Tabular: terrific or terrible? Your opinions, please.

[Craig]

I've just never warmed to it. I suppose if I worked at it I could get nice reusults, but when Ilford is half the price and gives me what I want, I don't have a lot of incentive to try and like T Max!

 

[GregY]

I've just never warmed to it. I suppose if I worked at it I could get nice reusults, but when Ilford is half the price and gives me what I want, I don't have a lot of incentive to try and like T Max!

After years of LF and MF, I'm finding myself using more 35mm again....& TMX has given me very smooth prints in 11" x14"
The minute I pull out the MF.... then FP4+ gives me everything i need.
(old TMX negative, incident metering, Leica & 35mm Summicron....print on Foma Variant, Ansco 130.. 11x14" print

 

[Craig]

After years of LF and MF, I'm finding myself using more 35mm again....& TMX has given me very smooth prints in 11" x14"

Somewhat surprisingly, probably my best print is from a 35mm neg on HP5. I have 3 framed 11x14 prints on my wall, all side by side. One is a 35mm HP5 neg, one is 6x9 Delta 400 and the final one is 4x5" Delta 100.

I've had a number of experienced photographers look at them and so far nobody had been able to guess the formats correctly. The stars aligned that day for the 35mm exposure, it's beautiful tone and virtually grainless.

 

[GregY]

Somewhat surprisingly, probably my best print is from a 35mm neg on HP5. I have 3 framed 11x14 prints on my wall, all side by side. One is a 35mm HP5 neg, one is 6x9 Delta 400 and the final one is 4x5" Delta 100.

I've had a number of experienced photographers look at them and so far nobody had been able to guess the formats correctly. The stars aligned that day for the 35mm exposure, it's beautiful tone and virtually grainless.

As an aside...I've used lots of HP5, in all formats and sold lots of big prints from those negatives, but i've never warmed to that film. I'll take Tri-X of any era in a heartbeat. I guess there's no accounting for what moves us.

 

[Craig]

I'm gunshy on Tri-X. I had a bulk roll and it reticulated badly. I developed a roll of HP5 and a roll of Tri-X in the same Paterson tank and the Kodak reticulated and the Ilford was fine. I've avoided Tri-X after that.

 

[aparat]

How are you making the exposures? Acros II is orthopancromatic which means you're going to get very different results depending on your light source. My results (that I published over in the resources section, somebody else has already linked to it in this thread) show a very different ISO performance, but I used a full spectrum daylight source. If your light source is tungsten based (or in that same range) or just doesn't have a lot of blue in it, you'll get different behavior. In my experience, full panchromatic films respond much the same no matter the light source, at least the difference is small enough it could be chalked up to statistical error, but other films that have responses that aren't full panchromatic tend to exhibit different behavior depending on the spectrum of the light.

Thank you for bringing light quality up. It is a problem that affects most sensitometers.

I have two sensitometers. One is a professional model, calibrated and certified, with a "white" LED light source. However, it is not ideal for two important reasons: (1) exposure level is fixed, and (2) the proximity of the light source to the film plane is so close that the diffusion mechanism in the sensitometer does not perfectly spread light intensity over the entire step tablet. It's a minor effect, but it can skew the shape of the curves somewhat. I wanted to avoid that since we are comparing films here in this thread.

The other device I use is not professionally calibrated. I "calibrated" it myself using equipment I rented to make sure that it gives reasonably accurate exposure. It is a flaw of the system, no doubt. The light source is incandescent with an 80A filter in the light path. This device has flexible exposure control, including a reasonably accurate shutter, so this is the one I used for this project. I wanted to use three different levels of exposure, as I was testing eight films simultaneously. This type of light source was fairly common in the sensitometers used in 1950s and 1960s when most of the seminal work in sensitometry took place, and was found to require a 1.3 multiplier for some films when calculating film speed. The reasoning is that, as you pointed out, outdoor daylight can be more actinic than most, if not all, sensitometer light sources. Perhaps Acros II requires such a multiplier to be applied. However, this would require further work. I am planning to retest Acros II, anyway, so I will try to explore this idea.

I am curious as to what kind of light source your sensitometer uses. Perhaps it can be adapted to a commercially available medical model, such as those made by X-Rite, and thus solve the light source problem once and for all. When I was researching light sources a while back, I found that it was difficult to obtain a true full-spectrum performance, i.e., with a an even spectral distribution, from currently available sources, without a significant cost.

 

[faberryman]

I guess there's no accounting for what moves us.

