Trying Out EMA

chuckroast · Feb 28, 2024

Lachlan Young said:
'Not even wrong' describes so much of this waste of time. Once you know that the effect is essentially targeting negatives of normal contrast scenes to higher grades/ shorter neg DR's, you can get there without special developers (that ain't nothing but fuddled D-76 derivatives) or quasi-mystical terms of art. D-76 and continuous agitation will get you to the same place if you know what baseline controls you need to instigate.

That is exactly not what I am doing. If I only had normal SBRs with good mid-tone local contrast none of this would be of interest. But semi/EMA is of interest with very short mid tone ranges and very big overall SBRs, So, no, it is not "essentially targeting negatives of normal contrast scenes". Bad premise, wrong conclusion methinks.

Also, your description of the developers used for this is wildly off the mark. Pyrocat-HD isn't a D-76 derivative, fuddled or otherwise. Neither is D-23. Neither is Rodinal. All of these have been successfully used for semi/EMA type applications.

Finally, continuous agitation will absolutely not give you the same results, at least not in some cases. You will absolutely not get the edge effects of the sort these mechanisms can provide. The only developer I've ever seen able to come close to that conventionally is PMK and its high aerial oxidation rate is problematic for anything other than straightup development.

I note that you have very strong opinions. I wonder, have you actually tried any of this stuff. I am not theological or ideological about any of this and have provided photographic examples of what I am finding. I'd welcome your example that demonstrate you claims.,

Milpool · Feb 28, 2024

Realistically all that can (ie possibly) be happening with reduced/no agitation coupled with long development times are exaggerated edge effects, and possibly compressed highlight contrast (too many variables to generalize - but often what I see in examples people show is obliterated highlight detail and the overall "wired"/masked look). If one compresses total contrast with such a technique and then uses higher printing contrast, that is what unsharp masking does. What is guaranteed is poor uniformity.

Lachlan Young said:
'Not even wrong' describes so much of this waste of time. Once you know that the effect is essentially targeting negatives of normal contrast scenes to higher grades/ shorter neg DR's, you can get there without special developers (that ain't nothing but fuddled D-76 derivatives) or quasi-mystical terms of art. D-76 and continuous agitation will get you to the same place if you know what baseline controls you need to instigate.

chuckroast · Feb 28, 2024

Milpool said:
What is guaranteed is poor uniformity.

That has not been my experience. Once I dialed in the process properly (which did take some work), I get absolutely uniform behaviors across multiple formats and different films. If anything, it helped removed variability across these dimensions.

When people say "it's error prone" or "it's inconsistent" it pretty much always means that they've not taken the time and effort to lock in a repeatable process. Because semistand/EMA is tricky to get going initially, a lot of people give up after a few tries and declare it to be a failed methodology. That's why I published my findings in detail - to help interested people over the learning curve and technique hump.

I'm not saying that this is the only way to do things, only that it's a valid additional technique when the effort is made to get the process under control. Realistically, any development technique, indeed any darkroom process will yield dreadful results if the practitioner has sloppy technique or has otherwise failed to develop a good process.

chuckroast · Feb 28, 2024

juan said:
He concluded that any stand longer than five minutes wasted time and led to bromide drag.

For true stand (no agitation after initial) that is my experience as well. It's not that you get drag every time, it's just inconsistent.

But once you have film suspension properly figured out, my experience is that you can consistently get drag-free negatives using semi/EMA methods.

I've been testing different ideas in this vein for the better part of 3 or 4 years. Trust me, I've discovered about every way to induce drag imaginable . Eventually, it led me to a way of working that makes drag a non issue.

I've left a fairly detailed trail of my findings here:

tundra/Stand-Development

gitbucket.tundraware.com

Milpool · Feb 28, 2024

Sorry I wasn't clear - I didn't mean repeatability across formats etc. I was referring only to how evenly developed the negatives are. When I tested these things I found evenness bad enough that even base fog was non-uniform.

Anyhow all that really matters is whether or not the user gets the desired results. If you find it to be a useful technique I can't argue against it.

chuckroast said:
That has not been my experience. Once I dialed in the process properly (which did take some work), I get absolutely uniform behaviors across multiple formats and different films. If anything, it helped removed variability across these dimensions.

When people say "it's error prone" or "it's inconsistent" it pretty much always means that they've not taken the time and effort to lock in a repeatable process. Because semistand/EMA is tricky to get going initially, a lot of people give up after a few tries and declare it to be a failed methodology. That's why I published my findings in detail - to help interested people over the learning curve and technique hump.

I'm not saying that this is the only way to do things, only that it's a valid additional technique when the effort is made to get the process under control. Realistically, any development technique, indeed any darkroom process will yield dreadful results if the practitioner has sloppy technique or has otherwise failed to develop a good process.

chuckroast · Feb 28, 2024

Milpool said:
Sorry I wasn't clear - I didn't mean repeatability across formats etc. I was referring only to how evenly developed the negatives are. When I tested these things I found evenness bad enough that even base fog was non-uniform.

