The mystery - the magic - I sure wish they still made XXX

You fill in the blank for XXX. Is it just me? I am I missing something?

I have been shooting film, developing film, and printing film for about 40 years. Sometimes a lot - a whole lot and some years not so much. So... Why oh why when some product is not available any more it get's discussed and coveted as if it were some magic secret only way to make images? I think this is an internet only effect - I cannot for the life of me remember having or hearing a similar discussion prior to the web.

Don't get me wrong - there are many many products that have disappeared in the last 40 years and boy was I angry when they did. Not because I could not product very similar results with something else. It was that I freaking HAD to and didn't feel like getting to know a new product when it was not on my terms. Also do not get me wrong that I am somehow newer is better (sometimes it is, sometimes it's not). Also I absolutely agree that some processes that are not in wide spread use have a unique look - I practice some of them - platinum printing. Wet plate. Etc.

Sometimes I am nostalgic for companies that I liked that have either gone away or are shadows of their former selves. That is not at all what I mean.

What I am talking about are the discussions surrounding what are relatively recent products (ie 50's, 60's, 70's) typical B+W silver based film, developer, and paper that are treated as if the products was a magic bullet that made "superior" images and allowed you to do things you just cannot accomplish any other way. From my perspective this is insane wishful thinking by (in my guess) people that have never even used the defunct product that they are talking about. For the most part you can get the same "look" today with currently produced products as long as you are using a similar method of producing the image (Ie large format, 35mm, etc, similar lens technologies, etc, etc).

Super XX - You have to be kidding me - I would never use it today compared to what I use now.

Havey's 777 - magic - yea right.

Panatomic-X - I liked the box and the name is cool to but there are a bunch of films that will do just fine as replacements.

Paper was a different story for a while there but now... You may not be able to get what you want from Kodak or Agfa but there is not much I cannot do with what you can get and make it look so close to anything I have ever done it is not funny.

So what is the next silver bullet? I will lay money it is Kodak TXP 320 in medium format in about 4 years.

RB

AMEN

rwboyer said:

What I am talking about are the discussions surrounding what are relatively recent products (ie 50's, 60's, 70's) typical B+W silver based film, developer, and paper that are treated as if the products was a magic bullet that made "superior" images and allowed you to do things you just cannot accomplish any other way. From my perspective this is insane wishful thinking by (in my guess) people that have never even used the defunct product that they are talking about. For the most part you can get the same "look" today with currently produced products as long as you are using a similar method of producing the image (Ie large format, 35mm, etc, similar lens technologies, etc, etc).

Super XX - You have to be kidding me - I would never use it today compared to what I use now.

Havey's 777 - magic - yea right.

Panatomic-X - I liked the box and the name is cool to but there are a bunch of films that will do just fine as replacements.

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Harvey's, which was developed in the early 40's, is far from defunct. You can buy it from Bluegrass Packaging in Louisville, Ky. While I agree that there are no silver bullets, this developer gives me negatives that yield my best prints under most conditions. It's not magic, but it is unique, probably because of the glycin in it. The prints just seem to glow easily with it. Under certain different conditions Pyrocat-HD yields better results. Cherishing something because of its special qualities is not necessarily to worship it as the holy grail.

I wholeheartedly agree about Super-XX pan. Grainy, terrible reciprocity characteristics. 400TMax has nearly the same characteristic curve, is sharper, very fine grained and you only have to give it a stop and a half at 100 seconds.

HIE -- try to make that out of a cola nut... and while we are getting all teared up: EIR.

c6h6o3 said:

Harvey's, which was developed in the early 40's, is far from defunct. You can buy it from Bluegrass Packaging in Louisville, Ky. While I agree that there are no silver bullets, this developer gives me negatives that yield my best prints under most conditions. It's not magic, but it is unique, probably because of the glycin in it. The prints just seem to glow easily with it. Under certain different conditions Pyrocat-HD yields better results. Cherishing something because of its special qualities is not necessarily to worship it as the holy grail.

I wholeheartedly agree about Super-XX pan. Grainy, terrible reciprocity characteristics. 400TMax has nearly the same characteristic curve, is sharper, very fine grained and you only have to give it a stop and a half at 100 seconds.

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And other other circumstances rodinal works "better", etc., etc.

