It began with the exploration of Pyrocat-HD.

Pyrocat-HD became the gateway drug to explore low agitation development.

That became a gateway drug for exploring the use of severely out of date films - most recently, 2x3 Plus-X expired in Nov. 1974.

This is just a short update for those of you still following along:

PRIOR FINDINGS

Given a highly dilute developer and a very long development time:

  • Stand development (no agitation) does not work reliably with modern films
  • Semistand development (1 midpoint agitation) does work quite reliably with modern films.
  • Extreme Minimal Agitation (2 or more agitations during development similarly gives good results with modern films.
  • In every case, using minimal support to hold sheet film reduced the tendency to encounter bromide drag.



I documented this here:

https://gitbucket.tundraware.com/tun...nd-Development


ALONG THE WAY


I did get a private email from someone who said, "You're problem is using Pyrocat-HD to this stuff. I do everything with stand development in Rodinal and never have issues."


ENTER VERY OLD FILM


I then extended the exploration to try and do semi-stand with very old films. First with Tri-X expired in July of 1993, and then the aforementioned Plus-X. The results were ... interesting.

The Tri-X had no issues being semistand developed. The Plus-X, however, has shown an unpleasant tendency toward bromide drag.

So, I wanted to figure out whether this was primarily the film formulation or the age of the film causing the bromide artifacts.

So ... I semistand developed the Plus-X in D-23 1:1 for an hour with a single 10 second midpoint agitation at 31 minutes after an initial 2 minutes of continuous agitation. NO bromide drag. To be sure I shot two sheets of each scene and developed the first in D-23 and the second in Pyrocat-HD. The Pyrocat-HD negs exhibited very nasty drag effects, but the D-23 negs look perfect and - even after nearly 50 years - still show full film speed and no significant visible fogging.

I therefore conclude that highly dilute Pyrocat-HD semistand development is incompatible with at least some very old films. I do have some frozen Plus-X sheets which - while out of date - should still be fresh, and I'll explore that at some point.

Of course, the D-23 is nowhere near as dilute at 1:1 as the Pyrocat-HD is at 1.5:1:200. So, one future exploration might be to further dilute the D-23. The problem is that 2 liters of D-23 1:1 only have 7.5g of Metol total. Severe further dilution might really deactivate the development. Still, it's on my list of things to try.

The other thing I want to go back and do now is to put that old Plus-X through an Extreme Minimal Agitation cycle rather than semi-stand. EMA should materially reduce the risk for bromide drag.

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it ... for now.