Adox HR50 + D76 + Multigrade Ilford + Multigrade Developer How to achieve this ?

I am using Leica lenses and cameras for 33 years and I was getting from ordinary photo boots below quality.
I am not able to get same quality for last 10 years , today never ! I never developed 35mm film in 30 years.

I found below image from Adox HR50 advertisement. I can invade a country for that quality. I have d76 and how should I expose and develop ?

What I'm seeing in that image is strong composition that relies on fortunate lighting, as well as a strong dose of vignetting that was undoubtedly added in digital post processing. Exposure was probably on the short side for this film (which will probably struggle to reach actual 50 ISO), but the photographer chose to allow large sections to drop away into pure black here and personally I think it doesn't hurt.

The magic is not in how the film was developed - and also not in what film was used to begin with. This photographer would likely have achieved the same with a camera loaded with, say Fomapan 100.

As so often, what matters is what you point the camera at. The rest is just going through the motions.

HR-50 is great for this type of high contrast look. It needs to be exposed a little bit more accurately than other films but I always say it makes 35mm look like medium format, and half-frame look like full-frame.

I'd expose it for a narrower latitude than other films. I try not to overexpose the highlights more than 2 stops with it. In that way I'd say it's at a midpoint between how you treat normal B&W and how you treat slide film.

For the image posted, a person could meter the inside of that building, then the outside. If the difference in readings is more than 2 stops, go with the outside reading +2 stops overexposure. Or just use your in-camera light meter and rate it at 50, it works most of the time.

Development: I use Rodinal since it still retains a fine grain. 1+25 10 minutes 22C semi-stand development. 30 seconds initial agitation, one gentle turn at 5 minutes.

D-76 might give a little more contrast than Rodinal semi-stand so be careful, I think you can still get it to work okay though.

I’ve seen other posts were people are using Rodinal to develop HR-50. On the HR-50 info sheet it says Rodinal is not recommended.


I’ve been using Ilford dd-x iso 50

What film are you using?

I saw on the datasheet that Rodinal is not recommended as well, but it really does work great on it in the unusual 1+25 dilution. Rudiger Hartung's recipe.

I've also seen decent results on it with HC-110 and may try that soon.

Adox does make its own specific developer for it. Also note that Adox Scala 50 is exactly the same film, so if you find that at a better price you should buy it instead.