I am not debating that different products have different characteristics. What I am communicating is those characteristics are not so so so unique that they are terribly difficult to replicate with other similar products. When I say similar I mean that in a broad way not a narrow exact recipe way. I have proven this over and over again to myself and others. I am not trying to advocate that some properties of certain products are not in anyway desirable - they surely are when take as a whole. Take that product away and whatever that "look" is can be had - maybe there are other characteristics that cannot - like cost, replensh-ability, capacity, fragrance - whatever.

As I said - there are definitely products that I miss as well but... they were not magically unique properties and some of the characteristics that I see discussed are purely imagined at best or unscientifically observed at worst.

Just for sake of intellectual debate and I am not getting down on you or your selection of products - really I am not - I have my favorites - one of them being TXP = now defunct in MF. I really do not care that much. Let's see Harvey's makes all your prints glow. Okay. Yea - Do they glow more than mine? I don't know. Every print that I have ever seen that I like (in purely aesthetic terms) "glows" - I will bet you that far less than 0.1% of prints I have admired their "glow" have had their negatives been anywhere within 100 miles of Harvey's. I wonder how that worked since it is a special property that makes this happen to negatives developed with it.

Okay so it's not the only way - let's go with a more literal interpretation of what you said - It makes it "easier" to make them glow. So if I took some of my negatives that were hard to make prints glow and instead would have souped them in Harvey's as opposed to whatever I used - they would now make prints that glow? Somehow I doubt that. How about the reverse - you know the ones that didn't make negatives that print glow-y in Harvey's. Maybe they are just bad light?.

Please do not be offended - I have my favorite products to and I use them because they are easier for me than other things to get the results I want at this point in time. If they went away I would with 99% certainty be able to substitute another product and get pretty much the same results within a short period of break-in, not that I would like it.


RB

mhanc said:

HIE -- try to make that out of a cola nut... and while we are getting all teared up: EIR.

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Efke IR820 I will show you prints from that and HIE - if you get anywhere near 50% right of which is which I'll give you a dollar.

Ps. If all manufacturers stopped producing all silver halide B+W film and paper products we would all be up the creek. Not the point. I seriously doubt that ANY of us at home could formulate, mix, and coat ANY sheet film or roll film anywhere near 400 or for that matter 100 speed with qualities that were even close to typical black and white films today or even in the 50's, even earlier.

RB

Very good post and one with which I fully agree. Photography evolves and the suppliers of our film and paper will naturally change their product lines. I would love to have had the chance to work with emulsions from the 30s, (thinking about prints by Strand, Steichen and many others), but it's not to be, but hopefully I know enough to bend the films and papers of today if I want to go in that direction. (Though not replicate them I hasten to add.) There are of course things I miss like mad but it won't stop me taking and printing photographs. I remember speaking to a photographer maybe ten years ago at his opening at a prestigious London gallery who insisted he could never print again his work because he could no longer get Kodalith paper, and that was all he could print his work on. Fair enough. I liked his work, and the lack of paper story was probably good for his PR but I thought it sold himself short as an artist.

When I was at college in the early 80s we all printed on Agfa Record Rapid. That changed in time with the removal of Cadmium and then the discontinuation of the paper but we found other things to print on. Funny thing is many professional photographers who haven't been in a darkroom for years, even decades, still insist that Record Rapid was the only paper to use. It really was a great paper but please, there are alternatives. Hats off to Mirko and Adox for supplying some great new/old/contemporary/remade papers. This is what is important!

Mike Crawford said:

Very good post and one with which I fully agree. Photography evolves and the suppliers of our film and paper will naturally change their product lines. I would love to have had the chance to work with emulsions from the 30s, (thinking about prints by Strand, Steichen and many others), but it's not to be, but hopefully I know enough to bend the films and papers of today if I want to go in that direction. (Though not replicate them I hasten to add.) There are of course things I miss like mad but it won't stop me taking and printing photographs. I remember speaking to a photographer maybe ten years ago at his opening at a prestigious London gallery who insisted he could never print again his work because he could no longer get Kodalith paper, and that was all he could print his work on. Fair enough. I liked his work, and the lack of paper story was probably good for his PR but I thought it sold himself short as an artist.

When I was at college in the early 80s we all printed on Agfa Record Rapid. That changed in time with the removal of Cadmium and then the discontinuation of the paper but we found other things to print on. Funny thing is many professional photographers who haven't been in a darkroom for years, even decades, still insist that Record Rapid was the only paper to use. It really was a great paper but please, there are alternatives. Hats off to Mirko and Adox for supplying some great new/old/contemporary/remade papers. This is what is important!

