Magic Lith Prototype Update #4 (EXA developer series)

Just FYI, I’ve begun using a naming series for my developer experiments. “EX” prefix (Earlz eXperiment), then developer “series”, then developer version, then finally (if relevant) print number. So for instance the print above is “EXA3C”. Developer series “A” (glycin+HQ paper lith), 3rd iteration, 3rd (C) print in the mix.

I’ve decided to try using some Glycin in this lith developer. It was made into a solution by dissolving 10g of glycin into ~180ml of TEA (triethanolamine). The idea behind it is that glycin should be a very soft-working developer capable of very nice highlight gradation, while also being (unconfirmed?) mildly superadditive with HQ and supposedly can function as a preservative/regenerator for developing agents. Thus far my experiments with it is interesting, but not really super lith-like. There is definitely an infectious development aspect happening, but it otherwise does not behave much like a lith developer, at least with this “non-lithable” paper choice. It’s fairly fine grained, higher contrast, and with subtle coloration.

The formula used:

• (Pre-soak print for 1m before development to swell emulsion and remove incorporated developers)

• 2L of water (slightly warmer than room temp, about 80F)

• 10ml HQTEA 20%

• 15ml of Glycin-TEA 6%

• 12ml Sodium Sulfite 10%

• 25ml Benzotriazole 1%

• 2ml Potassium Bromide 10%

• 30ml Potassium Carbonate 30%

• 10ml Sodium Hydroxide 3%

• (2 prints processed before above print was made)

Ingredient considerations:

• HQTEA — I’ve found that too much HQTEA in developer with this much alkaline is actually too active, so I think 10ml here is the ideal amount. Previous tests used less and didn’t produce good blacks

• Glycin-TEA — This is an interesting and unique developing agent. The initial idea behind using it was to improve highlight gradation and also improve the evenness of development. At both aspects it seems to excel, though requires careful formulation. Too much glycin in relation to HQ seems to “steal” development from the HQ and will not produce proper blacks, but beautiful soft highlights. Too little will cause unevenness in this formulation.

• Sulfite — I was hoping that Glycin would allow me to significantly reduce the amount of sulfite, but this does not hold. Less than 5ml per 2L will quickly develop a red film and lose HQ activity and thus not develop proper blacks. Up to 15ml still exhibited decent infectious development

• Benzotriazole — This ingredient is especially interesting. Adding Benzotriazole seemed to reduce highlight speed, without affecting black buildup. I believe this is because Benzotriazole will significantly reduce the activity of either HQ or Glycin (or both), but does not affect the infectious development action of HQ once it begins to take off. Previous tests with Benzotriazole before adding Glycin seems to indicate it will slow down highlight development of HQ, though once highlights are in place it won’t slow down infectious development. In the end, this I guess makes sense why it amplifies the uneven development problem. The edges will naturally develop a bit faster, and the benzotriazole will make center highlights come up slower compared to edge shadows once edge highlights are in place. This problem seemed to mostly go away with the addition of Glycin though, indicating I think that Glycin’s induction period is not very affected by even massive Benzotriazole additions. So, once Glycin gets the highlights into place then HQ will take over to develop the blacks more quickly than the HQ would otherwise touch highlights. This is still a big balancing act and over exposed/lower contrast results still have some uneven development, but this discovery I think is important in finding something more general purpose

• Potassium Bromide — Bromide seems to do the opposite of Benzotriazole. Bromide will slow down overall development and especially infectious development. Some is required to keep development times reasonable, but really quite little should be used here. A surplus of bromide will cause the color to tilt toward olive green and erode blacks.

• Potassium Carbonate — I wanted a more stable alkali than hydroxide

• Hydroxide — With only carbonate in previous tests I didn’t quite get fast enough development nor good infectious blacks. With a bit of hydroxide addition this seemed to go away yet remained stable until the HQ oxidized. I think the Hydroxide helps the developer get over a “hump” in pH but to remain fairly stable afterwards

Overall, this is a really interesting developer begging for more testing. In the formulation here the evenness of development was quite good, highlights develop at different rates than shadows, and overall gradation is very interesting. There is some contrast control capability, but not nearly as flexible as with proper lith printing. With more exposure on the print before the one above there was definitely less contrast, but also more tendency for uneven development and low midtones seemed to race toward black more quickly than I’d like, while highlights remained fairly slow to develop. Development time is fairly short in these tests, around 2-5 minutes depending on exposure level and how many prints have been run. I think future direction will be increasing the Glycin and benzotriazole amount more while leaving the rest alone. I also want to see if I can reduce the alkali. I have a theory that HQ can’t penetrate the emulsion without high pH levels, but Glycin can and this makes a pathway for HQ to take over even at lower pH after glycin develops the initial highlights and such.

