one more time - diafine basics

[RayPA]

Well, I just ordered my first batch of Diafine (has not arrived yet), and the catalog stated 'concentrate for 950 ml' - maybe it is the gallon packages that come in powder form?

Roman

My package is exactly as stated by Roman, two cans of powder that make a gallon each.

 

[T_om]

Tom, would you say garlic or curry is best with crow? I'm going to have to eat my words! I assumed that because the Diafine was packaged in tin cans (like soup) that it was in liquid concentrate form. I was wrong - it's powder, just like you said.

Hahaha! Glad to know all is as it should be. I was worried there for a bit thinking someone sold you some sort of substitute.

Tom

 

[Kin Lau]

Had me confused for a while too, since I ordered it, and mine was powder 🙂

 

[XAos]

You people need to cut this out. I just ordered some myself. Out of curiousity - has anyone here ever left it in either solution A or B for an unreasonably long amount of time? How did it turn out?

 

[Krasnaya_Zvezda]

OK, you guys have just caused me to take the plunge on the Diafine, too. Once it's mixed, how long is the shelf life? Might take me a while to use a gallon.

 

[wlewisiii]

XAos: Taking care of my son the other day a roll got let soak in A for about an hour. Don't know if that counts as unreasonable or not. No difference in it or the roll before or the roll after.

KZ: Near as I can understand, just this side of forever. My understanding is that it will last for years in normal use. Mine's going on six months since mixed, so I can't really say yet, but I intend to keep using this batch till either the A runs out or it fails to develope a roll. I have no clue how long that will be.

William

 

[T_om]

OK, you guys have just caused me to take the plunge on the Diafine, too. Once it's mixed, how long is the shelf life? Might take me a while to use a gallon.

The longest I ever kept a batch was about 3 years. But it was during a time that I was not doing very much B&W work. I probably didn't put a hundred rolls a year through that batch. It still worked fine after 3 years but I just tossed it on general principals. The "A" bath was about gone too. Not "gone" as in not working but "gone" as in GONE. It slowly gets carried away as it soaks into the film so there ends up being less and less of it.

I finally dumped that batch when I was getting back into B&W shooting on a regular basis and expected to be processing a lot of film so I thought I would just start a new batch.

In all the years I have used Diafine, I have never really counted the number of rolls I put through a gallon batch. I tried MANY times, but I am slothful, lazy, barely literate and forgetful... I tried keeping notes, marking the jugs with grease pencil... lots of good intentions, but failed good intentions. I always lost count. 🙁

Tom

 

[Marc Jutras]

I ordered a gallon kit of Diafine today from Huron. Adorama was asking 31.50$US for shipping to Canada!!! LOL Now, I have to dig out my Patterson tank and get a few little goodies and a changing bag (almost forgot that one!).

 

[Krasnaya_Zvezda]

The longest I ever kept a batch was about 3 years. But it was during a time that I was not doing very much B&W work. I probably didn't put a hundred rolls a year through that batch. It still worked fine after 3 years but I just tossed it on general principals. The "A" bath was about gone too. Not "gone" as in not working but "gone" as in GONE. It slowly gets carried away as it soaks into the film so there ends up being less and less of it.

I finally dumped that batch when I was getting back into B&W shooting on a regular basis and expected to be processing a lot of film so I thought I would just start a new batch.

In all the years I have used Diafine, I have never really counted the number of rolls I put through a gallon batch. I tried MANY times, but I am slothful, lazy, barely literate and forgetful... I tried keeping notes, marking the jugs with grease pencil... lots of good intentions, but failed good intentions. I always lost count. 🙁

Tom

Sounds like from your post, Tom, that when you dump the tank, you pour it back into the appropriate bottle, 'A' or 'B', rather than discard it? That this is not a one-use solution? If that is the case, it might indeed last forever. Or at least the rest of my natural life.

 

[XAos]

XAos: Taking care of my son the other day a roll got let soak in A for about an hour. Don't know if that counts as unreasonable or not. No difference in it or the roll before or the roll after.

Amazing. I'd consider that unreasonable in any mono bath delopers. That'd tolerate about 99% of even true emergency interruptions. (Not like the world needs one more roll of pictures of my cat anyways.)

 

[T_om]

Sounds like from your post, Tom, that when you dump the tank, you pour it back into the appropriate bottle, 'A' or 'B', rather than discard it? That this is not a one-use solution? If that is the case, it might indeed last forever. Or at least the rest of my natural life.

