Hmmmm…. well that depends on a lot of things. The most gigantic thing is YOU and YOUR process and how tight YOUR controls are and… To a much much lesser extent it has to do with water quality. Take one look at the massive development chart with virtually any film and developer combination and you can probably tell that it is a useless resource. Heck the times given for the same film shot at the same speed with NOTES that describe the same procedure vary so wildly it is not even funny. Sometimes processes claiming to be the same in terms of method/dilution/agitation give the time and temp that differ by 100%. That is why this resource is almost useless.

That is also why I don’t publish specific development times. Kodak does, Ilford does, and if you follow their recommend processing guidelines to the letter and your process has reasonably tight controls you will be in the ballpark of reproducing the exact contrast index that they were targeting – if that is what you really want. So what to do if those recommendations don’t cover what you need? Try anything based on a guess from previous experience, film type, general developer activity, whatever and modify what you did from that point. It’s not brain surgery – really. I can almost assure you you can get it to “what you were looking for” inside 3 or 4 tries and know a heck of a lot more about what you want under what conditions even from your total failures than you will ever learn from the massive development chart.

So say you have some degree of consistency down and your hard won knowledge of one film in one developer buy either want to use another film or need to use another film. What do you do then? Guess! yep just guess. You will probably get close if you have some rationale – every once in a while you will get a nasty surprise but you will probably get where you want to get on the next try. I am going to do something that I almost never ever do and list some specifics for films that I know well assuming you want to print on a modern VC paper at grade 2. I am not going to list times, I am going to give some relationships that I have found for “normal” development that I have found to be true for films that I have used for a long long time in a wide variety of developer formulations. All of them are Kodak. I could give similar relationships for other brands but I am not confident that they will hold true over a wide variety of conditions – they probably would based on my more limited experience and that is where I would start my guesses at but I am only going to list things that I am certain of.

Kodak TMAX 100 (TMX) takes about the same time/temp in a given development process as Kodak TRI-X 400 does. No kidding. TMX changes more quickly one way or another but normal is about the same time.

Kodak TRI-X 320 (TXP) takes a lot longer than Kodak TRI-X 400 (10%-35%) more time depending on developer.

Kodak PLUS-X (PX and PXP) take much shorter times than Kodak TMX (20-25%)

I have a lot of other data like this but these things are true over a ton of different developers I have used. I hope this is useful at all to the 5 people still shooting and processing their own film. Your milage may vary from my exact times but I do not believe the relationships I have listed will.

RB

I still do not have an answer to that question but I did get some interesting info – depending on your process the blue washes out, or not. As far as i can tell from all the input I got over on the APUG forum acid processes seem to remove the blue dyes and alkaline process seem to leave it there.

Getting to the point – a reader emailed me and ask what the actual printed image looked like. I could describe ti but I decided to scan it instead. I could do a better job at the scanning and post but this is a raw scan of the negative with no hanky panky. It doesn’t match the print exactly but it’s close enough for government work. In general the extreme highlights are rendered a little differently in the analog print. I could probably fix that here with a bit of gain dialed in to my scanner and some adjustments to compensate for the loss of shadow but who cares. At the end of the day I always thought that Kodak Plus-X and Pyro developers were a very good combination for caucasian skin tones. At least the way I like to render them.

In case you forgot – here is what the negative looked like on a light table.

This example happens to have been developed in Kodak XTOL, a wunder-developer of the moment a decade and a half ago. To tell you the truth, after extensive testing I never really warmed up to it. I had gigantic consistency issues with XTOL from batch to batch. Saw negligible shadow speed improvements, and nothing really special at all compared to regular old Kodak D-76. Oh the developer was “non-toxic” but who cares.

Plus-X on the other hand was a “nice” film. I really did not shoot it in smaller formats much as I actually prefer Tri-X so so much more for a million reasons. Here is a pixel for pixel view of Plus-X from a 4000 dpi scan with no hocus-pocus so you can see the structure of the film. At normal enlargements (not the microscopic view you see here) it was very smoooooth but still had a little bite to it.

Just for comparison sake here is the same pixel for pixel view of Kodak Tri-X at 4000 dpi – this one was developed in PMK Pyro – a supposedly much “grainier” developer. See why Tri-X is my desert island film? I love that stuff, not nearly as “sharp” as some other finer, slower films but hey I am not a landscape photographer trying to see detail in tree leaves 14 miles away on a small format camera.

Here is the full Tri-X image

RB

As time wore on and I made it a practice of reviewing contact sheets of things that I had shot years previously a few things occurred to me over and over again. The first thing was that a lot of the “faults” are not more than a passing stylistic fancy that you happen to have at a certain point in time. Second, other more technical faults are either irrelevant for a particular image or are so secondary to the image that you don’t really care about them down the road. Third, images that you may have decided are superior for inane reasons, like they are sharper or have no subject motion, are not nearly as good as the one right next to it that happens to have a little subject motion. This can be true of any image I guess but I have found it especially true of people.

Case in point. When I first shot the images included with this post of my 3 year old daughter I knew that they were not going to be great due to the fact that I grabbed my camera that was loaded withKodak Plus-X film and just started shooting. Plus-X is ISO 125 at best and this was an indoor shot of an animated 3 year old. As I fired off a couple of shots I “knew” there was going to be subject movement given that I was shooting at 1/30. I developed the film in PMK Pyro because all of the other exposures on that roll were perfectly exposed for that developer. The first prints that I made did not include these two. In fact they included none of the 5 shots in this series because what I “knew” was true – there was a ton of motion blur.

Years later when I was going through contact sheets I decided to print these two images. Turns out I like them way more than my other perfect images on this roll. Heck I forget where the original prints that I made of “perfect” frames are.

