Saturday, December 23, 2006

Frederic Harster Photos/ Neopan 400 test




Thank you Fred for sharing your data and images. Scanning is a subject about which I know very little and I appreciate the opportunity to learn from those more experienced than myself.

Data

Fuji Neopan 400

EI : 200
rotary process (CPE2+) @20°C
presoak : 5mn in distilled water
dev time : 8mn (1:100 - for 300ml total)
double fixing bath (4'/3')
wash in distilled water (20mn)

Negatives scanned

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi all,

Jay and I welcome any experience you might have regarding this film & 510-Pyro. The one stop speed loss was a surprise and asks for some complementary data.
Please bear in mind this is my first attempt at developing stained negatives. My only evaluation tool is a film scanner, not wet printing.

Dan said...

I am also leaning to think that there is a speed and highlight density loss with my batch of 510-pyro. The Tri-X I developed yesterday had a rather thin leader. I am still learning, but the negatives look rather flat, and remind me of XP2. The grain is very, very fine for 400 speed film.

jdef said...

Remember that some of the highlight density is made up of stain, which is transparent to the eye, but opaque to printing paper. One reason 510-Pyro negs are so fine grained is because the printing density is partly made up of grainless stain.

Dan, how are you printing, or are you printing?

Dan said...

Not printing yet. Scanning. Will try printing them hopefully in a week or so. So should I conclude that scanning is useless with pyro negs?

Anonymous said...

Dan,
I too have experienced the thin leader/flat neg result despite an increase in the recommended dev time. Can you share you dev data (EI, time, process, etc) with us please ?
Did you manage to get box speed with some other films already ?
I'm about to give tri-x a try after my - minor - disappointment with neopan.
Thanks.

jdef said...

Hi Guys.

Film speed is detrmined by the slope of the toe region and tied to contrast. "Normal" contrast is tied to the enlarger light source. For a negative to print with normal contrast on a grade 2 paper with an ES of approx. .1, it will require a CI of .42 for condenser enlargers, and .58 for diffuse enlargers. The negative developed for printing with a diffuse enlarger will be more developed, and show a higher effective film speed than the one developed for printing with a condenser enlarger. For those of you scanning your negatives, how do you scale your negatives? What CI do you shoot for, and how do you measure it? If we are to compare film speeds, we need some point of reference.

Anonymous said...

Hi Jay,
I go for a CI between 0.55 and 0.6. I plot the characteristic curve with scanner readings after an exposure lock. My 0.1 above b+f is an approximation from the b+f value.
However I use the simple method, not kodak one with 2 arcs.