Fomapan 200 5x4 - First Results

You are the OP, and the reply was to your last post.

Ian
 
No, about your posts about Foma films and Pyrocat HD, why such poor results. A simple question.
 
I am getting excellent results with Pyrocat-HD and Foma 200. The only problem I had was with Foma 200 in rollfilm format which turns out to be a widely found experience having nothing to do with my development technique.

Fomapan 200 semistand processed in Pcat gives me consistently excellent results. It's response to EMA is somewhat somewhat less than, say, Tri-X or FP4+, but more than APX 100 or GP3. Again, the results are consistently very good.

I just reread this thread and am puzzled why you conclude I am getting bad results with this film/dev combo. As I reread my postings I don't see anything that would indicate this...
 
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@thronobulax I know you like EMA but was wondering what tests you had done with FomaPan 200 with standard dilution 1+1+100 and what times you settled on
 
Ian-Barber said:
@thronobulax I know you like EMA but was wondering what tests you had done with FomaPan 200 with standard dilution 1+1+100 and what times you settled on
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I was well into my (semi)stand and EMA experimentation long before I bought my first box of Fomapan 200. Hence, I've never processed it "normally". I believe the recommended times for 1:1:100 and normal agitation are to start with what you
might use for ID-11 or D-76 but - having never done so myself - I cannot confirm how well or poorly this works.

Also, while I do, on occasion, process using EMA, my default is seministand: 2min initial agitation, one 15 second agitation at 31 min, and out at 60min. I'm increasingly of a mind to increase my dilution from my usual (1.5:1:200) to something higher like 1.5:1:250 0r even 300. The more semistand negatives I print, the more my sense is that they are too dense/have too high an overall CI. When I end up with slightly thinner negatives by accident, they end up printing really well.
 
Most of this is all Greek to me, but…
If I wanted to get thinner negs, especially if I found they would print better, I’d simply reduce the time. Typical advice is to reduce by 20%.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. It’s difficult to believe that some anonymous court mathematician in Babylon managed to hit on the perfect time for a specialist film-developing process when he invented the sixty-minute hour.
I may, of course, be wrong.
 
David M said:
Most of this is all Greek to me, but…
If I wanted to get thinner negs, especially if I found they would print better, I’d simply reduce the time. Typical advice is to reduce by 20%.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. It’s difficult to believe that some anonymous court mathematician in Babylon managed to hit on the perfect time for a specialist film-developing process when he invented the sixty-minute hour.
I may, of course, be wrong.
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When agitating normally, reducing development time will thin the negative and it will reduce effective ASA. Failing to compensate for this will remove detail from the shadows. IOW, a reduction in development time, thins both shadows and highlights. Moreover, it will almost inevitably reduce the mid-tone local contrast, which is almost always a bad thing.

The shadows develop more slowly than the highlights. This is the basis for high dilution, low agitation development. Develop a long time to get full shadow detail, and keep the developer highly dilute to let the highlights exhaust quickly, thereby preserving highlight detail. Diluting the developer further (within reason) will primarily reduce (thin) the highlights because they will exhaust more rapidly. The shadows will still fully develop over the very long time they are in contact with the developer..

There's nothing magical about 60min development. It could be overnight, really, with much the same effect. (In fact, some of the old photo shops used to do exactly that with D-23. They'd dunk the film and let is sit in developer overnight.) I have found empirically that - at the dilutions I use - much less than 60min starts to reduce effective film speed (shadow detail gets lost), but longer development makes no significant difference. Now, it might be that the magic time is 47.02984 min but I can't be bothered to test to that level of precision. My results are more than satisfactory at 60min and the dilutions I use ... other than the aforementioned desire to pull in the highlights a bit.

If you've not read it, I cannot recommend David Kachel's monograph on how monochrome films work highly enough. It is a treasure trove of deep insights into film and developer behaviors:

 
If you go reading things like that, you will never produce high quality images.

Ian
 
Ian Grant said:
If you go reading things like that, you will never produce high quality images.

Ian
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<Shrug> I found it helpful. Perhaps others will. You clearly didn't. It's a big world, with many ways to conquer the problem.
 
Interestingly David Kachel is not an advocate of Stand/Semi-stand/EMA methods or Pyro developers:

"Post after post talks about using pyro with techniques for reducing contrast where the subject matter does not call for reduced contrast: split developers/water bath / dilute still bath / minimal agitation, all classes of contraction development (reduced contrast) that I thoroughly shot down as both ineffectual and risky, a quarter century ago."

His preferred method is SLIMT with a developer like D-76 or HC-110.
 
If you look at Kachel's images, he's going more towards Ralph Gibson's approach of high contrast and low to no shadow detail.

Look at the difference between the tonality of the image Ian Barber posted today and the Lake image, now Ian's image can be interpreted with higher or lower contrast, but because there's little to no shadow detail in the Lake image there aren't so many options. Same film & developer, get good negatives and options are wider for post development interpretations.

Ian
 
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David Katchel is a familiar name but I can’t, for the life of me, recall,what I read.
Thank you for the clarification on sixty minutes.

My suggestion remains, however. If the apple of thinner negs (which are easier to print) has fallen on your head, why are you following a different procedure?
I can understand that curiosity may be driving your quest for the exact number of eyes of newt.
 
Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
Interestingly David Kachel is not an advocate of Stand/Semi-stand/EMA methods or Pyro developers:

"Post after post talks about using pyro with techniques for reducing contrast where the subject matter does not call for reduced contrast: split developers/water bath / dilute still bath / minimal agitation, all classes of contraction development (reduced contrast) that I thoroughly shot down as both ineffectual and risky, a quarter century ago."

His preferred method is SLIMT with a developer like D-76 or HC-110.
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That is correct, he is no fan. What's amusing is that SLIMT is a far more complex way to do the same thing, in my view. I've not tried it, but prebleaching negatives when you don't yet know their likely densities seems like it's just asking for trouble.

Also, I disagree that Pyro/extended development et al is inherently just about contraction. It has some such properties, depending on the reproduction medium, but for me, the real value is the expansion of mid-tone contrast - the contrast that almost always is responsible for making a print really sing. Kachel also has a very good article on the primacy of local contrast that is well worth your time.
 
Ian Grant said:
If you look at Kachel's images, he's going more towards Ralph Gibson's approach of high contrast and low to no shadow detail.

Look at the difference between the tonality of the image Ian Barber posted today and the Lake image, now Ian's image can be interpreted with higher or lower contrast, but because there's little to no shadow detail in the Lake image there aren't so many options. Same film & developer, get good negatives and options are wider for post development interpretations.

Ian
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@Ian Grant. I already explained in patient detail that the negative is full of shadow detail, I just made an aesthetic decision to render the lake shore line much more darkly than the negative would suggest. You're free to disagree with that choice, of course, but assuming facts not in evidence, or worse still, ignoring the facts that are in evidence seems destined only to provoke arguments for their own sake. You can easily download the image in question and adjust it digitally to see if what I am saying true. If that doesn't work, I'll email you a scan of the negative.

In short, I have just as many options with that negative as anyone would have with a good negative generally. I accept I may have made an aesthetic choice you don't like, but pounding on and on about something that simply isn't true and has been clearly articulated to not be true is just bad form.

You do seem - of late - to be particularly irritated with world. I'm sorry if your life circumstances are causing this.
 
David M said:
David Katchel is a familiar name but I can’t, for the life of me, recall,what I read.
Thank you for the clarification on sixty minutes.

My suggestion remains, however. If the apple of thinner negs (which are easier to print) has fallen on your head, why are you following a different procedure?
I can understand that curiosity may be driving your quest for the exact number of eyes of newt.
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I do not wish to simply reduce development time because:

  1. I do not want to lose the mid-tone expansion that longer times provide
  2. I don't want to have to guess at the ASA. At 60 mins - across all dilutions I have tried this far, with all developers I have tried thus far, and with all films I have tried so far, the effective ASA is box speed.
By increasing dilution, but leaving all other things constant, I can carefully dial in the negative density I want and the other things about my negative design will remain more-or-less in place. At least that's the to-be-proven theory. We'll see what Reality chooses to reveal.
 
In my experience with SLIMT, I found it useful for high contrast material like docu films, paper negatives, reversal processing of paper, etc and these are not the kind of stuff Kachel is interested in. I was trying to get pictorial results with the help of SLIMT which was difficult otherwise.
 
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Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
In my experience with SLIMT, I found it useful for high contrast material like docu films, paper negatives, reversal processing of paper, etc and these are not the kind of stuff Kachel is interested in. I was trying to get pictorial results with the help of SLIMT which was difficult otherwise.
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My general approach to all things photographic is to eliminate variables and improve consistency, so I can spend my time primarily on aesthetics. Kachel is an marvelous expositor of all things photographic, so I was interested in SLIMT as an alternative to semistand or EMA. But as I read more deeply, I abandoned any further exploration for two reasons: 1) SLIMT felt far less repeatable than sticking film in a highly dilute developer for an hour every time, no exceptions. 2) SLIMT means you're still agitating normally when you do develop. That means losing the mid tone contrast expansion inherent in long, high dilution development models.

I'm sure with time and work, I could have more-or-less mastered 1) but there is no fixing 2) and hence I gave it no further consideration.
 
Your posts contain some very contradictory statements, you are looking for.

thronobulax said:
My general approach to all things photographic is to eliminate variables and improve consistency, so I can spend my time primarily on aesthetics.
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But the approaches you are taking do just the opposite, have no basis on good practice, and vary from those you quote.

Every explanation you post is a mess, almost gibberish. My Dalmation could explain better with a few barks.

thronobulax said:
My general approach to all things photographic is to eliminate variables and improve consistency, so I can spend my time primarily on aesthetics.
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That's what most of us want and some of us have achieved, and is what you seem to have lost.

Ian
 
Ian Grant said:
Your posts contain some very contradictory statements, you are looking for.



But the approaches you are taking do just the opposite, have no basis on good practice, and vary from those you quote.

Every explanation you post is a mess, almost gibberish. My Dalmation could explain better with a few barks.



That's what most of us want and some of us have achieved, and is what you seem to have lost.

Ian
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Apparently, in your misery, the only satisfactory answer I can provide is ... Woof
 
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