Correct. You just keep using the same batch until the "A" bath is gone. I would say "until it quits working" but I have never HAD it stop working.

Also, a batch seems to get better after a hundred rolls or so is put through it. Less grain and smoother tones. What we used to do is buy a gallon kit and a quart kit at the same time. We would mix up the "A" and "B" gallon kit and only the "A" portion of the quart kit. We would toss the "B" can from the quart kit in the garbage, we didn't need it.

When the volume of "A" in the gallon kit started drawing down, we would just replace it with the 'extra' "A" we had mixed up from the quart kit.

No need to do that nowadays. But back then, we were developing hundreds of rolls of film a month. 220, 120, 35mm, 70mm... all souped in Diafine.

Tom

 

[Krasnaya_Zvezda]

Well, this is sounding better by the minute.

 

[Doug]

I guess we could have said it came in cans... 🙂

 

[XAos]

So why is Diafine a cult instead of the dominant reli I mean principle method of development for people doing B&W at home?

 

[wlewisiii]

So why is Diafine a cult instead of the dominant reli I mean principle method of development for people doing B&W at home?

Well, IIU what I've been reading since on my Diafine kick it's because the constraints on scanners are really very similar to those on newspaper presses. Diafine was always loved by newspaper photographers because it allowed for, say with Tri-X, an easy 2 stop push that made shots that might not otherwise get made. The flattening of the negative that can happen is a wash in the half-tone process anyway, so nothing is really lost. Scanners, at least the affordable ones, have a similar resolution. Just pull it in and play with photoshop till the cows come home. This is not to say that these are the only things it's good for - simply what it was always _known_ for. And as home scanning of negs has gotten more common, people began looking back for some of the old knowledge again. So it's only now that it's really getting a wider audience - and as some of the folks using it start to explore all of it's capabilities, I imagine it might become even more popular. IIUC, IMHO, and all that.

I think that it's been a real boon to my shooting. And I don't have to worry if I need to go see what my son is up to at some given moment in the process. That's a really nice feature for me.

William

 

[T_om]

So why is Diafine a cult instead of the dominant reli I mean principle method of development for people doing B&W at home?

Probably because not everyone likes the way it acts with certain films. Just read some of the threads here. Some like film X in Diafine and some like film Y.

Also, Diafine is a pretty old developer. Newspapers loved it because it was foolproof, quick and handled different films and formats all at once.

Additionally, lot of newcomers to photography simply never heard of it. It was never given much amateur photo press "back in the day" partly because photo writers like to delve into the esoteric and not the simple. You can write a hundred articles on D76 alone going on and on about certain nuances of this technique or that technique.

With Diafine, you just stick it in the soup and go.

This is very frustrating for writers used to expounding endlessly to their readers about the benefits and effects of turning tank inversions over to the right or over to the left in the Northern Hemisphere while wearing gloves to keep the increase in temperature from your hand totally ruining the film. 🙄

Photo press has almost always been about the technical side of the craft, not the artistic side. For every article about actually taking better pictures, you will find 1000 techy articles about one gizmo or another, one lens or another, one developer or another... and ceaseless, endless, interminable, arguments about dilutions, temperatures, agitation cycles, ad infinitum.

Photo shops sell stuff. How interested do you imagine they are in selling a developer that lasts for literally years instead of a one-shot-then-buy-it-again-next-week brew?

Anyway, I tell people to try it and see for themselves. Absolutely NOTHING would make me keep using something that was crap to use and produced crap as a result. So I believe people will come to their own conclusions after using it. It might not work with your favorite film... then again, it might blow your socks off. It's not like it costs a fortune to try. 🙂

Tom

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Tom, would you say garlic or curry is best with crow? I'm going to have to eat my words! I assumed that because the Diafine was packaged in tin cans (like soup) that it was in liquid concentrate form. I was wrong - it's powder, just like you said.

FrankS: I think it's being served with radish nowadays, and a healthy serving of RC cola. 😉

No problem; I think mystery is solved. Or you could argue that it was so old that the concentrate dried out and turned into powder.

Post-edit: huh, weird; all of the sudden all of these post-entries showed up. Rod Serling been editing the site lately?

 

[rover]

I was going to point that out Frank and ask if that is why you thought it was a liquid.

Being Italian, a little olive oil, basil and garlic can make anything palitable. 😀

It is worth mentioning that this weekend there were tons of posts about processing film, Diafine, people starting home processing....

I enjoyed reading what everyone is doing, and starting to do.

 

[FrankS]

Does anyone have any antacid? I've got a tummy-ache.