Diving in to film testing and random thoughts
I’ve been having mixed results in the darkroom, so I’m in the process of at the very least improving my consistency. Part of that process is testing my film and development time for what I like to shoot. It hurts my feelings to use so much precious 4×5 film for the purpose—but I’ve learned something. My instinct to shoot at half the rated speed for my Fomapan (or Arista.EDU Ultra) film was right on the money. However, the development times for Rodinal 1:50 I got from Digital Truth are way off for the way I develop. When I tray develop, I am constantly agitating and rocking the tray back and forth. As a result I have way more contrast than I should.
How do I know? Well I do have an X-Rite 810 densitometer, which can be found on ebay for a reasonable cost. I don’t plan to use it all the time, but while I’m getting my process under control it’s becoming quite valuable. I found the minimum exposure that produced .1 over film base+fog which gave me an ISO of 100 for the Fomapan Creative 200 film. Great. Now, I’m trying to find the right development time that will give me a density between 1.25 and 1.35 for a Zone VIII exposure. The first time through I accidentally made the exposure for Zone VII (that’s zone 7 instead of 8), and used the recommended 10 minute development time for Rodinal 1:50. The density I got was about 1.89. So let me spell it out, it was way above what it should be. My second attempt corrected the exposure (more exposure, more density) and halved the development time to 5 minutes. The density I got was now 1.69, which is still way above what it needs to be. My two choices now are to dilute the developer or to use less agitation. If the time is below 5 minutes you will see some variance in results depending on how quickly you stop the development. I’m not done testing yet, and it is going much slower than I’d like because I don’t have but a few minutes at night to do one test.
Film testing is not a fun task, but in many ways I think it is necessary to go through to at least establish your custom times. The goal is to spend less time fighting my negatives to get a reasonable print and more time enjoying the results. The problem I’m running into is a lack of consistency in my negatives or detail in the highlight areas. The negative has it, but the paper can’t reproduce it readily. My scans came out nice but the prints were a lot more contrasty. Now I know why.
After I get my Arista/Foma film development process down, I may experiment with using my Silvergrain Tektol to develop the film. I’ll start with paper strength at 5 minutes and adjust density by adjusting my dilution or time.
