Sorry for hijacking your thread Oren, but some interesting contributions that made me curious.
Juan, I am also a bit baffled by your times. Of course we all have our own ways of measuring light, agitating, printing and on top of that our personal preferences how a printed picture should look, you clearly are happy with your results and that is what counts. However, even if you compensate for the lower temperature your 25 minutes is overcooking it, at least that is what would happen with my negatives if I would follow your recipe. At what grade do you print your negs ? Condenser or Diffusor?
SebC. Started working with Rollei Retro 100 as summer is finally coming and I like to shoot (wide)open. Still struggling a bit with developing time/agitation; looks like I am heading towards EI 80 and 10 minutes (1+50). How do you expose/develop your APX 100/Rollei Retro 100 ? You also wrote minimal agitation especially with APX, what do you mean with that ? A gentle twirl with the twirling stick every minute, 1 slow inversion every 3 minutes ? Let me know please.
Oren, very nice website, really like a lot of the black and white work.
Hi Peter,
My enlarger is condenser and diffuser... I feel really surprised at people who say "for x film, development is y minutes"... That just doesn't exist... When I cursed my career on photography, the first year of B&W is dedicated to calibrate one single film per student and learn to expose and develop for direct sun and for flat light... Those are two different universes... How can you say developing Tri-X for 25 minutes, exposed incident at ISO 200 on overcast days, at 18ºC is "overcooking it"? Go do it... You'll see your negatives are perfect even before printing... Only pure whites on scenes reach levels just below highest density on negatives... Why overcooked?
Of course for direct sun the story is a totally different one... Just 14 minutes with three inversions every third minute, and at 18ºC... That's treating a film in the best possible way... I tend to print my direct sun negatives on grade two, and my overcast negatives on three, to give my scenes the last bit of help when printing... I understand what lots of people do: they develop a film at just one development time, they include sunny and overcast scenes(!), and they end up with too contrasty sunny negatives and too flat overcast negatives, and then they abuse filters or photoshop, and anyway their sunny images have too dense shadows and their overcast scenes weak tonal separation.
Overcast scenes require a lot more development than sunny ones, and not just a bit more: they really need a tough development so their flat tonal range becomes separated on negatives... And as sunny scenes require a lot more exposure to fill the shadows with rich detail closer to human view, they need a lot less development than overcast ones to control their much higher natural contrast and the huge exposure...
Again: when I develop a sunny roll, and then an overcast roll, and I place both of them on a light table, both show a precise and identical use of the whole tonal range negatives can give, with whites clearly differentiated from high grays. And as I don't use autoexposure and don't mix different contrast scenes, my contact sheets show 36 perfectly exposed and printed frames. This is what real LF black and white photographers do: developing each scene depending on its contrast, and not using "one single development time for everything".
Recommendation: shoot a roll of Tri-X on overcast scenes metered incident at ISO 200. Develop it in Rodinal 1+50 at 18ºC for 25 minutes with three inversions every minute, and come back and tell me how your negatives came. What can you lose, a roll? You can win a lot.
Cheers,
Juan
