taming high contrast B&W military film

[alan doyle]

i have managed to get hold of some weird hi con recon 35mm film, from army surplus, no markings but was told it was from japan.
i processed this treating the film like kodak technical pan in
tetenal neofin doku developer,which came in little 1 shot bottles.
i like this stuff a lot,i have been told that this doku stuff is not made any more.
anyone got any interesting alternative recipes to tame contrast improve grey scale.
the best recipe will get a roll of very very interesting film.
cheers

 

[Jim Noel]

try D76 diluted one plus three to one plus five. or HC 110 diluted about 1:100 from syrup. Jim Galli is very successful using Rodinal and some alteration when developing Lith film which has been exposed in camera. you might try a search on here, for his process. I don't think anyone is more successful in using high contrast films.

 

[R W Penn]

Rodinal 1-100 68f for 7 min for kodak high contrast tech pan film asa 64.

 

[glbeas]

Wonder what d-23 will do to it.

 

[IloveTLRs]

"doku" is the Japanese word for "poison" ... I wonder if that's why it's not made anymore ...

 

[Mike Wilde]

If you mix from scatch, correspond. I have made up one that I believe was called T/O XDR4 or something like that. I used it to get continuous tone out of ortho lithographic film.

It was a developer with very little devloping agents. On the range of 1g of hydroquinone per litre, whereas the typical range for most film developers are between 7 and 12g of HQ per litre.

Of course many developers are used diluted from thier stock strengths, which is another way, as prior posters have suggested, to tame contrast; ie dilute more than usual.