Best for pull process.

Any thoughts on best film developer for pull process. I want to shoot some FP4+ about 4 stops over and pull process the film. Currently I use D76 or XTOL and sometimes WD2D+. I also plan on doing some selective bleaching on the prints to bring out detail.

Doing this you need a developer that can be strongly diluted, so that you don't get developing times that are too short (trying to avoid uneven development). Both D76 and Xtol can be diluted as far as 1+3, which should give you sufficiently long exposure times.

Out of curiosity, are you shooting extreme contrast lighting scenarios? If not, what do you hope to gain doing this? I'm sure you have a great reason, I'm just interested in learning.

- Thomas

Thank you Thomas. I am going to be shooting some still lifes with lots of contrast as well as developing some high contrast negs for another photographer who doesn't develop his own film or do his own printing. It seems to me that I have been erring on the underexposure side for to long and want to shoot the moon on exposure to see if I can get what I want for printing. I'm a bit more of a printer than anything else. I also have a habit of shooting, because of the work schedule, in the middle of the day in bright sunlight.

Bright sunlight might not have as much contrast as you think. Keep that in mind. I doubt you'll have to overexpose four stops to capture 99% of brightness ranges out there. You may want to try bracketing from +4 stops to box speed and see which negative gives you 'enough' shadow speed in the situations you encounter.

But I understand what you're saying about capturing very wide brightness ranges. Any developer should be OK for this, as long as you can dilute the developer enough to make the development time more than about six minutes or so.

Good luck,

- Thomas