results

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thronobulax

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As noted elsewhere here, after trying Foma 200 in 35mm, I was anxious to give the 5x4 a go. This is a crop of a 5x4 negative scan. I was right on top of the subject and, even at f/22-32, there was simply not enough DOF get top of frame in focus. (I really must get 'round to reversing the front standard on my Speed to make front tilt achievable.)

5x4 Fomapan 200
Speed Graphic w/127mm f/4.7 Ektar
Pyrcocat-HD 1.5:1:150
Extreme Minimal Agition (EM) - 90 seconds initial, 10sec @ 11min, 21min - total time 30min

I continue to find that I somewhat prefer the "look" for stand processed negatives over EMA. However, EMA negatives do seem to show a much more pronounced relief image, which I suspect would translate into more accentuated edge effects ...
 

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Very interesting. Extreme Minimum Agitation seems to involve more agitation than “ordinary” longer development. Surely some compromise is possible? You might call it Extremely Reasonable Development.
The real problem confronting all magical development systems (well, all photography, in fact) seems to be that the subject matter is so often extremely uncooperative in providing the correct range of tones for the development scheme to work as promised. What we really need is subjects with Extreme Tonal Conformity.
Bu it’s a nice image anyway.
 
What we are doing here is fiddling the H/D curve chemically with some combination of differential development (between highlights and shadows) and using a compensating developer like Pyrocat-HD to further rein in those highlights.

While EMA agitates more frequently that a "stand" type development, it also does so at lower dilution and shorter time than stand might. My semistand technique (stand + 1 midpoint agitation to chase away bromide drag) is with Pcat at 1.5:1:200 for 60 mins. EMA is 1.5:1:150 for 30min. Steve Sherman, the resident US guru on EMA, dilutes quite a bit more than this, so I suppose other variations are possible.

In truth, we're sort of gilding the lilly with all this. Basic development with ordinary agitation yields consistent and good results in the majority of cases. But these extended agitation schemes give us the ability to squeeze that last little bit of tonal subtlety out of the image. In my case case, my preferred subjects - rocks, trees, snow, water, and the abstractions of detritus - tend to benefit noticeably from the mid-tone expansion long development yields.
 
I have no quarrel with any of that. I’m simply fascinated by the use of the words Extreme And Minimum. Mr Sherman’s work always looks very competent.
 
David M said:
I have no quarrel with any of that. I’m simply fascinated by the use of the words Extreme And Minimum. Mr Sherman’s work always looks very competent.
Click to expand...

Yes, I think Steve and Sandy King came up with the taxonomy of Stand, Semistand, and EMA as ways to differentiate various low agitation strategies. As I said, these are all just variations on differential development.
 
I have only developed Fomapan 200 in a Jobo Multitank with constant rotation.

As a beginner in large format I have been shocked at how beautiful the negatives appear.

Metered at ISO 100, as seems to be the collective wisdom......

:)
 
Sean Mac said:
I have only developed Fomapan 200 in a Jobo Multitank with constant rotation.

As a beginner in large format I have been shocked at how beautiful the negatives appear.

Metered at ISO 100, as seems to be the collective wisdom......

:)
Click to expand...


Bear in mind that what I mentioned above was very long, highly dilute, very infrequent agitation which is a whole horse of a different color in approach than the Jobo. (I would NOT recommend this approach if you're just starting out. What you are doing is a much more reasonable point of departure.

I would expect ASA 100 with normal/continuous agitation for recommended duration.

I am curious, what developer and dilution are you using with the Jobo?
 
Speaking of Mr Sherman reminded me that it’s a long time since I looked him up.
Here he is describing a very old technique for correcting burnt-out highlights in a print. I’ve seen variations on using hot developer: undiluted concentrate, rubbing with the fingers and even breathing heavily on the print.
 
David M said:
Speaking of Mr Sherman reminded me that it’s a long time since I looked him up.
Here he is describing a very old technique for correcting burnt-out highlights in a print. I’ve seen variations on using hot developer: undiluted concentrate, rubbing with the fingers and even breathing heavily on the print.
Click to expand...


These days, he can be found over at Unblinking Eye. Here's his latest writing:

 
thronobulax said:
Bear in mind that what I mentioned above was very long, highly dilute, very infrequent agitation which is a whole horse of a different color in approach than the Jobo. (I would NOT recommend this approach if you're just starting out. What you are doing is a much more reasonable point of departure.

I would expect ASA 100 with normal/continuous agitation for recommended duration.

I am curious, what developer and dilution are you using with the Jobo?
Click to expand...

I have been using Agfa R09 Studio at 30:1 for 9 minutes.

Pyrocat seems very interesting and I hope to try it when I am happy with my workflow.
 
I’d second that. You have to discover what problem you’re trying to solve before you try to solve it.
 
Yes, when in early days of learning, it's best to lock down a single film, a single developer, a single technique before trying all the other esoterica. Good photographic technique is about mastering and controlling variables to the point where you don't much have to think about them, thereby allowing you to spend more brain sweat on the creative side of the ledger.

Like many people, my early forays into photography involved an attempt to try every film, developer, and paper I could find. This yielded chaos because I could never figure out what was causing something to go badly when it failed. Years later, I read Ansel Adams' trilogy on photography and embraced his ideas about variable management and my work improved almost overnight.

Now, after many (50+) years of doing this stuff, I do permit myself the odd new adventure, but even that is tightly controlled. For example, my most recent venture into high-dilution, low agitation development took the better part of a whole year to explore. Why? Because I carefully only changed one thing at a time to see how it affected the outcomes.
 
