After last weekend’s outing I had several sheets of film  to develop. The first couple came out a little thin but acceptable. Then tragedy struck. The developer, Pyrocat HD in Glycol, was suddenly failing to fully develop the negatives. And oddly there was a color shift from the usual tan to a pinkish color that […]

In celebration of photography day I went into the darkroom to catch up on some printing. But of course had to try something new. First I mixed my Photographers Fomulary 130 paper developer a little more dilute to see if it made any difference in tone of my normal paper. I mixed it 1:2 instead […]

I must have been feeling brave last night and processed 3 sheets of film at the same time. My experience with Pyrocat HD over the last couple of years has taught me a great deal about how it works when using minimal agitation/semi stand techniques. I altered my normal single sheet dilution to be sure […]

Another test this month using Photographer Formulary Liquidol paper developer. I had read reviews about this developer giving rich blacks and having similar qualities to Dektol, which is the standard by which other developers are measured. Liquidol purports to have faster development time, higher shelf life, and flexibility with over/under development. Developed by  Bill Troop and […]

I had taken a couple of shots of the Chattahoochee River after a big tropical storm had dumped a bunch of rain trying to capture the raging waters. However the water was so high that the rocks that normally protrude above the river were completely submerged. And it was near past my normal exposure time […]

I dropped my ancient trusty Kodak mercury thermometer a few months back and finally replaced it with one from Patterson. I then used it to check my dial thermometers to see if they had stayed “calibrated” (I had reason to suspect they had not). I found that one was two degrees higher than the mercury […]

Having seen some interesting images a few months back shot on Bergger Panchro 400 I decided to order some and give it a try. Since I usually work with Ilford FP4+ at EI of 100 it was going to be a bit of a challenge to find a suitable scene for a 400 speed film. […]

Here is the final print version of Amicalola Creek. My initial version was a scan of the negative and processed in Photoshop to my normal brown tone. However after printing this image I thought I liked it better more neutral grey. But I did decide to warm it up a bit so did a little […]

My Dichro 45s enlarger head died a few months back so I was using a cold light head in its place. I had to use under the lens graded filters since there was no control for the color of light when using multigrade papers. I then found on ebay, for a somewhat reasonable price, a […]

I did a little experiment today. I bleached a test print and redeveloped it with Pyrocat HD just to see what would happen. It redeveloped to a nice neutral grey in about 7-8 minutes. Used roughly 10:10:1000 mix. I thought it might stain the paper but it did not seem to or was very subtle. […]