Agfa HDR xray film, cut to 13x18
Tray developed in Rodinal 1+100 at 20C for 8min.
Contact print on very old (exp. date 1990) Agfa Rapitone paper, developed in Ilford MG 1+14
Shot and developed last weekend.
Printed in the darkroom yesterday.
Scan from print.
Me and Ioanna, aka Book Ex Machina, proudly presenting our newest publication:
The Letters Page vol. 1
featuring some of our favorite authors, like:
George Saunders,
Joanna Walsh,
Kevin Barry,
Naomi Alderman,
and many more!
So happy to have played a part in this.
http://bookexmachina.com/theletterspage.html
Shot with Agfa HDR x-ray film, cut down to 13x18cm.
Fujinon w 250 with front tilt, at f16 and 1/30"
Rodinal 1+100 at 20C for 8min in tray.
Scan from negative, finished in PS.
Playing around with Carestream single-sided film.
Camera: Sinar P 8x10
Lens: Fujinon 300
Developer: D76 6 minutes
Rick,Originally Posted by RickV
do you develop film containing 8 times of silver, compared with paper, in weak paper developers diluted to a weak solution?
Usually I give strong film developers a chance to develop my papers...
After testing with a Stouffer wedge I couldn't imagine that bracketing will give linear results, concerning the technical nature/the sensibilty of this film..
I figured out better to bring the shadows into Zone 3 or 4 and to control the highlights via development.
For portraits in ambient light I seem to have some succes in completely missattracting shadows, and metering directly the face instead.
Here I have to figure out some more.
First time I tried rotation of 5x7" sheets with succes but with some higher contrast as a result; both, Rodinal and Xtol, work fine here.
I use another system than Jobo; mine is an ancient Photo Union system out of the sixties, a developing machine with two tubes, with bigger tubes and a lot of capacity, and with a lot of pimples at the inner side of the tubes ( like the Jobo plastic film holders do have, too ).
Since my 12x16" tubes are paper development tubes, they haven't any pimples, so I have to switch to tray development.
For normal contrast and as usual today, I prefer developing Xray in trays and with Rodinal; laying another Xray sheet onto the ground of each tray avoids scratches, but not completely in my case.
Printing on grade two, or three, is possible in general.
I shake the tray and flip the film until the highlights start to come out; then I flip the film each 30 seconds which gives me a mild negative without hard contrast.
Flipping each 45 or 60 seconds results in a copy of the bottom of the tray :-)
Anyway, it's so amazing to see how the developer/the film reacts immediately, after each shake or flip action!
Red LED safelight guides me through the process, but visualizing the doublesided result is hard I have found, so I always give 5 minutes a try and further inspect the result after this time.
Sometimes I decide to end up in 6 minutes of development.
Recently, my first results with stand development didn't look bad, so I will continue stand development, in Rodinal of course, expecting less scratches.
Best,
Ritchie
I've been using a written #44 "No-red" filter on my spot meter to more easily meter for Carestream EB/RA. Been shooting it rated 200 ISO with the #44 filter. A lot of my results are blown out.
Now, I shoot plenty of MF and 35mm, and I never get results this bad. Was the filter a stupid idea? Anyone got other suggestions for adding consistency in metering/exposing this film? And does anyone have tips for using this stuff with a flash? I have no way of guesstimating what fragment of my flash's emitted light is non-red.
Has anyone here tried contacting manufacturers for spectral sensitivity graphs? Kodak turned me around because they no longer produce EB/RA. Carestream didn't respond to my email. It'd really help to know where the film's sensitivity lay exactly.
Before someone tells me for a second time that this is cheap enough to shoot freely, I would like to emphasize that not everyone has the spare time to develop hundreds of photos in a reasonable time frame. Darkroom access and time spent out of work and not in transit is very limited for me. Besides, maintaining a good-shot-to-dud ratio as I am right now (probably 1:4) makes this fantastic hobby feel like a waste of time. Very defeating to pull these borderline destroyed negatives out of the tank so frequently.
