Underexposed?? PanF+

I have a few undeveloped images that I'm quite concerned about exposed on PanF+. I captured quite a dramtic scene of some sort of garter snake swallowing some poor little bird in the Olympic National Forest. Exposure was scetchy and I believe was about two stops less than the EI 25 I shot everything else at, so about EI100 in low light. To make things worse the roll is mixed up with half a dozen others. I had planned to shoot EI25 and develop Rodinal 1:50 and there are many liberally exposed shots that I also care about, though the snake and bird images are by far the most important to me.

I would like to develop six rolls in Rodinal, but with the underexposure of the few important images I wonder if I would do better to develop everything in XTOL (1:3 at EI 50 times perhaps?) in an attempt to obtain maximum film speed and retain highlights as well as possible.

Advice? Specifically, do PanF+ user feel significantly higher shadow detail is obtainable with XTOL over Rodinal?

Or is it DBI time?? ;-)

It's not Rodinal time, that's for sure!

May I suggest FX-2? It gives a very useful speed increase, and diluted 1+1 it is just about the best ever developer for stand developing. For rolls of mixed/uncertain exposure where the most important frames are likely to be the most underexposed ones, that's what I use. Any film for 90 minutes, agitation first minute, and again after 30 minutes.

You could even give Diafine a try in this case.

How about shooting another roll, shooting -2, -1, N, +1, +2 and developing in Diafine and see if that works. I've seen some results posted at another site shot at 50 and 100 & dunked in Diafine that looked OK, and it may also do OK for those shot at 25.

You could try the same type of experiment for your other developers too. For Rodinal, you may like to experiment at 1+100 and stand for 1 hr.

Good luck, let us know how you get on.

The problem with PanF+ is while it can give great results, it is a rather short lattitude film at best. That is to say its very easy to lose shadow details, I usually meter the shadow, then close down 2 stops from there if I want to make sure least the shadow details comes in. 3 stops will get rid of most of the shadow details. But stand develop in rodinal sounds like a good idea, diafine probally not since diafine develops to a predesignated film speed which cannot be controlled ahead of time, and if you underexposed on the film based at that predestined ISO its going to be underexposed period.

I learned this rather quick with this shot on my roll of panF+ I shot for the first time (Click to Enlarge)

Ole said:

May I suggest FX-2? Any film for 90 minutes, agitation first minute, and again after 30 minutes.

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How do you think this combo would handle heavily exposed negs? I would assume that fat negs would have a lot of highlight compression?

I have used the Formulary's TFX-2 once with PanF+. Really nice combo. Good film speed, but I found that the thinnest negs printed really poorly. But I guess it's better to get something on the negs than nothing. The thin negs I just mentioned would probably clean up nicely with a little intensification.

While were on it, what's the status of Pinacryptol yellow these days?

I've only used that combo when I've known that the exposure was all over the place. Like when I took an old folder out one winter day - from brilliant sunlight on snow to almost night on the same roll. That wouldn't have been a problem, except that the shutter was in need of a CLA and would only fire at 1/25 second...
All the frames were printable. Yes, there was some highlight compression. But under the circumstances, I didn't rally think that the film wuld be able to hold the highlights anyway, so I was pleased with what I got.

While were on it, what's the status of Pinacryptol yellow these days?

Click to expand...

I don't know. I have 1 gram of it stashed for the day when I need it; so far I've been making "FX-2" without it. I believe TFX-2 is also Pinacryptol-free.

This might be a good time to try a two bath "compensating" developer. You should be able to get good results from the rest of the films and get as much detail as possible out of your underexposed frames.

MMfoto said:

I have a few undeveloped images that I'm quite concerned about exposed on PanF+. ...

Click to expand...

After much deliberation I decided to go with Ole's advice. I haven't done any real testing, but after running a few PanF+ rolls through Rodinal, as originally planned, I got really uneasy about the possibly underexposed images.

I developed the film in TFX-2 (the Formulary's T-film friendly version of FX-2) at twice the normal dilution for 90 minutes. Aggitation was 60 sec initial, another 30sec (neurosis induced) a minute later, and another 60sec at the 30min mark, with the last hour totally still.

The results are really promissing. The most important thing, however, is the images I was concerned about came out totally fine. Another half stop with a little expansion and they'd be perfect. In other words, they are perfect! Totally printable.

As these things tend to work, the images aren't quite as dramatic as I remembered them/bulit them up in my head, but that's another story! We'll see how they print.

A happy ending indeed.

Thanks for the advice everyone, and thanks for the Fx-2 recommendation Ole.