Guess I'll have to run a battery of tests to isolate this question a bit more. Should be
pretty easy to do, but from a practical standpoint, relatively academic, because I'm
getting exactly the kinds of negatives I want. (More of a challenge to go back to the
early negs and reprint them.) In other words, low priority. (I'm trying to transition into color work for the season.) But I'll get to it sooner or later. I went back to HP5
briefly when Bergger 200 got discontinued, just to learn some new tweaks. But now
that I've thawed some more Bergger and stuffed the freezer with TMY, it's unlikely
I'll shoot any more HP5. Have plenty of FP4 on hand, however.
If I understand you correctly, you say you are not bleaching the silver out of your negs for your stain-only negs. Would you care to share with us exactly what you are doing - some of use would probably like to give it a try.
Kirk - it was based on very dilute tray development 1:1 A/B ratios (rather than 1:2) and then distinct afterbath. But I don't know if the current HP5 behaves exactly the same way. It was HP5 "plus"but I suspect some sort of subtle emulsion difference. My cold light has a lot of punch so will easily handle printing through a deep blue tricolor (47B) filter. When I tried this with other films I got a marginally detectable image using blue light, but with too much fog and too little density to print. And unfortunately I didn't have any Super-XX left to compare results with it. My head tells me that the guys are right when they say the afterbath only adds neutral density, but my practical experience in the dkrm looking at the various negs and seeing how they print tells me there might be something about this which is still an open question.
Well, chemistry tells us that an afterbath can ONLY add an overall stain. There must be exposed, undeveloped silver halide to make stain proportional to the exposure, through the action of developing those exposed, undeveloped silver halides.
I'm still a bit confused about the silverless, blue exposure subject. So there is a silver image in the negs you were printing, and you were just using an all blue exposure that produced acceptable prints when using HP5+ but not your other test films, right?
The question is whether some other variable has not been accounted for. I run into
this kind of stuff all the time with DT printing, where decades of testing has the former trade well informed of what is and is not possible, then someone breaks these rules and it works, and can be pretty difficult to explain why - kinda like color Daguerrotypes which no one can figure out wihout destroying those rarest of images. With something like HP5 I'd be asking whether there was a change at some
point in the gelatin. Pyro tans, so it is possible there might have been a change in
susceptibility to afterstain, based upon relative hardness of the gelatin, hence the
possibility of proportionality under certain circumstances. Just a wild hunch. But the current batches of this film don't seem to give the same degree of edge effect as the earlier batches, and there are other subtle differences which make me wonder. I could be totally wrong of course, but at the moment don't personally have a better explanation.
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