One of the things that the film community suffers from is that all the discussion of exotic systems of development can convince beginners that Ilford, Kodak and the rest are idiots. This is not so. Their corporate failures were due to marketing and management, not to their technicians and scientists. Their advice is always good. It’s only when we wish to plough a narrower furrow that we should deviate.
Some of us are concerned with increased mid-tone contrast, but a portrait photographer may well need to reduce mid-tone contrast. Some, like me, worry about shadow detail. Some may want to sacrifice everything else for a dramatic graphic print. …and so on; there are plenty of other examples.
Additionally, most of the available advice on developing assumes a wet path to the final print. Hybrid printing has become very common and I suggest that, except for a few fundamentalists, it’s now respectable. If you are scanning and printing digitally, your negs will need to be different.
So. Tread carefully as you venture off the path of orthodoxy.
Learn about the Zone System, because you won’t be able to escape it, but remember that it’s an aid to making practical decisions under pressure in the field and not a religion.

Oops! This has expanded well beyond the original subject. My apologies to all.
 
I agree with you David, I also think that Steve Sherman printing example for instance is flawed, it doesn't work well with Warm tone papers where increased or decreased development affects the tonal colour. Simple dodging and burning is much better.

Stand and semi-stand development with Pyro developers as used by Sandy King and Steve Sherman were for ULF where the negatives are contact printing and enhancing acutance is beneficial.

Personally, if I needed greater or rather exaggerated acutance than given by Pyrocat HD I'd change to a high acutance developer like the old Paterson Acutol S, Ilford Hyfin or Kodak HDD. Used normally Pyrocat HD gives excellent acutance.

Ian
 
My own thoughts were:
1: The dark top-left corner looked exactly like fall-off through excessive cameras movement rather than a darker sky. Might it be caused by a polariser? The top-right darkening would be lost in the very dark tones there. Would it have been more satisfactory to dodge it out?
2: Is this not exactly the kind of situation that negative design is supposed to avoid?
3: The added light tone looks more like induced safelight fog, rather than increased development of the image, as it extends into the unexposed margin. It is one of the things that can be done (heresy alert!) in a more subtle and controlled way on-screen.
Being kinder, he would have had to use a flawed example to show how the technique works.
I posted it because we don’t see many discussions of the other half of image-making on the forum.
 
David M said:
One of the things that the film community suffers from is that all the discussion of exotic systems of development can convince beginners that Ilford, Kodak and the rest are idiots. This is not so. Their corporate failures were due to marketing and management, not to their technicians and scientists. Their advice is always good. It’s only when we wish to plough a narrower furrow that we should deviate.
Some of us are concerned with increased mid-tone contrast, but a portrait photographer may well need to reduce mid-tone contrast. Some, like me, worry about shadow detail. Some may want to sacrifice everything else for a dramatic graphic print. …and so on; there are plenty of other examples.
Additionally, most of the available advice on developing assumes a wet path to the final print. Hybrid printing has become very common and I suggest that, except for a few fundamentalists, it’s now respectable. If you are scanning and printing digitally, your negs will need to be different.
So. Tread carefully as you venture off the path of orthodoxy.
Learn about the Zone System, because you won’t be able to escape it, but remember that it’s an aid to making practical decisions under pressure in the field and not a religion.

Oops! This has expanded well beyond the original subject. My apologies to all.
Click to expand...

Kodak et. al. are interested in volume sales of product. For example, the only reason they ever built cameras was to sell more consumables - film, chemistry, and paper. These technologies were- and are designed to provide consistent and good results on average for most use cases. This leaves room for the individual photographer to engage in optimizations to suit their particular vision such as the ones you suggest for mid tone control or shadow control. This is analogous to buying a stock engine from, say, Ford, and hand tuning it to become a racing monster.

Zone System itself was an assault on the orthodoxies of its day, or at least an attempt to systematize what had largely been accidental or dark art. As you suggest, it's easy for it to be seen as holy writ rather than a framework for controlling and producing consistent images.

I, for one, have no particular objection to esoteric technique - indeed I just spent a year exploring one such example. But this has to be preceded by mastery of standard practice or chaos will likely ensue. I learned that lesson early on the very hard way.

In the end, I only care about the final image. The path to getting there is important, but the result is all that really matters.
 
That’s capitalism for you. Similarly, King Camp Gillette made razors to sell blades to the populace. No doubt there are other examples, but curiously, not oil companies making cars. That was Management and Marketing. I expect their scientists and engineers are as competent as Ilford and Kodak’s
You’re quite right about the cars of course. It’s clutch, brake and accelerator pedals and mirror, signal manoeuvre before F1 And Le Mans.
 
Just been reading an article that @thronobulax made on hs findings with PyroCat and EMA which was intersting. I noticed that the dilution used was 1.5:1:150.

The dilution I used when trying this system came from the Steve sherman video series and was 3ml of A + 2ml of B which I belive works out to something like 1.3:1:200

The only part of his process which bothered me was the fact that he was designing a negative to give him a density of 0.9 which he then used a lot of blue light from his Ilford Multigrade 500H Enlarger Head to control contrast.

Afrer seeing this in action, I sort of stopped tinkering with this EMA simply because I only use a standard enlarger so I am wondering if you also use a Multigrade 500H Enlarger Head @thronobulax
 
Gamma 0.9 sounds extremely high... He wasn't doing alt UV based prints?
 
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