Most people don’t realize how non-uniformly developed their sheet film is. It is usually only apparent when there are large areas of uniform exposure. Even then, as long as it isn’t terrible it is often assumed to be unevenness in the subject itself, and can be corrected in printing.

Generally, the larger the surface area, the trickier it can be. Unfortunately a double sided emulsion makes an already challenging situation that much more difficult. Add to this the fact x-ray emulsions and coatings are not designed for this type of processing.

With general purpose sheet film, the easiest way to get virtually perfect uniformity is to do one sheet at a time in a tray with vigorous, continuous agitation. I mean vigorous. And I mean continuous. It helps to cover the tray so that the developer doesn’t fly all over the place, and the other reason to keep the developer from leaving the tray is that you use a fairly minimal volume. For example, I have done single 4x5 sheets in little 5x5 sandwich boxes filled with 100ml of solution.

Whether or not the emulsion layer facing the bottom of the tray will scratch to hell is something you’d have to test for. Perhaps some sort of frame to hold the film slightly off the bottom would be doable.

I believe there exists single sided x-ray film, but I can’t help you with that. In all honesty I highly recommend using regular film of some sort rather than x-ray. I have never seen anything good come of attempts at bullying a film into doing something it was not designed for. I realize this is off topic but consider the following. Most people use view cameras at least in part for the potentially smoother, more detailed prints that can come from larger negatives. If you’re going to make it your normal practice to use a short scale, non-panchromatic, double sided...(and other shortcomings) x-ray film, you’re throwing away essentially all of the print quality benefits of shooting large format and then some. Rather than trying to use x-ray film for 8x10 due to the high cost of general purpose 8x10 sheet film, I submit you’d be far better off going down to 4x5 or even medium format and using proper film.

Michael

Quote Originally Posted by sabeluc View Post
I totally believe you are correct about non-conventional film and chemicals being at the core of the problem. I also think that if I were developing standard film in standard chemicals it would already be working with my tanks and hangers.

However, mostly for cost reasons, I'm committed to making x-ray film + pyro work. Keeping the costs low helps me feel free to play with the medium, experiment and make mistakes. I have found this to be critical for my art-making process. Even though this is tedious, putting in the time and experimentation to make this work (and sharing back the results if I can) is worth it. I do really appreciate the help along the way!

8x10 X-ray film is 40 cents a sheet. 510 pyro works out to 60 cents for the 4 liters required to fill the tank at 250:1 dilution for 4 sheets of 8x10 or 16 of 4x5. I also like pyro because I do alternative process contact printing in addition to inkjet and it allows me to use the same negative for both. The tanning action also makes the x-ray negatives more robust. I've gotten this working for 4x5s on 4-up hangers in the same tanks (clear skies and no surge marks), so I can already process 16 4x5s concurrently for $3 total.

I'm surprised 8x10 is so stubborn compared to 4x5.

I'm sure everyone knows but x-ray film is double-sided and very easy to scratch. I tried tray processing in the beginning with glass in the bottom of the trays but I had trouble doing more than one sheet at a time without scratching them and getting the bottom and top emulsions to develop evenly. Maybe I will need to go back to trays for 8x10 it if I can't figure the hangers out.

I think anything that touches the back side of the film (e.g. drums) will not work with x-ray film.