Month: March 2011

pyro..part one-smokey skies..

– just a test using the homemade pyrocat  on kodak tri-x 400-

not much info on this developer with regards to times, temps and working solution concentrations.. especially on 35mm-most  I could find was either MF or LF,  found a little but general guess work was involved and to be honest not too disappointed with the results. Perhaps slightly less time in development at the same working concentration or less temperature might give more detail at a loss of contrast..since the images were shot with the intention of expanding contrast I might need to balance this slightly in development to retain detail especially in the areas that are not sky. Also most were shot from metering the sky rather than the land, if I had metered the land the highlights in the sky would have become overexposed. In this case as a test of contrast and detail in this chemical, the sky element of each image offered the best tonal variations, so my reasoning was to make the sky the exposure guide for the images.

Shot using a red filter to push contrast- one of the benefits I heard of using this type of chemical over non-staining developers is that it is supposed to give better highlight detail so I figured high contrast would give me a test on this, plus I will be using this filter in some future things I’ve got planned so needed to know how it responded.

-Pre wash in weak ilfotol wash because of stand processing and minimal agitation I figured this would stop or at least reduce the risk of bubbles on film,

-Kodak tri-x 400 @ 400,

-Pyrocat HD- 1:1:250-@ 20’c for 1 hour stand,

-Agitated for 1st 1min 30 secs then 30 secs @ 1/2 time,

-Stop overly weak Kodak stop

-Fixed 5 mins in tetenal superfix 1:6

-print-

in warmtone dev- 1 min @ 24’c on ilford rc