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Reference image, MGV RC developed in Ansco 130 and printed with no contrast filter, f/11, 2s

Magic Lith Prototype Update #3

No pictures this time because the results have been pretty boring. Basically, I’ve found that a magic lith formulation can be a lot more flexible than expected, with the primary requirement being a relatively high amount of hydroquinone and a relatively high pH. I’ve done some tests with alkaline prebaths. This seems to help the evenness of a print significantly, but comes with it’s own problems. The print can’t be rinsed after the prebath or else it returns to hardened form and will develop unevely. If the prebath is too alkaline and/or soaked for too long, the print will have a mottle-like effect, but will develop evenly otherwise and quite quickly with the low contrast image appearing rather quickly and then infectious development occurring throughout the print. If done properly the print can also be pulled more quickly and thus with more color. Thus far my best results have been with 2.5m with 1.5L of water + 15ml of 3% hydroxide.

I’ve changed to using a larger tray and 2L of developer at a time which seems to help the evenness as well as tray life but is not a complete solution.

Benzotriazole is an essential component in this developer. Without it, you will get both peppering and yellow staining on the border. With ~5ml/L both will go away. Too much seems to make the uneven development problem worse though.

Bromide is not as terrible as expected. I don’t really understand, but it has more effect in a carbonate based developer than a hydroxide developer, even if both are around the same pH. Iodide is optional.. I can’t really see a huge effect when it is present with bromide, even with a large amount of iodide. With very small or no bromide it does work as a restrainer of sorts, but not a good one.

HQ amount is still a bit of a mystery. More HQ will produce better blacks, but also cause more overall development. High amounts of HQ will produce some fogging with long development times and thus if higher contrast is desired, then going close to the normal print time (rather than massive over exposing) will produce a low contrast image which will then be affected by infectious development to produce proper blacks and darkening of low mid tones.

Magic Lith Prototype Update #2 (Lithalike Developer Discovery)

Today found an interesting discovery. Something I’ve dubbed “lithalike”. It’s definitely isn’t the same as standard lith printing. Thus far the big differences between lithalike and standard lith printing:

• Probably impossible to get split toning (warm highlights, cold blacks) without of course toning afterwards (my gut says this process may actually tone in a similar way to lith prints)

• Highlights will not have a “cast” like a lith print.. ie, where “whites” in the actual print area are peachy or lilac. Whites in lithalike are just boring white

• Limited control of contrast through development/exposure techniques. I ended up using standard Ilford contrast filters to get the contrast where I wanted. Agitation can be used to control contrast to an extent without risk of an unevenly developed look. However, contrast can really only be altered with this by 1-2 grades.

• Probably not as useful for expired paper. You only over expose by 1/2 stop at most with lithalike

• Lithalike will probably work with pretty much any paper. It doesn’t rely on the delicate nature of infectious development too much, meaning unlithable papers can be used in this

And of course for the big similarities:

• You will get ample paper grain. The exact appearance and prominence of grain depends on paper choice and can be altered somewhat with developer formulation and agitation technique. (note the examples here are 8x10 and printed from an FP4+ 6x4.5 negative. There is no visible grain in normal printing)

• Plenty of color, even on typically very difficult papers like cold tone ones. With tests so far color trends toward green. Can probably be altered some with restrainer choice and paper choice etc.

• The developer once mixed will expire quickly. 4-5 prints is the maximum, with some color and activity changes etc after each print

• This process goes much closer to completion than standard lith printing, but it gives results I like better just before completion and compensate for this by adding 1/2 stop to exposure.

The big thing I like out of lith printing is the unique look of paper grain and how it’s significantly more prominent in shadows than highlights. For this purpose, it is definitely a developer I’ll use for actual prints at some point, once I’ve tweaked it to get rid of the green coloration. I’m hoping by changing the restrainer mixture a bit I can alter the color significantly.

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Ilford MGV RC (glossy) printed at grade 3.5 and developed in “lithalike” (“soft” agitation scheme every 2 minutes)

Finally, here is the formula. I mixed it twice, so I know it works, but I do consider it a “prototype” and intend to tweak it significantly for my own purposes.

