Stand development and D-76?

[Steve Sherman]

Greg,

Very basically, Jay is correct when he says PMK tends to promote higher fog and more general stain. This is caused mostly by the Metol portion of the mix.

I am not familiar with Jay's developer, have found Pyrocat HD to be almost without flaw regardless of what form of development process you choose.

Settle on one film, one developer and one paper for a while, learn the nuances of each. By jumping around to what this photog might say and then you hear another's take and you end up taking much longer to get to the promise land.

A good friend still uses D 76 and prints on a paper I don't care for, however, I must admit his prints are beautiful

[Michael Dowdall]

Greg

“why is it not recommended I use tray development (I have a "Slosher")?”

The reason Pyrocat wasn’t recommended for stand and semi-stand development in trays is that Sandy King had problems with streaking. I recently took a workshop of his and showed him the fp4+ negs that I developed in 1+1+200 1.2 L total volume with agitation 1min at the start, 20 sec at 18 to 20 min and pulled it from the developer after 35 min. Sandy saw no problems with my negs. Another participant in the workshop tried this method with Berrger and Efke films in a slosher under Sandy’s guidance with great results. So if you are interested in trying another developer, this might be a good way to go. It works for me.

Michael

[paulr]

"However, it has a fair amount of Sodium Sulfite in the formula. Sodium Sulfite is a perservative and actually acts to prevent the developer from exhasuting, not what you want in the case of S-S or EMA process."

Well, the sulite helps keep the developer from oxidizing, or becoming exhausted for reasons unrelated to the development process. It doesn't stop the metol and hydroquninone from being exhausted, though, because the process of reducing the silver will oxidize the developer in a way that the sulfite does not effect. In order to get the extreme compensating effects that people typically go for with stand development, it makes sense to want the developer to exhaust from development, but not from other kinds of oxidation. So I wouldn't imagine sulfite would be a problem.

The high concentrations of sulfite do act as a silver solvent, which is why D-76 is considered a fine grain developer. My understanding of this process is that the sulfite slowly disolves silver of the edges of the grains (which have a filimentary structure) reducing their size and the hardness of their edges. The disolved silver might also be redeposited on the image in ways that makes the grain less visually prominent. At weak dilutions (1:2 or 1:3) the solvent effect is minimized, but I don't know how these ultra long stand development times would influence this.

[Steve Sherman]

Paul, you are correct in that D 76 is a fine grain developer. As you say it actually dissolves silver halides at it's edges which tends to diminish the appearance of grain, i.e. fine grain developer. However, at the expensive of sharpness. Sodium sulfite tends to promote silver migration as development times are increased, again not a desired result when using S-S or EMA for increased adjacency effects.

Pyro based developers harden the film's emulsion within the first two minutes of development, thus silver migration is minimized and the exhausted developer is left to produce the adjacency effects which has become the hallmark of S-S and EMA techniques.

Interesting to note, ABC Pyro is not considered a good choice for the S-S or EMA process, most likely because of the high content of Sodium Sulfite in the B part of the solution.

[Jay DeFehr]

Steve,
it is my understanding that the sulfite effect you describe only occurs when the developer contains 85g/liter of sulfite, or more. In my own experience, I have not seen this effect in developers containing less than 50g/liter of sulfite, which might explain the increased sharpness and graininess of diluted D-76 over the undiluted stock.

Jay