f128 Snow Gum Dance

[Maris]

Snow Gum Dance, Charlotte Pass
Gelatin -silver photograph on Ultrafine Silver Eagle VC FB photographic paper, image size 24.6cm X 19.5cm, from a 8x10 Fomapan 100 negative exposed in a Tachihara 810HD triple extension field view camera fitted with an Apo-Nikkor 610mm f9 lens working at f128. Titled, signed, and stamped verso.

One hears a lot of dismay about the sharpness killing effects of image diffraction. Almost all of it emanates from digital shooters using miniature cameras trying to make big pictures. A big camera making a photograph that won't be enlarged is not so embarrassed. Even though Snow Gum Dance, Charlotte Pass was exposed at f128 it still contains detail finer than the eye can see!

[Walter Glover]

Everything about this says, "Maris".

[RoganJosh]

Any chance you could explain your explain your dev & print technique more in depth for this corker? Seems well balanced for a high contrast subject.

[Maris]

Any chance you could explain your explain your dev & print technique more in depth for this corker? Seems well balanced for a high contrast subject.

90% of the picture is down to the subject and lighting; hard sunlight, deep shadows, and strong bark patterns with cadenced forms make for a striking photograph. The subject is also striking enough to capture the photographer and hold him hostage until he has set up the camera and made the exposure.

My prosaic making notes indicate Fomapan 100 rated at EI = 50 exposed for 2 seconds at f128. Development was in replenished Xtol for 3 minutes at 30 Celcius in a tray with constant agitation. This is very hot and short but with practice it is possible to get even development. And it saves time. At 20 Celcius my dev time would have been 11 minutes and I'd be turning out 3 negatives an hour. With 60 negatives to do that's a lot of dark time and I might forget what daylight looks like.

Time in the contact frame was 7 seconds with the illumination supplied by a 4x5 enlarger with its lens set at f11. Paper contrast was filtered to grade #1. There's a minor burn in the lower right hand corner and in the upper left. All else is the familiar archival routine.

[RoganJosh]

Cheers, that's great info. What do you use as a heater?

[Maris]

Cheers, that's great info. What do you use as a heater?

The heat arrives as hot water from the tap built into the splash-back of the darkroom sink. The developing tray with 1 litre of Xtol-rep floats in a bigger tray of hot water. A glass laboratory thermometer measures dev temperature and when it stabilises I slide the film in and start rocking the tray.

I reckon the 20 Celcius tradition as a developer temperature has no deep technical basis. It was just a convenient value based on historically average European tap water. Accurate temperature control is very difficult but accurate time control is very easy. That's why I just measure the temp and adjust the timer accordingly. If the dev temperature was 32 Celcius I'd give 2 minutes 20 seconds, if 28 Celcius I'd give 3 min 50 sec, and so on. The end result is the same in both cases.

There is about a day's work in establishing an accurate time vs temperature chart for any conventional developer; once done, forever known.

[Nathan Everett]

Simply wonderful! It never ceases to amaze me how such order and balance can be found within nature, from a distance it looks like chaos but take a few steps closer and it all starts to make sense. I can only imagine how beautiful the contact print must be with the detail of the 810 in all it's glory...

[Mick Fagan]

I reckon the 20 Celcius tradition as a developer temperature has no deep technical basis. It was just a convenient value based on historically average European tap water. Accurate temperature control is very difficult but accurate time control is very easy. That's why I just measure the temp and adjust the timer accordingly. If the dev temperature was 32 Celcius I'd give 2 minutes 20 seconds, if 28 Celcius I'd give 3 min 50 sec, and so on. The end result is the same in both cases.

There is about a day's work in establishing an accurate time vs temperature chart for any conventional developer; once done, forever known.

Maris, I’m not so sure the 20ºC was that convenient, although I would suggest it was pretty convenient as that was more or less an average room temperature perhaps in the 1800’s and through to the mid to late 1900’s.

I would have thought the adherence to a 20ºC developing temperature was mainly to ensure the emulsion didn’t lift off, or in the case of glass plates, slide off. I worked in graphic arts in the seventies and through to the late eighties. One department, a blocked off corner actually, was dedicated to applying emulsion to re-usable glass plates.

These glass plates were coated with an orthochromatic emulsion under a safelight, then exposed in a gallery camera, then hand developed in huge dishes/trays also under a safelight.

In the summertime (Melbourne) the tap water temperature usually climbed to the mid to high 20sºC. We had two options, use ice to keep the bath close to 20ºC, or add Sodium Sulphate to the (slightly different) formula. The Addition of the Sodium Sulphate would let us use temperatures to about 26ºC, higher than that and we ran into trouble again.