Lithalike Prototype Formula:

• 2L of water (warm, about 90F)

• 20ml HQ-TEA 5% (5g hydroquinone in 100ml of triethanolamine — not the same strength of HQ-TEA used in previous posts)

• 6ml sodium sulfite 10%

• 1ml potassium bromide 10%

• 7ml benzotriazole 1%

• 1ml potassium iodide 10%

• 60ml sodium hydroxide 3%

Note it is easiest to measure the HQ-TEA in a small graduate and then “rinse” the graduate several times into a larger graduate to measure out 2L of water. The solution can be mixed probably 1 hour before you need to actually print, but the sodium hydroxide should be added just before you start printing. Once it is added the developer will not last longer than 45 minutes at the very most.

Ingredient considerations:

• HQ-TEA — I reduced the HQ-TEA concentration as I realized I was using 2g/L of hydroquinone in lith development which is extremely unusual. Typically the amount of HQ varies from 0.2-1g/L for lith printing. This extreme excess of HQ may be the mechanism that made the early Magic Lith results possible though. With significantly reduced HQ, I could not get infectious development to happen to any significantly visible extent like in previous runs. In the future I will probably stock both 5% and 20% solutions of HQ-TEA for experiments as large amounts of TEA can cause restrainers to stain prints

• Sulfite — Very little sulfite should be used. Surprisingly despite using a large amount of alkaline and this small amount of sulfite, the developer lasted long enough to run multiple prints. Additional sulfite will reduce color and grain of lithalike

• Bromide — Like previous magic lith experiments, this continues to be extremely sensitive to bromide additions, but a small amount seems to help reduce tendency for fogging and to slow down development so that it doesn’t develop unevenly

• Benzotriazole — This developer has some fogging problems (yellow borders). The benzotriazole reduces this significantly without seeming to skew developer activity too much. With some papers more benzotriazole is required

• Potassium Iodide — I’m not even sure this is necessary but my gut tells me it helps to ensure development is even

• Hydroxide — The pH of this developer should be kept considerably higher than most lith printing developer formulas. More hydroxide has a tendency to increase potential fogging problems, but less will give worse blacks and contrast.

Agitation can be used quite extremely without getting uneven development. Less agitation in some ways will produce less contrast and in others more. Extremely soft agitation will produce an increase in grain. This doesn’t quite work as flexibly as real lith printing, but blacks will develop faster than highlights with no agitation, whereas with constant agitation the behavior is more linear. I experimented with agitation as little as every 3 minutes and got decent results, though blacks did suffer some as at that point blacks will exhaust. There is definitely a sweet spot to be found. For the most part agitation constantly and agitating once per 30s produce identical results but with less agitation the developer will probably exhaust a bit slower.

Overall this is far more “boring” compared to real lith printing, but it’s also a lot more reliable while still keeping some of the interesting aspects of lith printing.

Magic Lith Prototype Update #1

I’ve recently been experimenting with a prototype developer I’ve dubbed “magic lith”. This is a lith developer designed to work with any paper, including overly hardened RC papers. Primary test paper thus far is Ilford Cooltone RC. In normal lith developers it will not produce infectious blacks and will give a very low contrast and dull image.

Magic lith is being designed as an “HQTEA” mixture of individual components for simplicity. HQTEA is simply 60g of hydroquinone combined with 300ml of triethanolamine (TEA) to make ~350ml of HQTEA. HQTEA is a very simple way to preserve hydroquinone in a liquid(ish) solution. It will keep indefinitely but without a lot of sulfite will decay quickly once water is added. Using HQTEA is the ideal route to go for designing a lith developer because it keeps indefinitely and allows complete customization of the developer. TEA in theory may have some effect on the final result, even in very dilute solutions. At the very least it will increase the natural pH to ~10 for normal dilutions and ~11 for stronger dilutions. For standard lith printing, citric acid or some other stable acid can be used to reduce the pH for more color. TEA is very stable as a pH buffer and so doesn’t need to be constantly replenished like carbonate or hydroxide. The hydroquinone itself will die much quicker than the TEA.

The current starting point mix for magic lith is the following:

• 10ml HQTEA

• 3ml potassium bromide 10%

• 2ml potassium iodide 10%(!)

• 5ml benzotriazole 1%

• 10ml sodium sulfite 10%

• 50ml sodium carbonate 20%

• 1L luke warm water (~72F) — warmer water can be used but the developer will die even more quickly and development can speed up exponentially and be flat out difficult to control

This developer mix will die very quickly, within 2-3 prints. When the developer is yellow it is near death and ~2ml of sulfite should be added to keep it alive for one more print. Once the developer is red or brown and/or have a red film on top, it is dead. I’ve not done any testing with replenishment.

