[pres589]

I just started developing film and I picked Clayton F76+ (which for sake of brevity I will often refer to as "F76"). So far I am enjoying it quite a bit. Anyone that uses F76 can contribute to this thread. I hope it's educational; there not a ton of examples of pictures developed with F76 vs. the more well known developers. I'll start;



Took this with my K 35 f2 and Ricoh XR7. Ilford HP5 with an EI of 1600. Developed traditionally with the roll spending 13 minutes in the soup. Hand held shot, I think 1/8th of a second, with me bracing myself against a phone pole. Taken at f2. Subject: an alley off of Mass. St., Lawrence KS.



Same roll, same development process, taking with my M 50 1.4 and the XR7 again. 1/30th of a second at f1.4. Subject: Pool table & piano at the Ragin' Bull, a bar in Pawnee City NE.

[stevebrot]

Excellent idea! #1 above is spot on. Good work. Do you have any comments regarding grain?


Steve

[pres589]

It's nearly grainless. It's crazy how smooth this combination is. These are both from that same roll as the street sign shot in the other thread. I'm going to try and work on how to push this another stop at some point in the near future.

This is going pretty well. The top shot got a bit more tweaking with the sliders in Lightroom. The bottom was a very fast job.

[pres589]

Today I put new light seals and did a quick cleaning on a friend's Minolta XG-M. Came with a Minolta 50mm f2 lens. It's an interesting camera, with a 'touch sensitive" light meter activation on the shutter, and requires batteries to shoot. I ran a roll of Kodak Ultramax through it just to look for light leaks and get a feel for how this camera is to shoot. I mostly like it, actually a lot, but in Auto mode it has a weird shutter lag at times that I think is due to the light meter being slow. Roll was shot at ISO 800 on the camera.

I know from previous experience that Ultramax, shot at box speed, needs about 7 minutes of traditional 1+9 soup and 20 degrees C dev time to come out decently. So why not try stand development!



I measured out 8ml of F76 concentrate, added in 450ml of water, and let it rip. 30 seconds of initial agitation, followed by 15 minutes of rest (so this is semi-stand and not true stand development), then turn of the tank over and back again. Did that for a total of 46 minutes, then normal stop/fix/bath.

This really didn't work out very well. Most of the frames are nearly blank. Some frames in the middle of the roll did come out, and those were really thin. This was one of the best and it still took a lot of playing with sliders in Lightroom to get here. There's not black and white conversion here so the shift to tan is part of the negative.

The goal was a bit of a push with controlled grain. The grain isn't bad; Ultramax can get pretty grainy. That said, I think this method needs a lot of work, or else I should just stick to normal development. I think with F76 stand development is probably not a great idea.

[pres589]

Kodak Tri-X 400 pushed to 1600 this time. Dev time of 14.5 minutes at 21 degrees C with a traditional development scheme (30 seconds initial agitation, then 10 seconds of agitation every minute after that). These edited very nicely. A touch more grain than HP5+ from what I've seen so far.



1/15th of a second, f2 with the K 35mm f2 on my Ricoh XR7



1/30th of a second, f2 on my K 35mm f2.

[pres589]

So for further fun with Tri-X 400, I thought I'd try a three stop push, for an EI of 3200. And then the clouds and the rain came and didn't give me a good bright scene to work with. No matter, I gave it a shot. For development, I again used the usual 1+9 dilution at 20 degrees C. 21 minutes in the soup with 30 seconds initial agitation, 10 seconds gentle agitation every minute, pretty much my usual. Set the camera to 3200 ISO with +/- 0 EV adjust and went out. Here's how that went.



Quick work like usual. This was at 6 PM on a cloudy day so it's not really good photography weather. Still, it's usable. And the grain has come out of hiding. Here's a 100% blow up from the center of the frame;



So this was looking good, all things said and done, and then I got to the pictures I took last night of the family cat. This... isn't so great.



The thing is, we've got whites to blacks, with many shades of gray in the middle. It just seems underexposed. I admit to having the camera in Auto mode when I took this and it seemed optimistic to me at 1/60th of a second. 1/30th was probably better, and this was with an f2.8 max prime, so I think this was the camera's meter being overly optimistic again. Happens.

Overall I think this is decent although obviously a lot more grain than when I pushed to 1600 last time around.

p.s. I keep getting water streaks on the negatives, second time in a row that water just ran down the negative and then 'froze' there. I need to change up how I'm using the wetting agent & water mixture after the final rinse under the tap.