Anyhow all that really matters is whether or not the user gets the desired results. If you find it to be a useful technique I can't argue against it.

I'm not sure what might cause this. Certainly, if you do semistand without the necessary precautions of how the film is suspended, you definitely can get bromide drag. But drag tends to be kind of grossly visible in my experienced and manifests as streaks, not just lack of uniformity.

My biggest criticism of semi/EMA isn't that it doesn't work or provide value (it does) or that you cannot overcome drag issues (you can) , but that you have to get everything right. It punishes small errors of technique and/or lack of consistency. So, I really do understand why people get frustrated with it and give up. But I'm a curious sort who wanted to find out what it took to actually make it work consistently. Hence my multi-year quest.

pentaxuser · Feb 29, 2024

Can I ask you, Lachlan, to perhaps set out what you meant in your #22. By this I mean, explaining in more detail how someone who is looking to learn more about what can be done in preparation for exposure in camera prior to taking negatives that eliminates a form of processing "corrections" which is what such methods as EMA etc seem to entail in your opinion

I think it may be what you have termed "baseline controls " that I need explaining but whatever you believe is necessary to help me understand

Thanks

pentaxuser

Lachlan Young · Mar 1, 2024

@pentaxuser 'baseline controls' means such things as not messing up temperature, agitation, using chemicals that aren't somewhat expired, getting exposures that actually aren't way off from where they should be, not basing assessments on questionable opto-mechanical or opto-electronic systems (wobbly enlargers, consumer grade flatbed scanners etc) - i.e. taking appropriate care of basic competency - which I see all too often ignored in favour of hanging desperately on to the words of workshop-selling gurus. Making a decently crisp 2.5-3x off a 5x7 neg should be insanely easy with essentially any of today's mainstream materials, if it isn't you're doing something horrifically wrong. What you want is a fairly generously exposed neg that you pull the processing back a bit on, such that it needs to be printed on G4-5 to look good. You might need to iterate a bit to get things nailed down for your own process. That's literally all there is to it - nothing new or magical or whatever, but apparently people have needed to go on expensive workshops (full of mangled sensitometry - yes, that includes Ansel Adams) for decades to have this apparently 'special' knowledge imparted in unclear, mystical, even conspiratorial terms, when all you are doing is exploiting the inherent properties of a material in a slightly different way.

chuckroast · Mar 1, 2024

Lachlan Young said:
@pentaxuser 'baseline controls' means such things as not messing up temperature, agitation, using chemicals that aren't somewhat expired, getting exposures that actually aren't way off from where they should be, not basing assessments on questionable opto-mechanical or opto-electronic systems (wobbly enlargers, consumer grade flatbed scanners etc) - i.e. taking appropriate care of basic competency - which I see all too often ignored in favour of hanging desperately on to the words of workshop-selling gurus. Making a decently crisp 2.5-3x off a 5x7 neg should be insanely easy with essentially any of today's mainstream materials, if it isn't you're doing something horrifically wrong. What you want is a fairly generously exposed neg that you pull the processing back a bit on, such that it needs to be printed on G4-5 to look good. You might need to iterate a bit to get things nailed down for your own process. That's literally all there is to it - nothing new or magical or whatever, but apparently people have needed to go on expensive workshops (full of mangled sensitometry - yes, that includes Ansel Adams) for decades to have this apparently 'special' knowledge imparted in unclear, mystical, even conspiratorial terms, when all you are doing is exploiting the inherent properties of a material in a slightly different way.

You have strong views about the work of others and their failings (which may be entirely fair). May we see your prints?

pentaxuser · Mar 2, 2024

Thanks Lachlan. I had wondered if "baseline" controls were exactly those you in fact then mentioned and they were.

pentaxuser

loccdor · Mar 2, 2024

The key to eliminate the negative effects of stand development for me was keeping the temperatures of everything (developer, sink, air, tank, etc) as close as humanly possible so the thermal currents are not created.

When I first started out with it I did treat it more like a "lazy" development, and got poor results. But done properly, it requires at least as much attention as a normal development, and can produce good results. I think that's what causes a lot of contention about it. It's best not considered as a shortcut. I too gave up on it for a while. Now I find it a valuable tool for specific situations.

Great videos, by the way, Andy! New subscriber and enjoying your channel.

juan · Mar 3, 2024

I once tried a Mortensen experiment. I mixed a glycin only developer and deve!oped an 8x10 negative in a vertical tube in the refrigerator for several hours. Maybe it was overnight. The negative overall was very dense but contrast was good and there was no sign of bromide drag. I probably agitated a couple of minutes at the beginning and that's all. So, the temperature would have been even throughout.

Trying Out EMA

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