This developer produces “sort of lith” results with Cooltone RC. The tonality and grain is definitely there, but contrast is harder to control. Paper was over exposed by ~3 stops compared to a normal print. Paper should be rinsed before development to remove incorporated developers. Borders will be obvious within 30s, image will become visible around the edges at 2m, center will remain mostly invisible. Image will begin to become visible in the center at 3m. Infectious development happens around the edges at 5m. Center will appeared veiled, as if there is a layer of fog over it. As infectious development occurs, this fog will fade from the edges to the center. The veil appears to prevent infectious development from occurring in the areas affected. The end result will have significantly less development in the center than the edges. There is also some pepper fogging easily possible. The end result will be very grainy. With glossy MGV paper, the grain will somewhat follow the manufactured lines in the gloss finish, thus, pearl or some other finish is recommended. Cooltone RC does not seem to have these lines in the gloss finish.

The uneven development problem has been very difficult to solve. With no bromide and only iodide/benzotriazole, the center will actually develop faster than the edges. I believe there is a fine balance needed between the restrainer ratios and potentially the addition of more TEA (not HQTEA). The pepper fogging of course can be easily solved as normal with additional sulfite, though this can make infectious development a lot harder to achieve.

Component considerations:

HQTEA — The TEA may be the reason why this developer works at all. I’ve tried normal lith developers with a lot of part B and never got reasonable results. Regardless, the addition and subtraction of HQTEA hasn’t been thoroughly tested.

Bromide — This developer/paper is extremely sensitive to bromide. A little bit too much will completely prevent infectious development. Bromide will significantly slow down development, even for small amounts relative to most lith developers. With no bromide at all it will enter infectious development extremely quickly, even with significant amounts of other restrainers (ie, benzotriazole/iodide). Some amount is definitely required, but it must be carefully controlled. This also causes developer death to occur much easier since bromide is naturally released from paper development

Iodide — This seems to help balance the development between edges and center. Too much will stain the print edges yellow. Too little and edges will develop significantly faster than center. It seems like iodide helps to cut through the hardening to allow infectious development to occur faster

Benzotriazole — This is not a conventional addition to a lith developer as it basically just slows development down. Because of how active this developer is, I decided to add this to slow things down for getting the snatch point easier. I think this is an optional component though with the addition of bromide, but with minimal bromide this is also needed to prevent chemical fogging

Sulfite — Any HQTEA developer mix seems to be quite sensitive to the addition of sulfite. Too much and of course infectious development won’t occur, but too little and the developer dies during the first print. A lot more testing required to determine a proper maximum and minimum. The amount of HQTEA added affects the maximum amount of sulfite that can be used

Carbonate — This is simply used to get the pH of the developer to 11. If the developer is not to a high pH level, it will not cut through the hardening of the RC paper and never enter infectious development even with no restrainers, minimal sulfite, and a lot of HQTEA.

Water temp — Warmer water will not behave normally as expected for lith developer, ie, a linear speed up. It seems like as the water is made warmer development will exponentially speed up, making uneven development problems worse. I use luke warm so that it stays about the same temperature throughout testing.

Print aging — This will be much more affected by printing than many lith developers. The release of bromide causes the developer to slow a lot and the highly basic developer with minimal sulfite will naturally decay anyway. I don’t recommend trying replenishment nor use of old brown at this point.

A lot more testing to be done, but as seen above, there is big hope for producing a final Magic Lith recipe consisting of simply a part A and part B which will work with any paper. The results thus far show infectious development can happen, something previously regarded as impossible, and now the rest of the testing is just figuring out how to control that aspect so that the typical “lith split” between highlights and shadows can occur evenly across the entire print. Ideally the developer would last longer than 2-3 prints, but right now I’ll settle for whatever works and figure out better tray life later.

Lith Printing Experiment Report Nov 17, 2019

Tonight I ended up doing some second-pass lith development where you basically make a normal print and then bleach it and then lith print that. It can produce really unique results with some modern RC papers, though it’s definitely more tricky as it in my experience it can easily break the “golden rule” of lith printing, ie, that less exposure = more contrast.

I’m also preparing for a write up of The Ultimate Homebrew Lith Developer. TUHLD for short, heh. Basically the biggest problem with lith developers is that either they contain a relatively high amount of sulfite, the lith developer (part A) has practically no shelf-life nor tray life, or the lith developer contains formaldehyde and kills you slowly when you’re messing around in an enclosed room with 120F heated developer. The only real way of preserving hydroquinone in solution is to either add formaldehyde, put it into a very acidic solution and put a smaller amount of sulfite (but still absolutely some is required), or to never add water to it.

