More fun with ridiculous pushes: HP5+ in Super Soup

I've had fairly good luck with Tri-X in Donald Qualls's "Super Soup" developer, a mixture of Dektol, HC-110, ascorbic acid, and sodium carbonate. He gets something like EI 6400-12800 with a 15-minute developing time; I've been using 12 minutes for EI 3200. The results seem much better than they "should" be, in terms of grain, contrast, and tonality; not "it doesn't look pushed" better, but certainly "it doesn't beat you over the head with grain the size of city blocks" better.

Unfortunately, I have an inexplicable problem loading Tri-X in 120 onto reels, and I was losing one or two frames out of every roll, so I thought I'd try the soup with HP5+ and see what kind of speed I thought was workable. I shot a roll of 12 exposures, 3 each at EI 1600, 3200, 6400, and 12800, and developed for 15 minutes with vigorous agitation every 30 seconds.

The attachment shows one frame of each speed, straight out of the scanner. It's pretty clear that 12800 is too ambitious, as I expected, but the other three seem quite usable---6400 loses some shadow detail and would probably be too grainy for big enlargements, though. 3200 seems to be the sweet spot. 1600 is kind of flat but not disastrous, and might print better than it scanned.

There are a few more photos, in postprocessed form, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ntenny/sets/72157620654443216/.

Considering the extreme speeds, I think these results are pretty good. It's certainly a usable combination for "available darkness" shooting.

-NT

Very neat. Even 12500 looks ok to me except for the grain.

Could you post the recipe again? Do you agitate?

Most of my 35mm cameras' meters only go up to 1600. How do you meter for 12,500; do you have a good handheld meter?

They all look usable if printed properly. 3200 does look the best though. Interesting experiment!

BetterSense said:

Most of my 35mm cameras' meters only go up to 1600. How do you meter for 12,500; do you have a good handheld meter?

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I'm sure you can extrapolate.

Well if the camera has a manual mode, you can swag with the match-needle up to 2 stops usually. But on an auto-exposure camera, you are kind of out of luck.

I don't believe in cameras without manual modes, personally. I used a (meterless) Rolleiflex for this roll; I just metered at 1600 using a DSLR, then adjusted by one more stop for each subsequent set of shots. The room has pretty consistent lighting---basically, there's a "bright" area, a "medium" area, and a "dim" area, all about a stop apart---so there wasn't that much information to keep in my head.

Here's the recipe (taken from http://silent1.home.netcom.com/Photography/Dilutions%20and%20Times.html#Super_Soup, and doubled for a 16-ounce tank):

12 oz. DIH2O
48 ml Dektol stock
16 ml HC-110 syrup (US version)
2 g ascorbic acid
1 tsp. sodium carbonate
More water to 16 oz.

15 minutes developing time, vigorous agitation every 30 seconds.

Yes, that is in fact four separate developing agents: metol, hydroquinone, phenidone, and ascorbic acid. (I suppose I could add some coffee as well...) The negatives look neat; there's just a little general fog, but the blacks are REALLY REALLY BLACK, which makes them look denser on the whole than they are and gives a sort of high-contrast impression, even though the actual contrast range doesn't seem that extreme. Even the edge printing looks blacker and sharper than usual.

It'd be interesting to understand this developer better---my impression is that it was a sort of ad-hoc preparation and has never been really fine-tuned. For instance, I wonder if all those developers are really playing a significant role, or if the boost in pH from the washing soda is really necessary. (This is basically HC-110 dilution A, mixed with Dektol 1+9 instead of water, plus vitamin C, so shouldn't it already be plenty alkaline?)

-NT

I think the 12.5k shot looks pretty good. I'd certainly be happy with that. For an unbiased opinion, you should ask Ornello on the digital truth forum

BetterSense said:

Most of my 35mm cameras' meters only go up to 1600. How do you meter for 12,500; do you have a good handheld meter?

Click to expand...

With a Canon A-1 you can set the meter to 12800

Those tests look good !!

Where are the comparison pictures? Like, how is that any better than HC110 alone?

Wow, how interesting. Sounds like a "throw developers against the wall and see what sticks" formula. Maybe he's onto something, but I can't for the life of me see how combining all those chemistries would make something better. That no one has figured out previously.