Pyrocat Tests and Some Disappointment?

[Jay DeFehr]

Just stick with what you know, you dont have to drink the cool aid.



Perhaps MDM meant that sometimes it's helpful to work within a set of limitations, that running off in too many directions at once can be counter-productive. By analogy, some people experiment by shooting with only one lens, or photographing only one subject.

Sticking with a single film/developer combination - and doing what it takes to get it to work - can amount to a form testing in its own right.

He might have meant a lot of things, but he wrote one thing. The OP made his own intentions very clear, and it's unreasonable to assume he doesn't realize he has the option of not experimenting with another developer. MDM's use of the cliche, "drink the cool aid" is difficult to interpret a anything but snide, and adds nothing of substance to the discussion, just as the increasing number of posts in response to his add nothing of substance, and to which I'm guilty of contributing. I should learn to ignore trolls.

[mdm]

What I meant was that you dont have to use pyrocat just because its supposed to be good, be your own judge of what is good. Many of the best pictures are made by people who just do what they do, eg Jim Kitchen, Maris, Austin who gets what the lab gives him, John Sexton. I use Pyrocat M, sometimes I wish I didnt but thats what I use and I am not changing because its cheap and I have plenty.

[kev curry]

MDM, I don't think your in any position to be handing out any sort of advice negative or otherwise especially when the work you display on your web site is taken into consideration!

[sgutterman]

What I meant was that you dont have to use pyrocat just because its supposed to be good, be your own judge of what is good. Many of the best pictures are made by people who just do what they do, eg Jim Kitchen, Maris, Austin who gets what the lab gives him, John Sexton. I use Pyrocat M, sometimes I wish I didnt but thats what I use and I am not changing because its cheap and I have plenty.

Right - the goal here is not darkroom acrobatics for their own sake; and it's not to get down with a popular solution; it's developing a set of methods that give me results I'm pleased with and that I feel steeped in and comfortable with, so I can go and confidently take pictures out in the world with a good idea of what's going to happen over the kitchen sink later on. Given how many people use and love PCHD I felt it was worth the testing I'm currently doing.

If I don't get this sorted out satisfactorily I hereby promise I won't keep using Pyrocat. I'll switch to caffenol and post rambling diatribes about the inherent superiority of Folger's T-Crystal Structure as it affects transient...shadow...rendition...on the toe of the reciprocity...density transmission feedback frequency.

[Wally]

MDM, I don't think your in any position to be handing out any sort of advice negative or otherwise especially when the work you display on your web site is taken into consideration!

Where's his website?

[sanking]

More Kool-Aid anyone?

It is great to experiment, but if one experiments aimlessly the results will likely be ambiguous at best, at worst useless and without meaning. Speaking here with considerable experience on the subject!!

Sandy

[Mark Barendt]

More Kool-Aid anyone?

Giggle

[kev curry]

Where's his website?

...looks like he's gotten rid of it!

[Ken Lee]

Going back to the original question...

1) The lighting may have been arbitrary: compared to the other objects in the scene, we don't know how dark that jacket was - or should look. Nor do we know how deep the shadows were. It's best to shoot a target with a known contrast range. Were there 7 stops difference between the deepest shadows and lightest paper ? Were there 10 stops ? Perhaps, if the lighting was soft, there were only 5 stops. Unless we know what we're trying to reproduce, we can't judge whether we've been successful.

2) Because with film we need to "expose for the shadow values and develop for the highlights", this test is, in some ways, backwards. If we want to evaluate the effect of an extra stop of exposure, we would look to the shadows, not the highlights. We can always adjust the highlights by adjusting developing time. What we really want to determine, is how much exposure is enough to give accurate low values.

3) The target image contains only a modest selection of subject values or zones. A gray card is a good start, but it would be better to have all the tones present if possible. An ideal way to do this, is shooting a step-wedge. Another is to meter some of the other items in the scene and identify them. At the very least, have some human flesh-tones in the scene, because the eye is very good at judging faces and flesh tones. Unless we know exactly how things should look, how can we tell how far off they are ? Placing the gray card on Zone V, where is the yellow sticky pad ? How many stops difference was there, at the scene, when you metered it ? That sort of thing.

The nice thing about BTZS testing is that you shoot a step wedge with 5 sheets of film, and develop each sheet for a different time. Based on that, you get all the information you need. (You can always make a sample shot as you did here, just to make sure that theory and practice are aligned, but unless your arithmetic is off, the results should be the same.) It's actually rather brilliant.

Going back to the article cited earlier, have a look at page 4. The charts on that page describe exactly how much contrast you get by developing those different films, for different times. For example, see Figure 24, which shows Kodak TMY developed in Pyrocat HD 2:2:100. The numbers on the bottom (X-axis) are developing time, and the numbers on the right (Y-axis) indicate Gradient, another name for contrast. The longer we develop the film, the higher the contrast. That makes sense.

I have taken the liberty of showing the graph here. I hope that's OK.



For Contrast Index, 0.5 is the "normal" value, which corresponds to N in the Zone System. So according to that chart, we get normal development at around 7 minutes. That test result alone, is worth its weight in gold. We get N+1 at around 10 minutes, N+2 at 12, etc... Ka-ching !

Another thing you see, is that compared to some of the other films, this one is very linear with respect to developing time: the line is very straight, which means that changes in developing time affect contrast quite evenly and predictably. While the T-grained films have a reputation for being "finicky", that's because people who are careless in their technique, get different results if they screw up - but that's highly desirable in a film/developer combination: it lets us precisely control things to get the most beauty out of our materials.

And Beauty is, as they say, its own reward

[Ken Lee]

By comparison, here's part of a test that Fred Newman made for me a few weeks ago, of Ilford HP5+ developed in D-23 1:1 (not divided D-23).



Note that this is a more diluted developer - and D-23 has a reputation as being low-energy - so the contrast range is much lower - but how much lower ? There's no guess work here.

To get a normal Contrast Index of 0.5, we need to develop for 10 minutes. Also note that even after developing for 16 minutes, we still haven't reached N+2 expansion. This film/developer combination is probably great for a sunny day at the beach, but not for bland subject matter.

On the other hand, with this film/developer combination, N-2 development happens at around 5 min 15 seconds.

So not only do we know that this is a "lower contrast film/developer combination", we know exactly how low, and how long to develop it to get the contrast we want.

There's no guesswork involved. Instead of relying on someone's well-meaning but vague advice (Person A: "I've been souping Plus-X in X-Tol 1:8 for the last decade. I really like it." Person B: "You gotta try Tri-X in PMK-XYZ at 3:2:1000. Nothing beats it") we get unambiguous facts we can really use, and a common language with which we can easily compare and categorize film/developer combinations.

This isn't the whole story, though. We know that different film/developer combinations give different effective film speeds. But which one gives which speed ? Shall we rely on friendly advice ? ("Try pushing FP4+ to ISO 8000 and develop it in Nescafe - you gotta see it to believe it")