While I've done my share of B&W photography, I've been shooting color for the past few years. And before that I was shooting digital at my newspaper job. So I'm a bit out of the loop when it comes to the latest and greatest films and developers for B&W. The films haven't changed much since I last did serious film testing in college. But developers have. For an upcoming project I may want to shoot 4x5 B&W as a departure from my other large-format work that has all been shot on C-41.

My goal would be to make great drum scans on my Howtek for large inkjet prints. But I don't want to optimize for scanning to the extent that I can't also make excellent darkroom prints. Going back to B&W is a bit of an experiment so I don't know for certain what the final product will be.

I'm not too worried about film speed for my static subjects. I also like lots of acutance and I like the look of nice, sharp grain. (In my photo-j and street photography days, my all-time favorite was tri-x in Rodinal!) But I don't want exaggerated grain for this work, just a nice texture. I love the tonality of Tri-X but for this work I might want a bit less grain. My initial thought was to try FP-4, but I'm open to suggestions.

Of course I'll do some testing, but any recommendations for starting points? Everyone seems to love the pyro developers these days, but how do those negs scan?