[Vendee]

p.s. I keep getting water streaks on the negatives, second time in a row that water just ran down the negative and then 'froze' there. I need to change up how I'm using the wetting agent & water mixture after the final rinse under the tap.

Looking for a liquid film dev. with results like D-76? - Page 4 - PentaxForums.com

[pres589]

Vendee, thanks for the input, I've been trying something similar to what you're suggesting and will share a picture of my setup when I get there. It's... very much a bathroom situation.

[pres589]

Vendee, I did exactly what you suggested, or close. A couple of nights ago I developed a roll of film. I did a 10 minute final rinse under a slow running tap into the tank. Dumped that, refilled with a mix of distilled water and wetting agent (a few drops of agent, probably 400ml of distilled water) and did 50 inversions. Dumped that, hung up the negative from a shower curtain rod, with one clip at the bottom hanging from a shoe string so the negative was around 30 to 40 degrees inclined.

Water marks running down the negative. Crud.

Last night I re-mounted the negative on the development spool and placed it in the tank. Refilled the tank with wetting agent and added maybe a teaspoon of stop agent. This was due to online reading about stop helping remove deposits from negatives. Swished that mess around for a couple of minutes and pulled the reel out. Tried to shake the water out of the film while still mounted to the reel. Took sting, wrapped that around the shower rod, and put four negative clips along the rod to hang the film horizontally. The thought was, maybe the water will run off the negative to the sprocket holes along the bottom edge, and having short distance to travel would help that along.

No, I still have water marks, only this time they look different. And bigger. So at this point I'm really doubting my whole setup as far as the rinse / wash is concerned. This evening I will try to clean the negative using anti-stat and a microfiber cloth. Not looking forward to this.

[pres589]

Okay, enough of this water spot nonsense, let's develop some film in Clayton F76! Like this stuff, Delta 400.



I used the exact developing instructions from the Massive Dev Chart for a one-stop push. K 35 f2 @ f2, 1/8th of a second, shot hand-held with the help of the SELF function on my XR7.





I took this with my M 50 f1.4 @ f2, 1/15th of a second. Seems a bit over-exposed, I had to tweak the sliders a bit in Photoshop to get here.

So far I'm okay with Delta 400 but it seems a little flat somehow, if that makes sense. I've got a bunch of it so here's to seeing what I can get out of it. More pushing is in store.

[pres589]

New roll of Delta 400. This was developed per the MDC for a two-stop push.



Main Street, Seneca, KS. Grain is out, again, but not crazy.



I don't do black & white conversions of the images in this thread and this one shows that. Shot in low light.



It's the internet so here's a cat picture.

[pres589]

I've been doing a lot of really low light shooting with no flash and just a bottle of Clayton F76 to guide me. Let's see how that's been going;



Thought I'd try pushing Tri-X 400 a little farther than previous; EI 3200, a three stop push. 30 second initial agitation, followed with 10 seconds of inversions every minute for 19 total minutes.

Another shot from that roll;



So what about Delta 400 also metered to an EI of 3200 for a three stop push? This took 17.5 minutes, with a 30 second initial agitation and then 10 seconds of inversions every minute like usual. It seems to be working alright.



It maintains decent detail and it's not overly grainy.



This next one was also from the roll of Delta 400. Taken with my Kiron 28mm f2.0, I think at set to f2.4, for approx. 30 seconds;



I'll freely admit that this last one came out really thin and took more playing with the sliders in Lightroom than I'd like.

[pres589]

Anyone have requests? Like trying to push Foma 400 in F76? Pulling (lord help me) a stop from T-Max 400? Some other nonsense? I've got another roll of Ultramax 400 that I want to try to stand develop again but no other weirdness planned really, just more pushing 400 ISO film about three stops and seeing what clicks. Any comments? Anyone?

[brofkand]

What are you using to scan these images

[pres589]

DSLR copying done with my K-5 II and a Kino Precision nee Ricoh 105mm f2.8 Macro lens. I built a tray / light guide setup that stands on top of an LED light box. A tripod holds the K-5 II point downward. It works pretty well although the tray assembly isn't attached to the camera in any way so I have to check the negative's squaredness against the camera. Focusing done in Live View, usually with an 8x or 10x magnification, with grain serving as a guide to assure focus. Lightroom and Photoshop Elements for processing with Photoshop really only being used for rotation and cropping and dust etc removal.