I guess my point here with digital is that I am still an image pack-rat and almost never get rid of images. I get rid of images that I take for e-bay auctions and such but almost never delete anything that has people in them. Especially people that I care about. I know there are two schools of thought on this but given that storage is small and cheap why not keep them?

My advise is to leave the things alone – at least for a couple of years.

Thoughts?

RB

To answer a whole category of questions in one fell swoop – Yes I like pyro developers and have found PMK to be very consistent. Yes I do think that some pyro developers have some unique properties that act differently than other developers on a particular film. Yes I am will be glad to post some more films/pyro developer combinations. No I am not going to post specific development times/temps/agitations etc. Not because I am stingy, it just goes against my philosophy what is valuable and what is not. I will be glad to write a little bit more about some general findings regarding dilutions, etc.. If anyone is having an issue or has a very specific question regarding film development, email me and I will be glad to share specific experiences and opinions with you.

I guess I confused a lot of people with what appear to be contradictory posts regarding pyro based developers. In the post on Ilford HP5 plus and PMK pyro I said that the combination is one of my favorites and has some very special properties that make it useful and beautiful even though HP5 plus is not one of my favorite films overall. In fact it is not my favorite film for pyro development either. In the 80% of everything is nonsense post I used an example of two very different films in two very different developers, one being PMK pyro, both calibrated to show how similar the results were. Both sets of comments are absolutely true and completely independent. The point I was trying to make but came off looking like I did not thing PMK was worthwhile was that a lot of information and observations out there regarding a film/developer/etc. are anecdotal with no control over the variables. For instance person #1 uses film A and developer B, then tries something else completely. Different film, different developer, different scene, some random processing times/temps/methods and likes the result “better” than what he was getting before. Wow now there is some great and useful information (not). This is the kind of stuff that gets communicated most of the time. Even by professional photographers. Useless.

Hope that clears things up. Oh one other thing – Yes I shoot Tri-X, in fact Tri-X is probably my desert island film. I will get around to posting some experiences with it and some samples using various developers as well – that might take a few posts to the shooting film series.

On a final note just to reinforce that you need to try things on your own, make your own judgements. The images included in this post are probably one of the least likely combinations of film and film developer that you will find. I kind of remember a lot of people who “knew” what they were talking about recommending against it way back in the day. To be fair my first couple of tries and guesses were a disaster. I figured out what I thought went way wrong, made some corrections, tried again, lather, rinse, repeat. Long story short this is TMAX 3200P (TMZ) shot at ISO 3200 developed in PMK pyro. No shit.

RB

One of the things that has driven me nuts about sources of information about photography in the past both prior to the internet and even more so after is that by and large photographers show final finished work and only discuss a tiny narrow bit of the technique, process, etc, whatever, and then attribute that tiny little slice as the ONE ingredient to the image. From my point of view this causes all sorts of confusion and frustration for people. There are all sorts of reasons that this happens, some are completely innocent, some are not so innocent and intentionally misleading. See my very first post for a small rant on this.

I learned this by being annoyingly tenacious in my early photographic endeavors. I also learned this when doing workshops. When I first started doing them I happened to use my medium format digital system tethered to a top of the line power mac and top of the line cinema display and Phase One software. That is what I happened to be shooting for commercial stuff at the time. This was a bad idea because it had nothing to do with what the workshop was about and was a huge source of distraction considering no matter how much I talked about what was important and what the workshop was about (working with people and models, lighting, dealing with locations) there was way too much focus on the camera and lens and software that I happened to be using. I started using equipment that was “inferior” to what attendees brought for themselves to use and guess what – the focus changed, the distraction went away and people focused on what was important with NO little nagging equipment inferiority complexes.

The attacthed images are an example and a metaphor for you to think about and use for your interpretation of information provided not only by me but anywhere that you happen to acquire it. These are shots of my 3 year old daughter watching television, my all time favorite film calibration target. I was shooting them while calibrating my development for Kodak Plus-X developed in PMK pyro film developer in 6×6 format. For my control and comparison I was using my old standby that I calibrated years ago Agfa APX 100 developed in Rodinal. Years ago even today you would hear endless debates between different film stocks, developers etc and all kinds of anicdotal “properties” attributed to each of them. Lot’s of “illustrative” images to prove various points that were all completely different, taken under different conditions, of different subjects but attributing those differences to film and developer or a combination of both. No matter what the source of the information – pro, amateur, idiot, whatever – there was an amazing lack of anything remotely scientific or meaningful communicated. There are a million reasons this happens but the bottom line is that most of it is nonsense and you need to see it for yourself and then make sure all of the variables are under your control.

Agfa APX 100 developed in Rodinal shot at ISO 64.

Same thing at 100% 4000 DPI scan.

Kodak PXP 125 developed in PMK pyro shot at ISO 64.

Same thing at 100% 4000 DPI scan.

Both images set the black point to about 12 for the film base black. What do these tell you? The first thing that it should tell you if you know a lot about black and white film is that I am pretty freaking good at calibrating my development process. The most gigantic difference is that in the PXP shot my 3 year old was moving during a relatively long exposure. The second biggest difference is that PXP has higher sensitivity to greens but you wouldn’t know that unless you knew what colors happened to be in the original shot. The one after that is the grain structure. The rest of the differences in film and devloper go down from there. By the way I abandoned PXP in PMK pyro for a bunch of reasons none of them super important and all very subtle.

I hope some of you find this helpful. I hope that my posting of RAW image files for you to play with, look at, and other “work product” type images is educational and informative. If I am talking about film I post a scan of the film NOT of what my interpretation of a print from the film would look like. If I am talking about the way Aperture deals with color and WB for a particular RAW file I post a RAW file NOT what the file looks like with skin fixed and dodged and burned and washed ironed and dried. If I am on the wrong track here please let me know how to do a better job.

RB