Ilford SFX 200: which developer? What filter: orange or red?

[wdeskiew]

Which developer do you use to get finer grain? Which filter gives nicer 'look' to a picture: orange or red? Maybe some examples?
i am going to use this film for the first time. I am not really interested in true IR effects, more in slightly surrealistic look of pictures taken with this film and a red or orange filter.
Do you have any experience of this kind?

 

[Roger Hicks]

Which developer do you use to get finer grain? Which filter gives nicer 'look' to a picture: orange or red? Maybe some examples?
i am going to use this film for the first time. I am not really interested in true IR effects, more in slightly surrealistic look of pictures taken with this film and a red or orange filter.
Do you have any experience of this kind?

With anything less than deep red, you might as well use HP5. There is no 'green gap': this is a panchromatic film with extended red sensitivity.

Deep ('tri-cut') red may however give what you are after. A T50 (50% transmission) of 695 nm will be needed to approach true IR effects. I have found generous exposure (EI 6 or less, using a separate hand-held meter) to give the best effects: this implies coarser grain, as does developing in my preferred Ilford DD-X. Use a fine-grain dev (e.g. Ilford Perceptol) and you could be looking at EI 2 and below.

The Lake Mono shot on the link below was SFX with (as far as Frances recalls) a plain deep red tri-cut filter. (Scroll down; it's on the right).

http://www.rogerandfrances.com/photoschool2a.html

Cheers,

Roger

 

[wdeskiew]

I have a russian filter marked 'K -8x' - K stands for 'krasnyi' (red) and '-8x' says it lets through eight times less light than without a filter. But the light metered with the filter screwed on shows only two stops less while it should show three stops down, according to what is writen on the filter...
What is the 'tri-cut filter'?
Do you say that the film, nominally iso200 should be exposed as iso6?

 

[vieri]

...

But the light metered with the filter screwed on shows only two stops less while it should show three stops down, according to what is writen on the filter...

...

Meters are quite often fooled by colored filters, and this is part - or better, a side effect - of the reason why manufacturer do state the filter's effect on exposure (the main part is to make it possible to use the filters with hand-held meters, of course).

I'd use an hand-held meter, or meter without the filter, and believe the filter factor reported on the filter itself.

 

[wdeskiew]

It looks that K -8x is an equivalent to 25A.
Additionally I should set the film speed to iso100 or even iso50 to get proper exposition.