Pyrocat HD and Ektascan B/RA

[Fr. Mark]

Forgive me if this has been answered already but I could not find it.

I mixed up Pyrocat HD from scratch.

I want to develop Ektascan B/RA for multipurpose use: Silver gelatin prints, Azo paper, cyanotypes and eventually Carbon prints. If I can get good scans, so much the better. Don't have a scanner yet.

Temperature control in my darkroom isn't very controlled---it is somewhat dependent on outside weather. But I may be able to correct that with Ilford's table of temp corrections for development times.

I rate the Ektascan at 100 film speed, and I believe I have the exposure right. Daylight balanced fluorescents and LEDs for light. 1 sec f16 to avoid reciprocity issues---though someone suggested using Tmax reciprocity similar to the option 1 Tmax in the iPhone reciprocity app.

Tray development. Continuously 30 sec, 5 sec every 30 sec water stop, alkaline fixer.

Last night it was 74F in the darkroom chemistry, tried 8 minutes. In 300 mL for 4x5's in a glass tray you can put a 5x7 in. They looked done at 5 minutes but I was so sick of thin negatives or having them turn out too thin in the fixer compared to unfixed I let them go to 8 minutes. By visual inspection I can't tell 2:2:100 from 1:1:100 when dry except by the notch code in the film holder (per Harlan's suggestion). They are a little grainier than I expected.

Suggestions? Procedures you use?

When I have time I will set up another test a busy still life and see what shorter times do. That should reduce grain, right?

Thanks, Fr. Mark

[StoneNYC]

Pardon my question, but I'm unclear what you're actually asking and saying, you can actually see grain in an 8x10 sheet of film?

How large are you printing?

You mention 4x5, you mean you're cutting 8x10 into 4x5 sheets?

And finally, to my knowledge, some of the "multi-purpose" choices you listed require significantly different densities, so you kind of need to choose what you're going for ahead of time.

PS yea I use TMX reciprocity times myself and they seem to work.

But if you're seeing grain (and you're sure it's grain) by eye in a sheet of film, something is wrong, or what you're seeing is an illusion of some kind.

Please give more details and clarification and maybe some can help. I can't, I don't use pyro nor tray development, but I do use ektascan in Rodinal and there's no grain at all, better than HP5+

[coisasdavida]

Isn't it the texture/sparkle that the emulsion side has on this film?
I'd get one printed before deciding this is grain.

[Ralph Weimer]

FWIW I've found "thin" pyrocat negs print remarkable well on silver-gelatin.

[Fr. Mark]

Let me try to clarify:
Ektascan b/RA comes in 8x10. I have a Sinar P with Sinar Shutter and equipment for 4x5 and 5x7. I also have some other cameras incl. 35mm. So, while cutting 8x10--->5x7 I ended up with a bunch of 1x10" strips, put one in a 35mm camera, developed the resulting photos (ttl metering, f16, 1 sec, 50mm lens, mirror lock up self timer, rodinal1:100)and enlarged the best one to 5x7 onto silver paper using a terrific leitz lens I got as a gift from a friend who went digital and thinks I'm nuts to struggle with wet chemistry photography. As stone says, compares favorably to 35mm HP5+ (which I've only ever processed in D76).

I also cut some 4x5 for the press camera and cheaper testing. I'm aiming at various contact printing processes until I can buy a scanner or decide I will stick with in camera negatives for contact printing. When I looked at the negatives with a 4 power loupe, they look grainier than little strip I put in the 35mm camera. The Rodenstock 150 f5.6 caltar ought to be as good as the zuiko/Olympus 50/1.8 but have less depth of field at the same apertures. I try to make allowances for that.

As to different densities for different processes: agreed, but we are talking different wavelengths of light, too. Pyrocat HD leaves some of the developer molecules or rather their oxidation products, in the emulsion---otherwise known as stain. These stains are far more UV opaque than visual light opaque. You are probably familiar with this effect from suntan lotion: not much if any absorbance in visual frequencies but "black" in UV.

So, my hope is, that a negative dense enough to print well in white light on silver gelatin or on Azo paper, I have a small quantity of Azo that expired in 1957, will also have enough UV density to print outstanding cyanotypes and eventually, Carbon. Or if somehow I could afford it, Pt.

