fuji across and woods...

I would have loved to continue using Fuji Acros, but I cannot get it in sheet film for a reasonable price, and I want the same film for 35mm, MF, and LF.
Mind you, that's the only reason. I love the range of Acros, but I have had negatives with blown out highlights more than once due to careless development. I second the notion of John Simmons that generous exposure in the shadows is necessary to get an easily printable negative. I developed in Rodinal 1+100 for 12 minutes with agitation every minute at 68*F and got very helpful negatives.
One scene was of a dark tree with bark details in the shadows, with a brightly lit landscape in the background. I gave a lot of exposure to render detail in the foreground bark, and held back development a little, and got a negative that printed with a full range of detail from sky in the background to bark in the foreground shade on a grade 2 paper.
I think the film development in this case is a do-over. I think gainer's advice sounds reasonable. Bracket the exposures until the shadow detail looks right, then adjust development time until the highlights look good. It's a capable film, no doubt about it.
- Thomas

Thomas Bertilsson said:

I would have loved to continue using Fuji Acros, but I cannot get it in sheet film for a reasonable price, and I want the same film for 35mm, MF, and LF. - Thomas

Click to expand...

I bought it from Dead Link Removed
It's not that cheap as ilford fp4+...

Hi,
after some works in the last months i got further on and would like to tell you guys the conclusion of my work.

Because I would like to show on paper what we see with our eyes in nature we only start working at 4 stops scene max. I print on matt paper, so 4 stops would be the max (glossy can held somewhat more).

The darkest shadow area measured was put into zone III.
Looks simple, but this is where often the whole story goes wrong.
When you measure a higher value let's say EV6 in stead of EV5, you will loose all the detail in the shadow. Because of wanting to see some detail, i developed longer to get them out.
But the whole impression of the photo was to dark and did not look like the reality. So be carefull when doing a reading for determining the light conditions...

Besides that when working under red light and turning the daylight on, your eyes find a zone V print OK. But when looking the next day, it looked to dark.
So carefully determining the dried print under daylight is also not to underestimate! For a print on the wall a Zone VI impression is fine, Zone V looks to dark...

I now develop my Across at 10 minutes, pyrocat 1:1:100 tank inversion once a minute and first minute continiously. Film is shot as 100asa.
My negatives look thin, but in the shadows all detail is available. I print at grade 2 - grade 2.5 (0-10 magenta). Sometimes 5 magenta creates the best print compaired to a grade 2 (0 magenta). So finetuning is very important!

After that i used Fp4+(shot as 64) and HP5(shot as 200) for 4.5-5 stops scenes. Developed them at also 10 minutes.
In one pic is still made an error because in a wood scene the sun came at one point through the leaves and hit the ground. I did not see it as a white area, but probably that reflection of leaves causes the area to give more light back as expected. So probably i would have to developed it shorted to get the highlight back in to print properly.

So i should have shortend the development to get the highlight back at a zone VII so that it can be printed... probably to 8 minutes.
At a certain point the Zone III will be to much reduced so that is will be gone. But is this at 6 minutes, 8 minutes? We don't know yet but have to find this out...

So the next step for us is to find the VI,VII,VIII stops scenes development and after that go and shoot...
Scenes of 2 stops i haven't found in nature yet..... Not even when it rains...

Be aware that this is all adjusted at nature. What it does for portrait, stillife etc.. i also have to find out...

acros

acros and rodinal @1:100 is the what works for me. 10:20 in a rotary processor
with a presoak of one minute. I then print on matte grade 3 paper and have never made better photographs. prints like butter....
Best, Peter