I am both lazy and incompetent when it comes to developing film. Even so, I manage to get results I am proud of. I attribute my sucess to one thing, Barry Thornton's 2 bath developer formula. Basically, it allows me to be sloppy with time and temperature and still get great results.
I won't argue that better results are not available. There are a great many folks out there that are masters of the process. They can and do fine tune every negative to near perfection. For me though, that's just way too much work. Frankly, I also doubt my ability to meet those kind of standards anyway.
I have developed many films with Barry's and been pleased. However, now that I'm going to shoot 4x5, I need to "qualify" another film. I now need something 320-400 iso. Tri-x 400 works nice, but is unavailable in 4x5. That leaves me three choices:
- Kodak Tri-320
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Ilford HP5
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Kodak Tmax 400
Of course, I'd hate to spend $50 a box on each of these just to test them out. I've asked around the forums, and I can't get much useful feedback, so I'm doing the next best thing. I'm shooting 35mm film to get a feel for the film/developer combination. Now, I know there's a big differnce between scanning a 4x5 negative and a 35mm negative. Still, looking at a 100% crop should show me how the film will perform.
The following images were scanned at 2400 dpi. The first is a full frame (mostly...cropped to 4x5 proportions) image, downsized for the web. The second image is a 100% crop from the first, before downsizing of course.
It occurs to me that I really should have scanned at 1200 dpi, since that's about as high as I intend to go with 4x5 film. I'll rescan and see how that looks.
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