While I'm at it, I figure to get as much resolving power as I can. Sometimes I may not need it, but sometimes detail/texture is what makes an image work.

I'm too much of a former chemist to buy pre-made developers but there are quite a few published Rodinal formulas---not all of which work as published (I think I tried six...incl. starting with tylenols/acetominophen---which does work!). Rodinal is great stuff and inexpensive and one shot use which is good for how I'm working: sometimes with long intervals between darkroom sessions.

But, the lure of multi-purpose negatives is strong as is the lure of having 1 recipe we all agree on so as to eliminate variables in this sort of discussion where we aren't all in the same room looking at the technique as it happens or inspecting the negative by passing it around.

I'm 47, I had enough darkroom time starting at age 9 to know that someday I wanted to do more and got my first SLR five six years later but never really became proficient at darkroom work. Less than two years ago I rediscovered photography as an art form and LF too. I've spent considerable chunks of my free time building things like contact printing frames and a clunky 8x10 camera---even the bellows. That camera convinced me for now that I'm not a camera designer and I wanted a really precise easy to use (but maybe not easily carried) LF camera. I got a good deal on the Sinar kit. Now I need to nail down the make a negative process.

I like the look of Ortho films sometimes and they do cost less. Now I just want to have a reliable exposure/developing process so I can make the portraits and landscapes and flower pictures and church/other interesting building images then way I see them before I press the cable release.

I know theoretically you can develop by inspection and I do, but my experience has been very mixed---sometimes it works sometimes it does not. Lately, I think I've over developed which leads to more grain and lower contrast, right?

Anyway, if anyone has Ektascan with Pyrocat HD experience---"package insert" type details: time, temp, agitation procedures for 1:1:100 or 2:2:100 or other dilutions, I'd love to hear it.

And if you have done different types of printing from the same negatives, UV v white light ditto.

Thanks. I'd've given up long before this and returned to crop sensor digital w/o you guys.

[Fr. Mark]

I also have hangers and home built tanks for dip and dunk 4x5 and 8x10 but not 5x7. I might be persuaded to make BTZS type tubes from black Plastic plumbing pipes. But I have trays...

[Oren Grad]

And if you have done different types of printing from the same negatives, UV v white light ditto.

I haven't, but I know that Carl Weese has successfully used pyro development to produce sheet film negatives - HP5 Plus, IIRC - that contact print well in both silver and Pt/Pd, precisely because of the different effects of the stain in the two media. My recollection is that not every silver paper worked well, and that Carl got his best results from Agfa Multicontrast Classic, now reincarnated as Adox MCC.

[Peter De Smidt]

How are you judging density? Pyrocat negatives look quite different from standard negatives. Using the blue channel of a color densitometer, or a uv densitometer for alt process work, can be helpful. There are people around here who have such things.

[Fr. Mark]

Judging density by eyeball. No idea where to find a densitometer equipped photographer in Central PA. And, if I'm going to do it by inspection in the "dark" I'm using a red LED and trying to guess looking at the back side of the negative.
Maybe what I need to do is to make a few more identically exposed 4x5's of a busy test shot (something like a newspaper page) and try a few more different developments then try to print as silver gelatin and cyanotype and see what I get with different development/exposure times of those. 8 min 1:1:100 or 2:2:100 Pyrocat HD at 74F is, I think, too much. At least I have a home built UV exposure unit I can hook to a gra-lab timer so that's repeatable. Part of my problem is that I don't know from experience what a "good" negative looks like wet and unfixed and barely know when its dry if its good or not unless it is grossly under exposed (done a lot of that by forgetting the bellows factor and/or the reciprocity and/or the time of day correction when outdoors), if I can't see the image that's pretty bad... This is a lot more manual even than even an olympus om-1 or XA with HP5+ and d-76 in a daylight tank with which I get pretty good results. I've had just enough photos I love out of this LF thing even one from the scraps that I know there's a lot of potential I just need to hunt down the right variables to get consistent results as I see them in my head before I push the cable release. Thanks for the help.

[Peter De Smidt]

Why not do some standard exposure and development tests, ala Fred Picker in the book the Zone VI Workshop? If you want, you could send me the test negatives, and I can read them with an X-rite 361T. That would give you visual density and UV density. If you need blue channel density, I know someone who'd read that for you.