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What is the grainiest bw film and developer?

Rodinal 1:3! That's nuts. Great pictures.
 
Strange that no one has mentioned caffenol as a developer. Use the formula for slow films on a high speed film e.g. 400 or greater. The Arista/Fomapan films work for this.


Edit note: Curse you autocorrect!
 
Quiver2 said:
Strange that no one has mentioned caffenol as a developer. Use the formula for slow films on a high speed film e.g. 400 or greater. The Arista/Fomapan films work for this.


Edit note: Curse you autocorrect!
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I've used caffenol for developing expired Kodachrome, but not much else. might be worth trying down the line
 
A good deal of fog helps; you end up with a muted negative that needs a lot of contrast boosting to normalize contrast, and that will boost the grain along with it.

Another thing that you could try is to use a red filter; not orange, yellow etc, but red. The red-sensitive part of a panchromatic emulsion tends to be on the grainy side. Of course, you get the particular color response for free to go with it...
 
loccdor said:
Rodinal 1:3! That's nuts. Great pictures.
Click to expand...

Well it certainly is to a Scotsman like me Actually if the same size prints looked similar on a darkroom print I'd say that Rodinal 1+3 looks OK but I do wonder what, if any, improvement there is on 1+25/50

pentaxuser
 
I'm loving the grain that you are getting with STRONG Rodinal dilutions, GasMaskMan.

I have a nearly full bottle of Rodinal that I didn't really get on with at it's usual dilutions, so I might just use it up on one or two 35mm films at your low dilutions.

Interestingly, to try and get some grain before, I tried a roll of HP5+ in Ilford MG developer, at 1+9 (= usual paper strength), and developed for two minutes, and I was quite impressed with how good the negatives came out. They were totally useable for printing with no extra grain. I've kept this in mind for when I need to d+p a film in the minimum time. But your tests have shown me an even faster way!

Terry S
UK
 

Always happy to inspire. the big tradeoff is these high dilutions absolutely will drain a 500ml bottle, especially if you try 1:3 and 1:1.
and yes, throughout the year, there will be more low dilution rodinal tests with more films.
 
FP4 in Rodinal 1:25.
I've used expired MF FP4 in the past, but never fresh 35mm. Not as grainy as UN54, but still a beautiful film; kind of a more subdued HP5





 

Kodak SO-078 developed in Kalogen 1+50 for 12 minutes.


This isn't quite to the level of some of the photos here, but it's pretty chunky. Definitely seems like a high speed film in Kalogen could be a good candidate. I think I've got a bit of orwo n75 left in the fridge somewhere so maybe I'll give that a try
 
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