Category: Photography

Made a thiocarbamide reference print today because I can never remember whether I like the warm brown or the cool one.

Turns out it’s the cool brown (on the top) that I like.

Defender 55-D is my favorite print developer. It’s nicely active and gives beautiful, warm tones with Arista VCFB, my preferred paper. But you won’t find it pre-packaged in photography stores. You’ll have to mix it yourself.

(Let’s pretend that photography stores are still a thing. I’m trying to visualize an ideal world here, even though I haven’t lived in a town with a photo shop in a decade.)

If you do some digging, you will turn up a few recipes for Defender 55-D. I’m old-fashioned and trust books, so I’ve been using the recipe provided by Steve Anchell in The Darkroom Cookbook (4th ed.).

It works wonderfully.

But I’ve just learned there’s an error in it. Someone goofed when transcribing the recipe for the US market. At tray strength for printing, the recipe I’ve been using has 4.3g/L of potassium bromide, which is the chemical that acts as the restrainer. More restrainer gives more warmth. The correct recipe gives only 0.6g/L of bromide in the tray.

This week, I’ve been printing with the corrected Defender 55-D recipe. I still like how it works, except for one tiny detail, which could be the reason it fell out of favor (ignoring, of course, that Defender is out of business.)

As we would imagine, with less restrainer in the developer, my print tone was more neutral. It made a lovely grey. For the first few prints. And then the image tone shifted warmer.

This happens because as more prints are developed, more restrainer is left in the developer, byproducts of the development process. This added restrainer slows development and warms the image tone. My incorrect version of 55-D contained quite a bit of restrainer from the start so building up a bit more as I worked didn’t change much. It gave warm tones throughout the printing session.

I’m glad to know the correct formula for my favorite developer. But in the future I’ll go back to doing it wrong, because that’s what it takes to make the prints look the way I want them.

A high-definition, divided developer tuned for paper negatives. It is designed to avoid highlight block-up and to give as much shadow detail as possible. The shoulder on these negatives will generally be big and round. Highlight values will be flattened out, but still separated thanks to adjacency effects. Shadow values are present, but not endless.

There is no magic developer that will make paper look like film, but this one at least extends the range a bit over developing in Dektol.

Bath A, stock

Distilled water, warm:    800ml
Metol:                      5g
Sodium sulfite:            25g
Thymol:         5 or 6 crystals
Distilled water to make: 1000ml

Mix in the order given.  The thymol crystals are there to prevent mold growth. Feel free to omit it if you’ll be using the developer quickly.

Bath B

Distilled water, warm:    800ml
Borax:                      5g
Distilled water to make: 1000ml

Tray setup

This is a divided developer, so bath A and B go in separate trays.

Dilute bath A 1 + 4 with distilled water. After developing, discard it. At tray strength, it’s too weak to be reused.

Bath B is used full strength and kept between sessions. Discard and mix a fresh bath B after developing 10 8×10 sheets or equivalent.

Developing Times

Bath A

Develop 6 to 9 minutes using intermittent agitation: 30 seconds initial continuous agitation, then 10 seconds every 3 minutes afterward. 

Bath B

Develop 3 minutes with 30 seconds initial constant agitation to wash away any Bath A that’s still streaked across the surface. Then, let it be still for the rest of the time, keeping the emulsion surface under the solution at all times. Face-down is best, but watch out for trapped bubbles.

Notes

I developed this process for tray development on individual fiber-based negatives. It works okay with RC papers, but has a tendency towards streakiness in bath B and general weakness from not carrying as much developer over. I have no idea if it works using tanks or with multiple sheets in the tray simultaneously. If you try it that way, please let me know how it works.

Bath A is primarily developing the highlights in your negative. If you want a more dense negative, use a longer development time. If you want a less dense negative, one which may be better for scanning and a digital darkroom process, use a shorter time. You may want to experiment with even longer or shorter times than I’ve given here. There is a wide range of times that will give a usable negative. Feel free to experiment and find the time that works best for your images and your printing process.

In bath B, once you’ve agitated away the surface developer to avoid streaks, only the developer that’s soaked into the emulsion remains. This quickly exhausts in the dense hilight areas, but will keep going in the shadow areas, especially with the little kick-in-the-pants that the borax will give it. This is the compensating magic you may have read about in divided developers. It continues building density in the shadows until the developer is totally exhausted. Usually that takes about 3 minutes. Leaving the negative in bath B any longer than that won’t have any productive effect.

