Pyro developer stain impacting VC Paper use?

I should say that most of my comments here are of academic interest. I don't have any bones to pick with photographers about most anything except, sometimes, the rationale for certain conclusions. Some old time photographers, I'm told, had secrets they took to their graves. If in fact they were the kind anyone else could have made use of is moot. Whatever they did, it worked. Chances are, their secret was eye, hand and perseverence as much as anything.

To return to the original question, one thing that can be expected (in my limited experience) is that the VC filter series will behave differently from what the manufacturer intended if the negative has stain typical of PMK. The contrast may be very nonlinear with respect to filter number, and printing time will change much more with a change in filter than it should with an unstained negative.

For Ilford MG-IV Warmtone in Dektol, the #2 filter is about as soft as can be effectively used unless split-filter printing; it seems to be very difficult to get decent blacks with #1-1/2 and lower without muddy highlights and midtones, even on negatives that seem too contrasty for #2. Adjusting film development so that the "normal" negative prints "normally" on #2-1/2 seems to work out best; it is then possible to hold texture in the highlights of a white wedding dress, and simultaneously keep the texture in the groom's black tux.

I don't recall this being an issue back when I was using Kodak Polymax Fine-Art, so there may be additional variation across the range of papers currently available. Other staining developers will presumably have their own particular printing behaviors, because of differences in stain color.

I should point out that scanning the neg as color can also help show that the effect of pyro on a VC print is not uniform in a way that I do not think can be duplicated by any other means. I showed that a pyro-stained negative printed as a color negative would have a magenta tone. The negative of that would be mostly blue, but bluest where the density is greatest. I think the only way to get this effect from an unstained negative is to use the bleach-and-redevelop technique to convert it by redeveloping it in a pyrogallol or catechol developer. The effect of the magenta filter on the pyro negative is to increase contrast more in the shadows than in the highlights. You cannot get the same effect on an unstained negative by combining the magenta and yellow filters of the MG set.

If you want to understand how pyro works as a film developer read The Book of Pyro by Gordon Hutchings. This is the definitive work on the subject. As a secondary source read the article on staining developers in an earlier issue of View Camera.

steve simmons
www.viewcamera.com

You could also look up the article "More Pyrotechnics", Photo Techniques, Vol. 21, Number 2, 2000 by Pat Gainer.