Choresday, which is the day before Thursday, which is also a chores day in early winter
While doing wood pile chores I made a few snapshots with the tiny Retina, which is giving sharper results with every film used, or I am getting used to it
I cut a 21ex length exposed at 40asa into three portions for development in replenished D76d for 5 mins at 20 degrees, Leitz two bath, basically D23ish followed by an alkali bath and Rodinal 1:100 plus one small dead spider per 300ml for half an hour
Results
Two bath gives what appears to be the nicest negs, that was 3 mins in sol'n A with almost constant aggravation at 20 degrees, followed by a still bath of sulphite and carbonate for four mins to bring up the shadows
The Rodinal at 1:100 is almost as soft as the two bath - I am aware I was only processing a small portion of film, so it was not getting ad knackered as it would with 36ex in the same amount of dev' - I will have to do more work to determine the effect of dead spiders on the results
Looked at wet the D76d is still too harsh for real use even down to 5 mins dev' and the other two are usable
Note on the developers
The D76dwas made up in 1985 and has been very carefully replenished ever since, with regular zone VII tests to check its quality
The Leitz two bath from the BKP Almanac 1954 is 5g Metol, 100g Sulphite to 1000ml water, bath two is 6g Sulphite, 15g Carbonate to 1000ml water - I dev'd 4 miins with serious agitation in the first bath followed by 5 mins in bath two with no agitation at all - The idea is that the highlights develop in the first bath and the shadows build up in bath two - The metol in the highlights quickly exhausts, hence no agitation in B2
The spider in the Rodinal 1:100 was not intentional - I have not used Rodinal for about 20 years, so tried it for half an hour with one minute serious agitation followed by abandoning it on the back of the wet bench for the rest of the time[/B]
Pix later, after the negs are dry