Except for really hot spells, we formulated a tropical developer, which apart from miniscule differences, was usually just the same formula but with the addition of Sodium Sulphate. Traditionally we started using it after the Christmas break in mid January, through to the first week of March. When a really hot spell came, we just added ice to the sink then the dishes would float and remain cooler. Sometimes they got too cool, but that’s another story.

I have mixed my own tropical developer for times when I couldn’t get the developer below 25-26ºC, I don’t bother any more as my darkroom has an air conditioner. More to the point, most modern B&W emulsions can withstand pretty high temperatures with the last time I suffered reticulation on panchromatic film being in the very late seventies.

As most photographic processes in times gone by, had the photographer or their assistant coating plates. Lifting of the emulsion by whatever means, would be catastrophic and waste not only time and money, but induce sheer frustration to all concerned.

If anyone would like some Sodium Sulphate to mix up a tropical developer, I have about 12-15kg of it left from a 25kg bag and as I have hardly used it over the last 15 years, I can supply some to anyone for the price of postage.

By the way, wonderful photograph.

Mick.

[Maris]

Those are very informative observations Mick. I live and learn! It wouldn't be a surprise if the original research on emulsion chemistry was done at convenient European room temperatures and tap water temperatures; maybe 20 Celcius or thereabouts. And the commercial products of those times, plates, films, papers, and chemistry would have been nicely compatible with that temperature target.

I came into photography relatively late, the 1960s, and by that time just about all amateur consumer films and papers were hardened. I never had to use pre-hardeners, tropical developers, sodium sulphate (Glauber's Salt), or formalin to keep emulsion on substrate. Crikey, the E6 process ran at 37.8 Celcius and lots of slides came out fine.

The hottest development I've ever done was Tmax400 in Tmax developer at 45 Celcius. This was in Blackall, Queensland, where the town water supply comes out of the ground at 58 Celcius and children have to be careful not to get scalded by the water from the cold tap. There was a deadline, I was in a hurry, but the negs were fine (dumb luck?) and the picture book that was subsequently published got no complaints.

Mick, I've had it easy compared to the old pros who got heroic results wrangling fragile materials under adverse conditions.

[Mick Fagan]

Maris, 45ºC is quite warm, I don’t think I have ever developed panchromatic film that warm, around 30-33ºC is the warmest, that too was in Qld, but up Cape York, I hung the film from trees to dry. I have no idea what it was other than it was 135 Kodak film, but that was in another life.

B&W Lithographic roll film up to 1m wide and designed to withstand extreme temperatures with very rapid development, as in 30 seconds dev, 60 seconds fixer, which was just a double bath, then a 30 second wash and 60 second hot air drying up to 60ºC. From memory, those litho baths which ran around 100ºF or 37.77ºC was about the hottest B&W film developing I have ever done. Standard temperature for colour materials though.

I can attest to the temperature of the water in Blackall, we were there last month, as well as in July. The town actually has water cooling towers, as do many towns running on bore water, so normal water comes out in the low 20sºC, but you can still get straight hot bore water in certain places just out of town, as well as the smell.

When Tmax first came out we were responsible for all of the press advertisements, plus many of us were keenly interested in this new technology and openly wondered to the Kodak reps if and when this flat grain technology would ever be used in high contrast lithographic film.

The samples of original in camera Tmax films that we saw, generally 8x10” sheets, were really breathtaking in their tonal range. But the big thing about Tmax film for us and many others in Australia, was its high developing temperature of 24ºC using manual processing, or in deep tank roller transport machines, 26.5ºC, unheard of for a panchromatic super sensitive film.

If you remember, one of the advertisements had a picture of a North American Indian in profile. He was wearing a head dress with feathers. The detail in his skin, which was a darkish olive type of skin was fabulous, plus the detail in the very light coloured feathers was just astounding. We all looked at an original on a light box through a loupe, none of us had ever seen such crisp tones. From the darkest detail to the lightest detail, everything was there. Even allowing for tightly controlled lighting with possibly a 4 stop range from highlight to shadow, it was really a breakthrough in film technology most of us thought.

The hard part for us, was getting material to send to publications so they could sort of get a similar looking image reproduced in their publication, it was a big ask. We resorted to duotone separations for the colour magazines, but the pure B&W magazines with colour centre pages, had a really hard time reproducing that advertisement, which was usually a full page one to boot.

I think Kodak was pretty much the last big advertiser of B&W films in mainstream press. When they released Tmax film(s), advertisements also appeared in many daily newspapers, something that was quite unusual.

Mick.