Help please - Ilford HP3 plates, exposing and developing

Hi all,

looking for some help if possible with some Ilford HP3 plates I've been given. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience in exposing and developing these very out of date plates and can give me any starting pointers for EI and developing times?

Cheers

Chris

I've not worked with the plate version but the film (4x5 sheet) I bought and used was pretty heavy base fog and I exposed it at about EI100 or EI50 something like that, to try to overcome the basefog. I've forgotten which developer now, oddly...

I bought some HP3 plates a year or more back, 6.5 x 9cm size.
They were heavily age fogged; I took one straight from the pack & processed it & it came out black. That's probably the simplest way to find out what condition they're in.
If there's only a slight amount of base fog you could try photographing with them & add some benzotriazole to the dev.
For EI I would start around 6 ISO & dev roughly the same as HP5 in whatever chemistry you're using. The first couple are always a calculated gamble to zero in on the correct settings.

I've always processed severely out-of-date materials in HC-110, for its fog-control properties. Nothing does magic in this respect, of course, but I've gotten workable results with plates as old as 60-65 years. It's probably a good idea to use a fairly high dilution for the sake of a longer dev time, so that misjudgements become less drastic.

Personally, I wouldn't burn a plate by developing it blank---better to take a flyer at exposure and development times in the hopes of getting something, IMHO.

<Dead Link Removed> has a collection of general suggestions on developing old film, and looks like it might make interesting reading anyway.

-NT

ntenny said:

Personally, I wouldn't burn a plate by developing it blank---better to take a flyer at exposure and development times in the hopes of getting something, IMHO.

Click to expand...

I agree with you there & my story was a bit simplified. When I got the HP3 plates the first thing I did was expose one in the camera & it came out completely black. So then I took one straight from the pack & processed it & that also came out black. It was more to confirm that the problem was with the plates rather than something I had done.

According to my old ID-11 data sheet:

HP3 plates:
ID-11 (stock), 20C, 7 min (continuous agitation) or 9 min (intermittent agitation)

For 9 min (intermittent agitation) it says for higher contrast the time should be increased by one-third.

These should be adequate starting points,

Aron