Do as little agitation as possible. Read Bill Troop’s explanation of minimal agitation on page 41 of The Film Developing Cookbook, 2^nd edition. The key is to let the developer be still to encourage edge effects along high contrast edges. This increases contrast along the edge because exhausted developer will diffuse across the border and retard development of the shadow side, making it even darker. Simultaneously, fresher developer will diffuse from the shadow side across to the bright side, making the light side of the edge even lighter. If you agitate too much, the developer won’t sit in one place long enough to have any noticeable effect and your negatives will be flat and mushy.

Many thanks to Bill Troop and Steve Anchell. PND came directly from ideas in their books, The Film Developing Cookbook and The Darkroom Cookbook.

Two years ago I bought two 100-sheet boxes of litho film, intending to shoot it all in Winston-Salem, and only then, after the gathering was done, worry about editing or printing. I was hoping that the repetition of shooting 200 sheets of film and the strict rule against judging would lead me beyond a surface representation of my city.

I didn’t intend for it to take two years to complete this project, but it did. Now I get to see if my plan worked.

New babies in the darkroom. It’s funny how you don’t see all that clutter in the dark.

Photographic film and paper developers generally consist of four components which work together to develop your images. Here’s a quick overview of the components and their purposes.

Please note: I’ll mention some chemicals in this article. Some of them are pretty harmless, but some can be downright dangerous. Please educate yourself about safe handling of chemistry before you start messing around with any of them.

Developing agent

The active part of a developer is the developing agent. It converts silver halide crystals into stable metallic silver that’s captured in the emulsion. Metallic silver is  awesome because it blocks light. And as a noble metal, it’s also very stable.

There are a bunch of developing agents. metol, hydroquinone, and phenidone are some common ones. Each developing agent acts differently on silver halides, which is why we have so many different developer formulas. Some formulas  combine multiple developing agents for the way they work together. One common combination is metol with hydroquinone (we call these MQ developers.) These two work together more strongly than each one does individually. This is called superadditivity.

Preservative

Developing agents are easily oxidized during development or even just while they’re stored in a bottle before use. To prevent this, we add a preservative to keep them fresh. It’s the same idea as adding a  preservative to processed food so it keeps longer. In fact, it’s often the same preservative. Go through your pantry and see how many packaged foods contain sodium sulfite. That’s the same preservative used in most developer formulas.

Accelerator

As naturally reactive as they are, most developing agents don’t really get going until they’re in an alkaline environment. The accelerator raises the PH to provide that environment.
Many of the chemicals we use as accelerators also have uses in the home as cleaners. Borax is used in many cleaners, as is sodium carbonate (a. k. a. washing soda). Sodium hydroxide, a strong base, is commonly used to open clogged drains.  These three are frequently used in photo developers (but not simultaneously!)

Restrainer

All of the components so far keep our developer converting silver halides to metallic silver. This one slows down the developing action.

If the developing agent is overly activated (too strong an alkaline environment) it will reduce all of the silver halides, not just the exposed ones that make up our image. To avoid this fog of uncontrolled development, we use a restrainer in our developer. This pulls back the action of the developing agent and encourages it to only work on the exposed silver halide crystals.

The most common restrainers are potassium bromide and benzotriazole. Some developers, such as D-76, are formulated so carefully that they don’t need a restrainer.

Go read Troop and Anchell

Now that you understand what the four basic developer components are doing, you may be thinking about your preferred developer and  wondering how its components work together. I highly recommend that you get your hands on one or both of the following books.

• The Darkroom Cookbook, 4th edition. Steve Anchell. Published March 24, 2016 by Routledge.
• The Film Developing Cookbook, 2nd edition. Bill Troop and Steve Anchell. Published December 4, 2019 by Routledge.

Silver gelatin is the most luscious photographic material. Prove me wrong.

In support of my argument, I give you the curly sculpture of an air-dried print, the sounds of its crisp tension, as well as its luxurious surface. We’re “not supposed” to touch the surface. “Oils,” they say. But touch one. Especially a glossy one. It feels like a baby’s perfect skin, firm and smooth. And it’s full of actual silver.

I rest my case.

Cognitive thought is the picture killer. Here’s Henry Wessel talking about photographing while nearly asleep. I share this with you because the majority of the photographs in the Winston-Salem project are made in the same state. Early alarm, out of bed, into clothing, grab camera, go. I’m out a bit later than him because I like it as the blue hour goes golden just before the direct sunbeams start pouring in. Retaining the sleepy mental state means I’m not overthinking anything, just seeing and reacting.

Henry Wessel: Photographing while “half asleep”

Also, from this other video, a quote:

“I photograph anything that catches my eye. That’s the best reason to photograph.”

Henry Wessel.

If you have already welcomed a copy of Signs of Life into your own life, you know what this experience feels like. If not, grab a fresh cup of coffee and enjoy this look at the book.

To purchase your own copy, please visit the store.