Paper Development Recomendation

Last night I printed my first contact sheet on my 5" 8' x 4" 2' no sink darkroom, the experience was amazing, I used some old chemistry I acquired a year ago with an enlarger I bought. I mixed the chemistry without much consideration, 1 to 9 for the developer, plain sink water for the stop bath and 1 to 9 again for the fixer. I followed Jason Brunner dvd tutorial and exposed the paper for 10 seconds at 5.6, put the paper into the developer and the fucking image came out about right! I bit light on the sides but nice and sharp around the middle of the page.

So right now I am ready to buy fresh new chemistry and fresh new paper to give it a second try. Any recommendations for starters?

Cheers,

Jaime.

Dektol for a paper developer, and any brand of stop bath and rapid fixer will do equally well. Dektol is cheap and an excellent paper developer. Shop for rapid fixer and stop bath by price. They're all more or less the same. For paper, I'd recommend using either Freestyle's Arista.EDU Ultra or Adorama's house brand of RC glossy paper to start. Both are excellent papers, and not terribly expensive. You'll be making plenty of mistakes and there's no point throwing more money into the trash bin than you need to. Some guys will come on and recommend the most expensive papers because they're supposedly "better". Well, sometimes they are, but most of the time they aren't. Some folks will come on and say that you need to use fiber based paper. Nonsense. It's more expensive and a real pain in the ass compared to resin coated papers. Takes forever to wash properly, hogs up chemistry, and never really dries flat.

Dektol sounds great, $2.95 for one liter, can't go wrong with that. Picking up also 100 sheets (8.5x11) of adorama paper for $36

at home I have a 1 Gallon already mixed Kodak rapid fixer I mixed last summer with the intent of being use for film development, can I use the same mix for the paper? Should I put more water into that Gallon? less time fixing it?

Thanks in advance.

jaimeb82 said:

Dektol sounds great, $2.95 for one liter, can't go wrong with that. Picking up also 100 sheets (8.5x11) of adorama paper for $36

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Even chaper if you buy it by the gallon pack. I think a gallon pack is about $6, so for twice the price you get 4x the developer. Don't worry about it going bad, the stuff keeps really well in completely full bottles.

Be advised that the Adorama paper is pretty fast. I get at least 1/2 stop more speed under my enlarger. YMMV, but watch out for that.

you might also contact the photo formulary
and get some ansco 130 ( formulary 130 )
stock solution, lasts over a year. i am still using
some i mixed 12-18 months ago and it works very well ...
paper you might look into photo warehouse ( ultrafine )
they have good deals on paper ( and film! ), and charge very little to ship it.

jaimeb82 said:

at home I have a 1 Gallon already mixed Kodak rapid fixer I mixed last summer with the intent of being use for film development, can I use the same mix for the paper? Should I put more water into that Gallon? less time fixing it?

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

Be sure to test the fixer by dropping some unfixed film and time the film till it clears... Double that time and u have ur fixing time... It's not supposed to last more than a month once diluted... And yes for most Ilford rc paper with fresh fixer 1+9 should fix in about 60 seconds...

jaimeb82 said:

at home I have a 1 Gallon already mixed Kodak rapid fixer I mixed last summer with the intent of being use for film development, can I use the same mix for the paper? Should I put more water into that Gallon? less time fixing it?

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

Yes you can. It is likely still good, though you should test it to be sure. To do the test, take a small piece of film, place 1 drop of fixer on it, and let it sit for 30 seconds. Then immerse the film into a small quantity of fixer and note the time it takes to clear. You can tell that the film is clear when you can no longer distinguish theinitial spot from the rest of the film. Clearing time should be about 2 to 3 minutes in rapid fixer, maybe a bit more depending on the type of film used.

What you should not do is use the same batch of fixer for film and paper. Separate out a batch for film and a batch for paper from the gallon.