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Strong Wild Agitation and Soft Agitation Difference ?

Mustafa Umut Sarac

Member
Allowing Ads
Joined
Oct 29, 2006
Messages
4,941
Location
İstanbul
Format
35mm
My photography course lecturer - she never lectures , only develop print film - suggested to the listeners wild strong agitation. I dont know why but within that period , nobodys got beatiful images , I got a new minolta 7xi with 28-80 power zoom and circular kenko polarizer and applied 1 minute soft agitation at the start and two soft inversions per 30 seconds and we got the sharpest negatives with fomapan 100 and 1+1 d76 11 minutes.
Did soft agitation saved the day ?
 
With intermittent agitation schemes (i.e. one cycle every 30-60-90 seconds) it doesn't really make a difference whether agitation is wild or gentle.

Too gentle agitation can result in effectively insufficient/no agitation, but you'd have to be reaaaallly gentle to get that.
Too wild agitation can result in damage to the film as it shifts on the reels. But you have to be reeaaaalllly wild to get that.
So in practice, there's a very wide bandwidth that results in virtually identical outcomes.

The reason your classmates got poor photos is likely elsewhere. Prime suspects are:
1: What they pointed the camera at
2: Whether they used the light meter in a competent manner
 
Define "beautiful." Do you mean sharp? Tonality? Are you asking whether images are less sharp due to agitation strength?