Lea Formula 7 is good for negatives, but it ages quite quickly: plan to use it up within two months.
UVP 4 is good for negatives also, and being a two cadmium recipe, it’s very slow to age and with proper storage can remain usable for many months.
Also formulated by UV Photographics is a proprietary “house blend” called UVP-X. It uses 2 bromides and 2 iodides which makes for faster collodion (about 1 stop faster than most other recipes). It is also a very stable recipe, so you can expect it to remain usable for about a year if stored properly (cool, dark). I recently finished a bottle of UVP-X that was 18 months old and still worked well! (Though it had lost some speed).
To a degree, collodion recipes just aren’t that different when it comes to results. However, the following is generally true about salted collodion recipes: the iodides in a recipe contribute to contrast, and the bromides help create more middle values. Though it may seem counterintuitive to say, positives (tintypes) don’t need to be as contrasty as negatives. So a collodion recipe for producing good negatives will typically have more iodide than bromide. But I must say that in my experience, all but the most extremely contrasty scenes will produce a negative that’s fairly low in contrast regardless of which collodion recipe you use, in which case they benefit from some intensification or (better still) re-development to build density and contrast.
What you need to decide once you’ve made a negative is: what will it be used for? if you’re going to scan it for post-processing, or make a traditional silver gelatin darkroom contact print from it, then you may not need to intensify/redevelop the negative. I’ve found a property exposed negative with good contrast will print on a grade 2 or grade 3 paper. But if you intend on printing your negative on albumen or salt paper (or even platinum/palladium) then the extra density achieved by redevelopment or intensification is pretty much mandatory. How you choose to make a negative is going to depend on how you’re going to use it. This is where Quinn’s book is going to be very helpful to you.
Also bear in mind that there are so many variables in the process that no two people will have exactly the same results when seemingly using the exact same techniques. Your output is going to depend on 1) the state of your silver bath (it’s age, pH, silver content, etc.), 2) your choice of developer, 3) your water quality, 4) temperature and humidity on any given day, 5) your choice of collodion, and it’s age, and of course 6) your technical proficiency. That’s a lot of variables. So take what advice I offer as being just “general recommendations”. What works for me may not work for your circumstances. A certain amount of trial and error is going to be needed for each practitioner to find their sweet spot.
PS: I hope you haven’t been storing collodion in a fridge that’s also used for food! No matter how tightly capped, a collodion bottle still leaks Ether fumes which can be absorbed by food items.
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