By "blown-out" do you mean blown highlights or overexposed negatives?
If overexposed, the short answer would be, rate the film higher. I have no idea what the filter factor of your #44 is and couldn't find that info on Google either, but rated at 200 and assuming the filter factor is about 2 or 3, you are basically rating the film around an EI of 25 or 50. Possibly a bit hot.
If the contrast is too high and your highlights are blown, develop less.
Apologies if this is a bit "obvious" but there certainly is a bit of a learning curve with any of the x-ray films available and there is simply no substitute for a bit of experimentation - which you've done, so now you can change your workflow accordingly.
Off-hand I don't remember anyone else using one of those filters so seems like you are blazing new ground, or maybe I am just mis-remembering. I don't use Carestream so I'm sure others will chime in here. I assume your usage of the filter is intended to help meter blue-sensitive film when overly red or blue light is present such as sunset/dusk, which makes sense but may be overly complicating your system. I've only used green-sensitive film, precisely for that reason.
Is blue sensitive film then not only orthochromatic, but also less sensitive to green light as well? I simply assumed that, if the film was orthochromatic, a cyan "no-red" filter would provide a closer metering relative to the sensitivity of the film, especially in artificial and dusk light.
I know that at least with some of my pictures, I am dealing with a weaker, older 35mm camera speed light flash - leveraged via flash sync - which may not be emitting blue through red light equally. I have seldom used flash before, and making those mistakes is punishing. It really makes a difference, though, since indoor portraits are nigh-impossible with such insensitive film.
And at the risk of sounding stupid, what is the difference between overexposure and blown highlights? I am very technically uninformed on film photography. Probably not the best background to jump into 4x5 and irregular film use, though I am working on it and trying to learn.
The speed light should be emitting roughly daylight balance light - perhaps a bit bluer, and older flashes sometimes are a bit yellowed, but neither should be a massive problem. But yes, I would nail down exposure with daylight first before trying to use flash, especially if that is also new to you. Too many variables.
I honestly can't tell you exact sensitivities (it's here in this thread somewhere...but at over 4500 posts that's a needle in a haystack!) but I know green sensitive is fairly wide spectrum, outside of red of course. Blue sensitive film should still catch green I think.
Regarding overexposure/blown highlights - perhaps an example scan would help us diagnose? If your shadow areas are showing up very bright, up in the midtones or higher even, you are overexposing the film. If the shadows look okay but everything quickly goes up into white, your contrast is too high. So maybe an example image and exact technical details would help - including exposure time / aperture, as well as your developer time, temperature, agitation scheme, etc..
That might take a while. The biggest roadblock in my workflow is that I do not have regular access to a scanner. I was lying about enrolment and using a university archive's scanner until they figured me out. I only scanned probably my first 30 shots or so, and that was before I started keeping an exposure journal. I keep a meticuloys one now, at least. A friend of a friend who works with Aboriginal Affairs drunkenly offered to let me use the high end scanner he uses at work. I intend to try and take him up on that, regardless of whether he was sober enough to be sincere about that offer.
The primary way I'm taking a look at my pictures these days is by making quick contact prints. I haven't regularly made prints since grade 10, 8 years ago, and it shows. The quality is very poor. I might need to take a workshop or something in order to better grasp the process. Because I have to schedule my darkroom hours against university students who seem to squat the 6-10pm range, improving my printmaking technique by trial and error isn't really feasible.
Do you have a digital camera, or even just a phone? Take a pic of one of your contact prints or maybe even try taking a pic of your negative on top of some sort of make-shift light table and inverting it.
Since you've got an exposure journal, can you tell us at least what your exposures were and a rough estimate of the light? Like for example, "Sunny, no clouds - f/32, 1/15." That's about what I would shoot on a sunny day, so if you are exposing way more there might be the issue.
BTW local libraries have scanners sometimes.
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