It is because each of us has a different vision of what we are trying to achieve with our prints.

 

[GregY]

It is because each of us has a different vision of what we are trying to achieve with our prints.

When i think about it, my choice of film developer (Pyrocat) and paper (Foma Variant or Ilford WT) are higher on my priority list than which film i use. Although i admit i could happily use FP4+ or Tri-X as my only film if the world supplies shrank even more.

 

[aparat]

@miha Those are beautiful photographs. I love the delicate tree branches print for its subtle tonality, which underscores their fragility. It's beautiful.
@warden I feel I need to say again how much I like the print of the tree. It's a bare, withered tree, possibly dead, but the luminous print brings it back to life. There's a similar tree near where I live. I've been trying to photograph it for some time, but it stubbornly keeps looking like an ordinary dead tree

 

[miha]

Thanks aparat.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Gosh, miha. You've still got some EMaks? I have about 60 sheets of Gr 2 glossy 20X24, and got worried if it was still good, so printed some 6X9 Tmax shots on it last week (nominal 16X20 size plus a nice-sized test strip off the edge), with wonderful results. 130 glycin developer. I sure miss those classic graded papers. EMaks has a subtlety to the tonality one just doesn't get with VC papers, plus a wonderful understated subtle warm glow, although one has to be careful toning it, because it tones so fast.

But Craig .... My gosh, being able to bag tonality all the way from deep shadows to gleaming highlights, even in glacial ice, is exactly why I shoot TMax100 (mostly smaller formats, but potentially all sizes), or TMax400 (more in 8X10, but sometimes clear down to 35mm). There is simply something wrong with either your exposure technique or developer choice, or both, if you're not finding that out for yourself. Don't blame the film! The characteristic curve profiles of both TMX and TMY are very similar, and only the speed is different in that respect. So the logic of your complaint doesn't work either.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I'm gunshy on Tri-X. I had a bulk roll and it reticulated badly. I developed a roll of HP5 and a roll of Tri-X in the same Paterson tank and the Kodak reticulated and the Ilford was fine. I've avoided Tri-X after that.

Retriculation is not a manufacturing problem. It is a problem in isolated darkroom from temperature extremes with the chemicals and water. Stop running hot water to wash you films. Kodak did not burn you; you burned yourself.

 

[miha]

Gosh, miha. You've still got some EMaks? I have about 60 sheets of Gr 2 glossy 20X24, and got worried if it was still good, so printed some 6X9 Tmax shots on it last week (nominal 16X20 size plus a nice-sized test strip off the edge), with wonderful results. 130 glycin developer. I sure miss those classic graded papers. EMaks has a subtlety to the tonality one just doesn't get with VC papers, plus a wonderful understated subtle warm glow, although one has to be careful toning it, because it tones so fast.

I've used it up a long time ago. However I was able to obtain some of the Efke Varycon (as Adox Vario Classic) paper last year which still prints great, but it is no Emaks. Emaks was a great subtle paper but I didn't like it selenium toned as it went plum / aubergine fairly quickly.

 

[grain elevator]

Gotcha. So we have different complaints about why TMAX is supposedly finicky with technique. In that case, there's an argument to be made that when several people agree about the existence of something (let's say, for a example, a dog) but wildly disagree about its properties, such that only one can be right, the likelihood that even one is right is, while not nil, quite low - it's more plausible that there is no dog.

 

[warden]

@warden I feel I need to say again how much I like the print of the tree. It's a bare, withered tree, possibly dead, but the luminous print brings it back to life. There's a similar tree near where I live. I've been trying to photograph it for some time, but it stubbornly keeps looking like an ordinary dead tree

Thank you! I don't generally make images like this one but when I saw that tree how could I not? I think it was the orange filter that redeems the image btw, otherwise I suspect that sky would have been boring. The skies here are generally clear so I try to keep a yellow or orange filter available.

I'm now curious to see if your work will shine some light on the issue of Delta 100 being easier/more forgiving than TMax 100. While the results I got weren't really surprising, I remember thinking "well damn that was easy." No blown highlights and the shadows looked good too on a work print, which isn't always the case for me with TMax 400 (which is a film I also like).

 

[warden]

(old TMX negative, incident metering, Leica & 35mm Summicron....print on Foma Variant, Ansco 130.. 11x14" print

Great shot, thanks for sharing it!

