I need to order more chemicals, so....?

[Hans Berkhout]

Try Beers

[LabRat]

Get some phenidone, metol, hydroquinone, vitamin C, borax, some lye (NaOH), some washing soda, some sodium sulfite and a small precision scale. Then you can experiment to your heart's content with many different formulas.

+1...

Getting into moderate volume work, you are just throwing $$$ away paying markup to buy prepared chems, and it gives you a wide range of variations of fresh to order formulas...

And it's fun to mix!!!

Steve K

[pepeguitarra]

I found myself using Perceptol a lot, it gives clear and neat grain, but not much contrast. Rodinal has become my go to developer, especially with the slower film emulsions.

[jnantz]

Hello John

You could always develop your FILM in your Ansco 130 its about 7mins+/- at 1:6 at 72ºF
You could also buy some cheapo instant rot gut instant coffee, some washing soda and Vitamin C and make
Some Caffenol 130 ( you use the teaspoon recipe for the Caffenol C, and about 20CC of Ansco130 / L of developer ).
It stand develops your film well for about 30 mins, then shuffle a little bit, maybe 1 mins before you stop; or shuffle process &c for 9 or 10.

John

[Bruce Barlow]

Zone VI print developer was Dektol. "Why take a chance?" said Fred.

[PRJ]

If you get Metol, Sodium Sulfite and Sodium Carbonate you can make three completely different developers just by changing the way you use those three chemicals. D23 is just Metol and Sulfite and gives a beautiful tonality as a solvent type developer. You can split D23 into a two bath developer for compensation. You can also mix Beutler's which is a dilute acutance developer if you want really sharp negs with more pronounced grain.

Add some Potassium Bromide to the three and you can mix the soft working print developer Ansco 120.

Something easy for you to do without having to get too many chemicals.

Hope that helps you.

[Eric Woodbury]

Good for you for settling. You can spend a lifetime tinkering with the chemistry and miss a lot of camera time, or you can learn the tools you have and maybe miss a few shots to wrong chemistry.

I've settled on XTOL type for film and D-14 for paper (Ryuji Suzuki's). The D-14 is similar to Agfa Neutol Plus and its offspring.

e

[Drew Wiley]

Bruce, as I already mentioned, Zone VI Dev was basically Dektol modified in two regards, one of them being a greater amount of Hq. So the effect was slightly different. Around the same time Picker sold the luxurious Brilliant Bromide paper, which did have, just as he claimed, an abrupt shadow dropoff. That's was an understatement. More like a cliff. So he wanted a tweak of 76 which a little better matched that particular paper characteristic. But I always preferred amidol. I still have a few bags of that old Z VI developer laying around, which I've never gotten to since I have an MQ tweak of my own which I liked even better for Polygrade V when it became my favorite paper after the demise of Brilliant Bromide and Seagull G.