Pyro and the newbie.

[Christian Olivet]

I agree with Ken. Go for it. Don't be afraid to use the special stuff. PMK is not the best for contacts. It is kind of muddy. ABC would be the best but very expensive, somewhat toxic, does not keep well, and hard to tame. Everybody is talking and giving a try to Pyrocat HD. I have already switched from ABC and find that it gives me the best negatives ever. It is cheap, very easy to use (almost imposible to make a mistake with it), keeps for 6 months, maybe more, and the stain is brown, meaning the negatives will print great in AZO and in Platinum. I have started from scratch two years ago and today I am able to make amazing prints. The Large Format Photography forum as well as Michael Smith's forum are the best learning sources. Forget about grain, in contact prints you will never see it. As far as film, go with an easy film like HP5 plus or Efke 100. I used both and are great. Basically any film will do but are more forgiving than others, and these last to are probably the easiest films with wonderful grey scales. As far as what process, contact printing on AZO is probably one of the easiest to learn and master. You can later use the same negatives to make platinum prints. Beware, platinum can became very expensive, especially in the beginning. I hope this helps!

[Mike Troxell]

"I agree with Ken. Go for it. Don't be afraid to use the special stuff. "

And I agree with Ken and Christian. Use the best from the start and you won't have to relearn everything later. People talk about the difficulty of working with pyro but (aside from being a bit more careful) the most difficult thing with working with pyrocat instead of store bought developers is that you have to mix the chemicals yourself. Just wear a respirator while mixing the chemicals and wear chemical resistant gloves (nitrile, Lowes and Home Depot carry them) while developing.

[Mike Troxell]

"Almost as long as the shutter opens and closes you will get a great picture. It takes extreme skill to destroy a LF shot."

You might be suprised I used to work as a computer consultant. In the Information Technologies field we always had a saying, "An idiot with a faster computer is a faster idiot" I guess the parallel saying for photography would be, "a poor photographer with a LF camera will be able to make larger poor photographs"

[Michael Kadillak]

I have started from scratch two years ago and today I am able to make amazing prints.

You made my point in recommending a more conservative approach. Two years is a considerable amount of experience to garner if you do a fair amount of shooting.

I cannot tell you how many expensive cameras I have seen for sale because the individual that purchased them had high expectations and for one reason or another decided to pack it in. If real results were "easy", we would be running out of walls to hang all of this success on. The reality is that large format in fact does take years to master and it also mandates a discipline that is not inherently in everyone that thinks that they are the second coming of Weston, Adams etc.

I am all for a positive attitude, but a dose of realism is also good medicine. I remember reading an article in View Camera a few years ago that after his military service, John Wemberly (a master photographer that developed W2D2) spent nearly three years learning photography and the view camera and another two years after that fine tuning pyro to his needs. My point is that most folks new to large format have a tall mountain to climb in the knowledge arena and it just takes time to injest it all. It is not good or bad, it is what it is. Encourage them? Absolutely. But we must be carefull that we do not unintentionally build their expectations to far from reality while affording them considerable latitude to make mistakes, learn and stay with the program.

[Jay DeFehr]

Mark, If I can do it, ANYONE cand do it, and I do for the reasons stated by Mr. Cook. My formula for success would be 1)big negative 2)develop by inspection in a staining developer 3)contact print. Of course the other part of Mr. Cooks post is aslo true; if you decide you want to shoot a smaller format and enlarge, you'll still have a lot to learn, but you will have a basis for comparison and likely, impossibly high standards. Good luck.

[Ben Calwell]

I use PMK for 5x7 contact prints and have had beautiful results.

[Brian Ellis]

I tested PMK extensively several years ago by making duplicate negatives of the same scenes, developing one set in PMK and the other in my normal developer D 76 1-1 (the testing was actually more elaborate than that summary but that's it in a nutshell), then printing both sets of negatives. The goal was to see if the special qualities claimed for PMK could be observed in a print. I found that I could always make identical prints from both sets of negatives. In other words, while the PMK negatives looked cool they didn't make prints that were any different in any observable way from "normal" prints. That was with VC paper (Kodak Polymax Fine Art) and Ilford HP5+ film. Whether results would be different with a different paper or film I don't know, the testing took probably fifty or more hours from beginning to end over the course of a month or so and I didn't have enough interest to do it all over again with different materials. Some have suggested that while PMK doesn't do anything special with VC paper, it does with graded paper. However, I wasn't about to give up the great advantages of VC paper (mainly the ability to print different parts of the print at different contrasts) just to use PMK.

Before you follow anyone's advice to use PMK ask them what kind of testing they have done to determine that it has some special qualities that show up in their prints. If they can demonstrate to your satisfaction that they have actually done some real testing, as opposed to simply using PMK and then making prints that they like, then by all means give it a try. Otherwise don't bother.

Note a few qualifications here. (1) I'm not talking about using PMK for alternative processes. It may be very good for that, I didn't try it for the only two alt processes I've done, gum and Van Dyke brown. (2) I'm talking only about PMK, I didn't try other forms of pyro (though a friend tested Rollo Pyro in a Jobo processor with results the same as mine, i.e. no noticeable advantage). Michael Smith has posted here before saying that while PMK doesn't do anything special, he thinks his pyro formula does, which may very well be true, I didn't try his or any formula other than PMK. (3) I and a couple friends who were also testing at the same time made a total of about twenty negatives, 10 different scenes, two negatives per scene. While we tried to vary the scenes from low to high contrast, there may be some particular type of situation that we missed and that would have revealed the special qualities of PMK had we not missed it (I don't think so but anything is possible I guess). (4) Last, and most important, this is all just my opinion and others can and do differ, though I will say that mine is at least based on some roughly scientific testing.

[Mark_3632]

I am not a newbie to anything lower than 5x7. I have shot 4x5 for five years 2 1/4 for longer, and 35mm many many more before that. I've worked in a darkroom as a student and then some fool paid me to print, where I used all manner of developers. If they paid enough I would probably still be there. I prefer the ilford developers over the kodak for 35mm and MF. For LF I seem to get the most consistant results with them as wellbut when developing for long periods to get the density necessary for alt processes, I would also have to deal with the grainyness, and what looked like halos. I just figured, since I was beginning a new format for the sole purpose of testing alternate processes I should investigate a developer that appears to compliment these processes, and did not need such a long development time that would cause those pitfalls I mentioned. At least that is what I am hoping.

[Jay DeFehr]

Here's an interesting article that deals with your specific questions. Good luck.

http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Pyro/pyro.html

[Ken Lee]

Mark -



Since you are no beginner, then it sounds like no big deal for you to try a few sheets and a few mililiters for yourself.



I just did this, and drew my own conclusions. I have one nice sample image at http://www.kenleegallery.com/sixfilms.jpg, which I made with my own scanner-based workflow. All images were given a moderate amoung of the "unsharp mask" filter in Photoshop to bring out whatever grain might be there. These images are from small sections of the negative, and represent a substantial degree of enlargement. (If you need to know exactly how much, I can figure it out later.. but it's at least 10x).



I admit, this is not a perfectly scientific approach, and does not include every permutation I have tried...but it shows a number of films developed in different developers, scanned identically. The best grain seems to be the FP4+ in Pyrocat, while the best "feeling of light" seems to be the Bergger in Pyrocat.



I still intend to test Ilford Delta 100 in Pyrocat versus DD-X. If you're interested, I can post the results.