A bit over 4 years ago, I descended into a rabbit hole to explore semistand/EMA. There was all manner of debate, discussion and ad hominem about it, I wanted to find out for myself whether "juice was worth the squeeze".
Around that time, I made my lab notes available to anyone else who might want to give this ago. I have maintained these, on- and off, here:
My general goal has been to try these development techniques with a variety of developers (Pyrocat, DK-50, D-76, HC-110, D-23, 510 Pyro, Beutlers) and films (Fomapan 100, Fomapan 200, Efke PL100M, FP 4+, HP5+, Plus-X, Tri-X, TMX, TMY, Agfapan APX 100).
I didn't do this with experimental rigor, a control group, and formal statistical analysis of results from a scanning electron microscope
I say this because these are my subjective anecdotal findings, not a law of nature. I am happy to provide reference images if there are questions, but I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I am just sharing with the class what I have found for myself. Other people trying this stuff likely will have their own results which may well not align with mine. We all work differently.
Takeaways:
Around that time, I made my lab notes available to anyone else who might want to give this ago. I have maintained these, on- and off, here:
My general goal has been to try these development techniques with a variety of developers (Pyrocat, DK-50, D-76, HC-110, D-23, 510 Pyro, Beutlers) and films (Fomapan 100, Fomapan 200, Efke PL100M, FP 4+, HP5+, Plus-X, Tri-X, TMX, TMY, Agfapan APX 100).
I didn't do this with experimental rigor, a control group, and formal statistical analysis of results from a scanning electron microscope
I say this because these are my subjective anecdotal findings, not a law of nature. I am happy to provide reference images if there are questions, but I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I am just sharing with the class what I have found for myself. Other people trying this stuff likely will have their own results which may well not align with mine. We all work differently.
Takeaways:
- How you suspend the film is fundamental to avoiding bromide drag. It has to well above the bottom of the tank and held by either widely spaced reels or with minmal contact clips for sheetfilm. Gravity will do the job, but the more structure that touches the film, the greater the likelihood of developer trapping leading to drag. For reels I do this by placing them on an inverted funnel in a double-height tanks.
- Semistand/EMA will give you very sharp negatives but it is very much film dependent.
- Edge effects seem to me to be more evident with older style films like 4x5 Tri-X 320.
- Fomapan 200 is an excellent film in 4x5 but has observably less resolving power than, say, FP4+ and certainly TMX. This is most noticeable in 35mm. (I had lots of quality problems with F200 in 120, so I no longer touch the stuff.)
- However, 35mm scenes without a ton of detail - like larger geometries found in abstracts - F200 works just swell.
- Similarly, while both Tri-X and HP5+ work well in larger formats, I was unhappy with how they handled scenes with detail, like foilage in 35mm. This likely has nothing to do with semisntand/EMA, but is inherent in their makeup. By comparison TMY in 35mm handles this really well.
- No matter what I did or how I tried, I could not get Double X to give me optimally sharp negatives as compared to Foma 200, FP4+, or TMX. This is kind of a shame because Double X responds really well to Pyro staining.
- Both semistand and EMA (Extreme Minimal Development) give their best outcomes at around 30 min development time, more-or-less, at least for the dilutions I've been using. Going much beyond this tends to create really thick negatives and difficult to print highlights (though the highlight detail is preserved).
- I was able to get very good results with longer semistand times by superdiluting 510 Pyro 1:500 and Pyrocat 1.5:1:300. However, I saw no real reason to do so. They didn't give me markedly different results than my usual Pyrocat-HDC 1.5:1:250.
- While both Pyrocat-HDC and D-23 gave me very good negatives, the Pyrocrat is preferred, particularly for 35mm. The Pyro stain tends to hide film grain very nicely.
- Tri-X in larger formats in Pyrocat-HDC semistand is a joy to behold.
- I found that MQ style developers like DK-50, D-76, and HC-110 do work with these development technques but they tend to deliver harsher contrast, presumably because of the rapidity of superadditive development. The only way I got decent results from them was to highly dilute them.
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