The solution I stumbled upon is to dissolve hydroquinone into TEA with absolutely no water added. Dissolving HQ into TEA is definitely not pleasant nor fast, but once it is mixed you have a somewhat easily mixed (well, as easily as HC-110) solution of HQ that keeps forever before adding water to it. It does involve adding several more “parts” to the lith developer, but actually makes it incredibly flexible for experimentation, since you can carefully vary the amount of sulfite, alkali, and restrainer. You can even try adding no sulfite at all and watch your developer quickly turn blood red with a weird film of oxidized HQ byproducts.

So, I’ll break down kinda the things learned a bit here in two parts. First, the TEA+HQ lith developer:

• TEA can be heated to.. pretty hot (hot enough to burn but not scar you maybe) and at this point some HQ can be dissolved into it. I was able to somewhat easily dissolve 2.5g of HQ into 120ml of TEA, heated to around 80C/190F with a magnetic stirrer and constant stirring over about 20 minutes. The clear (photographic grade) TEA quickly went to yellow upon addition of HQ and basically looked pretty much exactly like HC-110 once it had sat for a day. I think more HQ could be dissolved, maybe 3g or even 3.5g into the same volume, but I don’t have a precise heating setup for stuff like this and I really didn’t want to get it insanely hot, and after 2g it really took a long time to dissolve the remaining 0.5g. If you want an easier time I’d aim for just 2g or 1.5g into 100ml

• I didn’t mix a very large amount because I wasn’t sure it would work, but it worked great kept in a mostly empty bottle for ~5 days, no sign of difference between day 1 and day 5.

• At least some amount of sulfite is absolutely required. In my experience around 0.2g sulfite is required for every 0.4g of HQ. Without sulfite, not only will it die in the tray quickly, but a tiny amount is needed for lith development to work properly. Infectious development is basically a cycle of which sulfite is a part of. If you do try adding no sulfite, your developer will quickly die and likely won’t even finish a single print, but you can save it by adding some sulfite to it. This basically turns the oxidation products (the red film that floats on top) back into usable HQ.

• The TEA component is an alkali, but at the small amounts added for lith development, it’s not basic enough to make the developer work well. I recommend supplementing with a secondary alkali, HOWEVER, a significantly smaller amount will be required. Many part A lith developers are acidic, so you’re working against that with the part B alkali. In this case, the part A is already basic. I’d recommend adding 5 parts A (HQ+TEA), to 1 part B (base) to begin with.

• I’ve tried using TEA as the part B alkali, but it requires a considerable amount. It does produce somewhat unique and slightly more colorful results with significantly better tray life of the part B component since TEA will form a lower but stable pH buffer compared to carbonate and hydroxide. However, I don’t really think it’s worth the extra expense. TEA isn’t that expensive, but it’s not cheap when you’re using 100ml for every lith printing session.

• You can not mix most components into TEA. Specifically, neither bromide nor sulfite will go into TEA with no water present.

• Mixing a developer like this will produce somewhat different results than a formaldehyde containing developer. The formaldehyde actually forms a sulfite like component which will shape the grains and such. Don’t expect any lith developer (commercial or homebrew) without formaldehyde to give exactly the same colors etc as a formaldehyde containing developer. The results can definitely be great, but your favorite paper may not look like what you want.. but your least favorite paper may look significantly improved. It just required testing.

• Less sulfite is required for second-pass lith development. Sulfite helps to prevent fog and mottle and these basically aren’t a problem for second-pass lith, since there is no unexposed silver to fog. In addition less actual development happens in second-pass which means that your developer will die less quickly from development action.

• You can surprisingly use this stuff until it’s really deep brown and it’ll still work for second-pass lith. It got a lot slower, but also a lot more colorful in its results.

Ok, with that out of the way. Next just some musings on second pass lith and my love hate relationship with it.

• Most papers “work” to some extent with second pass lith, unlike with first pass lith. However, not all will produce the radically different results you’re looking for without a lot of testing. The primary papers I’ve tested are Ilford MGV RC and Ilford Cooltone RC

• Cooltone RC can produce really nice split tones if you only partially bleach it. MGV is less colorful after drying, but partial bleaching can be a good way of keeping the brilliant blacks but getting some subtle colors in the highlights and better gradation from midtones to highlights

• Second pass lith really breaks the golden rule that “less exposure and more development = more contrast”. For second pass lith contrast tends to be “fixed” without partial bleaching. I recommend printing a grade higher contrast level than you think you want if you intend to use partial bleaching to keep the blacks.