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Agreed -

as for your artist dude - maybe HE could only print on kodalith but I am pretty sure with some effort you could achieve similar results with materials still being sold today. You see kodaltih just happened to look that way when he processed it the way he processed it and exposed it and maybe even shot and developed negs for it - so what. If it didn't exist and what exists today existed then - I will bet you it would have been just fine.

RB

RB

Just to play devil's avocado a bit, it's not so easy to draw the line between "this product has an unusual combination of characteristics not easily found elsewhere, which collectively make it a material of choice for me" and "this material is unique and irreplaceable".

Can you get *exactly* the same results with your second-choice material?---probably not; the characteristic curves of any two films are going to be a *little* bit different, for example, and however much you try to compensate it's unlikely that you'll get exactly the same response at every point on the film---and then you get into the difficult territory of determining when it's "similar enough". Is it when *I* can't see the difference, or when *you* can't see the difference?

In sum, I basically agree with your analysis for certain, but I get why people (myself included, by the way) have that tendency to believe that of course *their* favourite toy is the extra-super-duper-special exception. Careful analysis of things perceived by our fallible, subjective senses is Just Plain Hard!

-NT

ntenny said:

Just to play devil's avocado a bit, it's not so easy to draw the line between "this product has an unusual combination of characteristics not easily found elsewhere, which collectively make it a material of choice for me" and "this material is unique and irreplaceable".

Can you get *exactly* the same results with your second-choice material?---probably not; the characteristic curves of any two films are going to be a *little* bit different, for example, and however much you try to compensate it's unlikely that you'll get exactly the same response at every point on the film---and then you get into the difficult territory of determining when it's "similar enough". Is it when *I* can't see the difference, or when *you* can't see the difference?

In sum, I basically agree with your analysis for certain, but I get why people (myself included, by the way) have that tendency to believe that of course *their* favourite toy is the extra-super-duper-special exception. Careful analysis of things perceived by our fallible, subjective senses is Just Plain Hard!

-NT

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I think we are in agreement = just to take it one more step too too far.

Absolutely on the mark about curves blah blah blah - the same holds true that the ultimate "optimum" response characteristics for every seen has also got to be a wee bit different as well. Guess what...

RB

I still miss Verichrome Pan, Panatomic X and LF pack films. Mostly, I miss VP.

mhcfires said:

I still miss Verichrome Pan, Panatomic X and LF pack films. Mostly, I miss VP.

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Yea - me too - I especially liked the name of it. Really nice name. I don't really care for the TMAX stuff, I don't like the way it sort of get's stuck in your thought. Verichrome just rolls of the tongue. And again the boxes were cool looking.

Apart from that - nothin' it did that I cannot do with 'new' TRI-X. or heaven help us Neopan 400 may be even closer. Hey come to think of it Neopan 400 is damn close - even the spectral sensitivity seems a bit more like VP than TRI-X but TRI-X has the same kind of look.

RB

Edit - believe it or not if you develop N - 1/2 and shoot TX at 250 in pyrocat you would be hard pressed to tell it from VP in D76 1+1 (at kodak recommended time and ISO)nor XTOL 1+1. I could probably do it with other developers as well but I happened to shoot similar scenes with both these combos on one occasion and accidentally arrived there.

And now neopan 400 is going. I miss P.O.P. Nothing really like it.

erikg said:

And now neopan 400 is going. I miss P.O.P. Nothing really like it.

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Really? are you kidding? Not that I use it - I don't but I have tested it and it is a fine film.

Where did you hear Neopan was going? I thought it was very popular.

RB

i miss gaf universal developer.
it was the best developer i ever used ..
1:1 / 1:2 or straight for prints
1:5 for the nicest long scale negatives i have ever processed.
i found a can keeping a window sil happy where i used to have a darkroom
and used it ( after it was there for 20 years ) ...

over the years i have tried to find something "like it" but have pretty much given up ...
i know instant coffee ansco 130 and any old expired film isn't going to be gone anytime soon ... that is what i use now ...

c6h6o3 said:

Harvey's, which was developed in the early 40's, is far from defunct. You can buy it from Bluegrass Packaging in Louisville, Ky. While I agree that there are no silver bullets, this developer gives me negatives that yield my best prints under most conditions. It's not magic, but it is unique, probably because of the glycin in it. The prints just seem to glow easily with it. Under certain different conditions Pyrocat-HD yields better results. Cherishing something because of its special qualities is not necessarily to worship it as the holy grail.

Click to expand...

not sure if it has glycin in it jim, the folks at bluegrass ( read: the lady who mixes it ) said the unblinkingeye
article (that tries to figure out the formula) is " way off "
maybe she is just throwing a wrench in the machine

either way glycin is good stuff!

