Semistand/EMA At 4 Years

[chuckroast]

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:

tundra/Stand-Development

gitbucket.tundraware.com

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 just wanted to do my photographic work and see what combinations of things showed promise. The ones that did, I pursued more deeply, the ones that did not, I ignored thereafter.

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.

AS ALWAYS YMMV (but I am happy to entertain questions or discussion).

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

It's pretty hard to beat Pyrocat_HD or HDC when it comes to semi-stand/EMA. HP5 sheet film responds exceptionally well to it. I've also gotten excellent results with TMY-2.
Thank you for posting your thoughts on this topic! Mod Hat on: Hopefully some bonehead won't come in and ruin the thread. Mod Hat off.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Mod Hat back on: Okay, bonehead was a bit strong.

 

[koraks]

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.

W.r.t resolving power, what doesn't work to the advantage of Fomapan 200 is its mediocre antihalation in 35mm. It's a totally different animal from 4x5" foma 200 in that sense. Which makes the comparison a little tricky IMO.
Btw, how did you assess/measure resolving power and how do you define it for your own purposes?

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.

How do you define 'optimally sharp' in this context? I've gone through some double x myself over the last year and I can't really complain of sharpness in the meaning of acutance. But it's pretty grainy and doesn't render a whole lot of fine detail for a film of this speed. Are we talking about the same?
I do notice it makes a lot of difference how it's developed; it looks quite different to me in parodinal vs. xtol vs. pyrocat.

presumably because of the rapidity of superadditive devlopment

Pyrocat HD is a superadditive developer just the same. Hydroquinone and pyrocatechol are very closely related molecules; both are superadditive with metol (pyrocat M-variants) and phenodine ('vanilla' pyrocat HD). Dilution indeed is key since the idea behind the high-acutance nature of reduced agitation development is to exhaust the developer locally.

I personally don't do much stand/semi-stand; I do sometimes develop esp. 35mm film with 3 minute agitation intervals, which is generally a safe practice in terms of avoiding uneven development.

 

[chuckroast]

Mod Hat back on: Okay, bonehead was a bit strong.

It was perfect.

 

[chuckroast]

W.r.t resolving power, what doesn't work to the advantage of Fomapan 200 is its mediocre antihalation in 35mm. It's a totally different animal from 4x5" foma 200 in that sense. Which makes the comparison a little tricky IMO.

I was unaware of this difference, thanks.

Btw, how did you assess/measure resolving power and how do you define it for your own purposes?

For my purposes, I think of resolving power as the ability of the film to hold fine detail. For example,
leaves on trees at a distance.

How do you define 'optimally sharp' in this context? I've gone through some double x myself over the last year and I can't really complain of sharpness in the meaning of acutance. But it's pretty grainy and doesn't render a whole lot of fine detail for a film of this speed. Are we talking about the same?
I do notice it makes a lot of difference how it's developed; it looks quite different to me in parodinal vs. xtol vs. pyrocat.

With Double X, I found - as you mention - that it does not hold fine detail well. I probably shouldn't have written "optimally" sharp, just ... sharp. I actually found Double X to be (subjectively) sharper in D-76 1+1 developed conventionally than in Pyrocat-HD[C] low agitation. But I abandoned it as a film shortly thereafter (having shot hundreds of images through 100' of bulk') since I found Fomapan 200 to be noticeably 'better'.

Pyrocat HD is a superadditive developer just the same. Hydroquinone and pyrocatechol are very closely related molecules; both are superadditive with metol (pyrocat M-variants) and phenodine ('vanilla' pyrocat HD).

Interesting, again, something of which I was unaware.

Dilution indeed is key since the idea behind the high-acutance nature of reduced agitation development is to exhaust the developer locally.

Stipulated. When I got D-76 out to about 1+4 it behaved better in this regard at the expense of more pronounced visible grain in 35mm negatives (this was expected).

HC-110 was a challenge even at 1+128. I got very printable negatives but big SBRs made those negatives very dense. I am pretty sure this was attributable to standing in developer for way too long. The greater curiosity was that even with Arista 100 rollfilm, this scheme yielded more grain than I wanted. Probably dialing back standing time would address both issues.

But taking DK-50 down to even 1+3 still gave me harsher contrast than I like. I have lots of it here and may explore it further because DK-50 gave me killer edge effects with 4x5 Fomapan 200. I think part of the problem is - again - excessive standing time.

I personally don't do much stand/semi-stand; I do sometimes develop esp. 35mm film with 3 minute agitation intervals, which is generally a safe practice in terms of avoiding uneven development.

I've done a lot partially because of this multi-year curiosity adventure I have been on. I will say that, once I more or less dialed it in, I found it to be very forgiving and allowed me to shoot most SBRs at box speed and not have think about it deeply like Zone System demands.

As an aside, far and away the best results I got as defined by sharpness, dynamic range management, and tonal rendering was with the Efke PL100M, R100 family of films. It is tragic this stuff no longer exists. I shot both rollfilm and sheetfilm in 2x3 variants of this and developed in Pyrocat-HD[C] and the images were really great. I have a ton of it squirreled away in 2x3 but only one box fo 4x5 remains. It is ironic that was essentrially a consumer "drugstore" film, was actually a superb emulsion. I do have a bunch of Adox CHS 100 II here in both 2x3 and 4x5 and this is rumoured to be the Efke successor, but I have yet to get to it.

My most recent foray has been to find the sweet spot of FP4+ and the results have been just terrific. Properly handled, it delivers stunning semistand results.

Thanks for your comments.

P.S. @Andrew O'Neill doesn't like boneheads

 

[pentaxuser]

Mod Hat back on: Okay, bonehead was a bit strong.

No offence taken, Andrew. Physiologically speaking we are all boneheads as members of Homo Sapiens , aren't we?

pentaxuser

 

[mzjo]

This post comes at a very timely moment as I have just started using/playing a bit with stand so I will be trying to follow and understand the results here (and avoid going too much into the detail of all these films and developers I don't know). For the moment I restrict myself to Foma FP100 for film and Rodinal for developer (the FP100 is my usual go to film that I get in bulk, being not rich). I use a piece of plastic waste pipe under the spiral to keep a good volume underneath (I don't think I have ever seen this advised, it just seemed like a good idea) and the Rodinal is diluted 1+100. 1 hour development with no agitation apart from at the start. So far so good!

Jo