 

[DREW WILEY]

Time for some Sensitometry 101 and not just hearsay whining. D100 should be more forgiving because it does have distinctly more toe than TMax. But for that very same reason, it simply can't resolve deep shadows as well without significantly boosting the exposure up onto the straighter-line section of the curve by using a much lower than box film speed; and then you risk blowing out the highlights in a truly high contrast scene. TMax is a film for responsible adults.

 

[cliveh]

How are you making the exposures? Acros II is orthopancromatic which means you're going to get very different results depending on your light source. My results (that I published over in the resources section, somebody else has already linked to it in this thread) show a very different ISO performance, but I used a full spectrum daylight source. If your light source is tungsten based (or in that same range) or just doesn't have a lot of blue in it, you'll get different behavior. In my experience, full panchromatic films respond much the same no matter the light source, at least the difference is small enough it could be chalked up to statistical error, but other films that have responses that aren't full panchromatic tend to exhibit different behavior depending on the spectrum of the light.

Can you please explain what orthopancromatic is? I thought a film was either ortho or panchromatic, but not both.

 

[Mick Fagan]

Can you please explain what orthopancromatic is? I thought a film was either ortho or panchromatic, but not both.

Check out Lina Bessonova, very informative clip on different film types.

B&W FIlm Types - Ortho / Orthopan / Panchro / Superpanchromatic — Lina Bessonova

An easy, comprehensive guide to decoding all the graphs and terminology in the black-and-white films' datasheets. We are looking into spectral sensitivity related to analog photography. Orthochromatic, orthopanchromatic, panchromatic and superpanchromatic (infrared) - what is the practical differe

www.linabessonova.photography

 

[Craig]

There is simply something wrong with either your exposure technique or developer choice, or both, if you're not finding that out for yourself.

Frankly, I can't be bothered to find out. Ilford gives me what I want, its price point is far more attractive than Kodak and it's easily and locally available.

 

[GregY]

Great shot, thanks for sharing it!

Thanks you... Here's another much more recent. 16"x20" mounted print. TMX , yellow filter - Plaubel Makina 670 - print on Foma Variant lll FB, Ansco 130.... straight print. In person, can easily be mistaken for a 4x5 film image

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Glad to hear you're doing fine, Adrian. I hope to get out this afternoon (with TMax of course), but still have to be choosy about which trails, since there's a lot of downfall in some places, and a lot of miserably sticky muddy goop in others.

Thanks. I'm ready for a break in the rain. We've been getting absolutely dumped on the last few weeks.

 

[cliveh]

Check out Lina Bessonova, very informative clip on different film types.

B&W FIlm Types - Ortho / Orthopan / Panchro / Superpanchromatic — Lina Bessonova

An easy, comprehensive guide to decoding all the graphs and terminology in the black-and-white films' datasheets. We are looking into spectral sensitivity related to analog photography. Orthochromatic, orthopanchromatic, panchromatic and superpanchromatic (infrared) - what is the practical differe

www.linabessonova.photography

I did and my computer told me it was a dangerous website and blocked it.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

I am curious as to what kind of light source your sensitometer uses. Perhaps it can be adapted to a commercially available medical model, such as those made by X-Rite, and thus solve the light source problem once and for all. When I was researching light sources a while back, I found that it was difficult to obtain a true full-spectrum performance, i.e., with a an even spectral distribution, from currently available sources, without a significant cost.

I didn't use a sensitometer. I used a strobe and incident meter to expose a grey card and controlled the exposure for each step with a transmission calibrated lens, then put a roll of film that I wanted to test into the camera, filled the frame with the grey card so that there'd be no flair, set the lens to infinity focus, then step up and down the aperture range at each transmission stop. Strobes are about as full spectrum as you can get. I put all the details in the published resource.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Can you please explain what orthopancromatic is? I thought a film was either ortho or panchromatic, but not both.

Orthochromatic is film that is sensitive to blues and some cyans. Orthopanchromatic is film that is still primarily orthochromatic, but has had its response extended up to the greens, yellows, oranges, and a little bit of red, though it tends to be not as sensitive in those ranges as it is to the blues. Panchromatic is sensitive from the deep blues up to just under infrared and is typically relatively evenly sensitive across that whole spectrum. Super panchromatic films have that sensitivity extended up to infrared, and infrared films are the same, but have the lower spectrums pretty ducked relative to the infrared sensitivity.

Lina Bessanova's video gives a basic explanation, but doesn't really get into the sensitivity levels across the spectrums. Just because you get a response, doesn't mean it's the same ISO response at that point in the spectrum. It's a bit more nuanced than that.