- john

rwboyer said:

Really? are you kidding? Not that I use it - I don't but I have tested it and it is a fine film.

Where did you hear Neopan was going? I thought it was very popular.

RB

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Neopan 400 is gone in 120, but we still have it in 35mm. Too bad, I really liked it in 120. Prints almost like Tri-X, and it's very hard if not impossible to see the difference between the two in prints. It sold for a lot less money than Tri-X though and that sure made me a happy camper.

I think there are some products that *are* hard to replace, because they represent the last product in a particular niche. As much as I love Tri-X, if it went away tomorrow, I'm sure I'd adapt perfectly fine with TMAX 400, HP5+, Delta 400, etc. However if TMAX 3200 and Delta 3200 left us, a certain type of shooting just got a lot more difficult.

I would lump HIE in there too. While there are other IR films that achieve similar looks, none are as sensitive to IR or are as fast.

I do agree with you for the most part though. We adapt, and a lot of these products are more similar than different.

Super-XX is special. I mostly use other films, but I have some Super-XX 4x5" and 8x10" stashed away for things that I think will really look good on it--mostly landscapes. Its main fault is grain, but it responds to B&W filters in a very precise way that other films just don't do.

rwboyer said:

Please do not be offended - I have my favorite products to and I use them because they are easier for me than other things to get the results I want at this point in time.

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which is the only reason I use 777. and I have duplicated the effect with other film developers, but with considerably more effort. I can show you the prints I'm talking about any time you care to come over.

jnanian said:

i miss gaf universal developer.
it was the best developer i ever used ..
1:1 / 1:2 or straight for prints
1:5 for the nicest long scale negatives i have ever processed.
i found a can keeping a window sil happy where i used to have a darkroom
and used it ( after it was there for 20 years ) ...

over the years i have tried to find something "like it" but have pretty much given up ...
i know instant coffee ansco 130 and any old expired film isn't going to be gone anytime soon ... that is what i use now ...






not sure if it has glycin in it jim, the folks at bluegrass ( read: the lady who mixes it ) said the unblinkingeye
article (that tries to figure out the formula) is " way off "
maybe she is just throwing a wrench in the machine

either way glycin is good stuff!

- john

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It behaves so similarly to the Crawley's FX-1 and FX-2 developers that I'm convinced it's in there.

I don't know much at all about films. I don't know much about papers, either! But I have found the older papers (particularly the cadmium emulsions mentioned above) to be much more responsive to and accepting of multiple processes and developers than the newer papers. (Maybe with the exception of Foma, which still can turn to mud for no reason apparent to me.)

If I really could see a paper that responds like Transtar, or Forte PWT+, or Oriental G3 or G4, then I wouldn't need a freezer in the garage. Haven't seen that yet, and not for lack of trying things out.

from what ive been told, the papers in stechens, avadon's, and others age was much more rich in silver and produced BEAUTIFUL prints. i love my MGWT, MC110, and MGIV, but can anyone give me some insight into this? what was so different about the papers. btw, ive seen richard avadon prints (contact and enlargements) first hand and there IS a difference, although im sure some of that is due to the printer at hand, lol.

I wish there were more graded papers out there. I never got a chance to try some of the great ones. VC is good, but if I don't need the local contrast aspects of VC paper, and can deal with having #2s and #3s around for common negatives, I don't really see the advantage (or even disadvantage) of VC papers. It seems that with every new technology that is adopted - it almost becomes a ritual to trash the "old" technology. Sometimes simpler IS better.

Anyways, aside from that: APX. It's an unmatched film for the look it produces. I realize that some around here are perfectly content eating Tmax for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but we need more possibilities on how to tonally portray a subject or scene.

Really, what I'm afraid of is homogeny. Corporations love it, but it's shit for the rest of us.

Clayne, I agree wholeheartedly!!!

I loved APX and have about 150 rolls (give or take) of it still stashed in my freezer.
Stockpiled as much as I could afford when I heard the news - pity I didn't do the same with the paper - very hard to get in Australia and non-existent in Thailand, where it seems Ilford rules the B&W world all over BKK.

c6h6o3 said:

I can show you the prints I'm talking about any time you care to come over.

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RB,

Don't let this opportunity go bye. At last fall's workshop Michael A. Smith spoke VERY highly of Jim's prints. I too, hope to be able to arrange a time/place to one day view Jim's prints.

John