• If you want maximum color, extremely slow lith developer should be used, ie, with little base and a lot of bromide. With this, you will NOT get proper blacks. If you do get proper blacks somehow, it’ll have little color and a lower amount of contrast than the original print. To get maximum color, you need to truly only partially develop it, removing some of the highlights. Thus, you need probably ~1/2 stop more exposure and partial bleach to keep the blacks, and then develop until you have the amount of highlight detail you want, and then quickly pull it before it reverts back to being over exposed.

• Be extremely careful with bleaching. With RC it can quickly be rinsed to remove fixer using the standard 1m recommendation, but make sure that there is no residual fixer on your hands. With all handling, try to handle by the borders and highlights such as the sky. Any uncleanliness will be very obvious in shadows and blacks. Make sure to keep the same cleanliness standards when rinsing the bleach off the print.

• Partial bleaching RC prints just doesn’t work well with all subjects. Large areas of black will bleach unevenly and then develop unevenly and can produce unattractive results after development

• Prints can of course be gold toned afterwards. Be careful if trying to achieve a split tone though, as the “one-shot” gold toner I use (I’ll provide a recipe in a later post) can be fairly fast, and will change color slightly more after sitting in water. Gold toner can quickly destroy warm tones, but if done carefully can produce beautiful split tones with blue highlights and warm shadows.

• First developer choice does matter, unlike much recommendations I’ve seen to settle on a neutral tone first developer, such as Dektol. I don’t have enough experience with this yet to talk in depth, but if doing partial bleaching, the shadows etc will mostly be set by the first developer. However, it also seems the first developer can somewhat change the results of bleached highlights and fully bleached prints. I need to do proper control tests, but for Ansco 130 vs Liquidol for first developer, it seems like Ansco 130 can produce especially warmer bleached highlights, while retaining it’s standard cold tone shadows with Cooltone RC paper. I experimented a lot and could not replicate the same look using Liquidol

• Ilford RC papers will lose a lot of color upon drying. Some additional color can be revealed by rinsing after fixing in very hot water, but I’m unsure how much of this color actually sticks after drying

Ortho Litho/PFS Experiment Report Nov 15, 2019

No fancy pictures because all I used was a step chart and enlarger.. but did test and find out a number of things.

• PFS-4 mixed with photographic grade TEA (ie, clear not yellow) is not as potent. Seems to require double the working strength and 25% more time for equivalent results. It does seem somewhat more stable to use with photographic TEA with less fogging, but actually looks to lose ~1/2 stop in unstable speed compared to technical grade TEA. Timing and such could potentially be adjusted further with pH balancing

• PFS-4 as a stock solution seems to keep pretty much forever. The batch I mixed in August is still just as good today

• PFS-4 can not be replaced by a simple carbonate+bromide solution. It’s clearly the TEA itself that is doing something to the film, not just having a basic environment with bromide present

• The “stable” speed increase of Arista Ortho Litho with PFS-4 is ~2 stops. The unstable (ie, can be fogged/show artifacts) speed increase is ~3 stops.

• PFS-4 is effective on Kodalith, though to a much lesser extent. The speed of Kodalith with nothing special is about 2.5 stops faster than Arista, and PFS-4 only adds 0.5-1 stop extra, though does seem to degrade the highlights somewhat and thus resulting in a more pleasant tonal scale, rather than going very dark on the negative, they go to a more mild grey. End result is that the speed of Kodalith with PFS-4 roughly matches that of Arista, but with a steeper contrast curve.

• PFS-4 does NOT work on Kodak positive microfilm (ie, what FPP sells). Absolutely no difference is made between the two. Also, a fun fact people don’t mention is that it is blue sensitive only and can be processed under red safelight, maybe even amber safelight

T-Max 3200 in Shanghai

Every time I visit Shanghai it seems like I love it more and more for it’s photography opportunities. These are a subset of the pictures I captured mostly with a Minolta XD11 and 50mm f/1.4 lens on T-Max 3200 film and processed with HC-110 dilution B. It’s really one of my favorite films with it’s striking contrast, surprisingly good shadow detail, and wonderfully sharp grain. It’s the film I always prefer when I actually need that extra stop of speed going from 1600 ISO to 3200 ISO.

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