Large Format photography group - From "zero to hero!"

Nomad Z said:
White = Light = Exposed.
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Carl Hall said:
I use white/silver for unexposed and black for exposed as well. I remember which way round it is with the TOAST RULE. It's white before you cook it and it's black afterwards! :D
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Thanks folks, that makes perfect sense, the trouble is now that’s in my head I’m going to even more confused.
 
stevelmx5 said:
On the wet/dry plate holders I'm working on, I'm engraving "EXPOSED" on one side of the dark slide where you grab it to remove it. That way, if the slide has been shot, the writing will be facing outwards, towards you, when you insert the holder. I'm terrible for remembering if I've used the dark/light edge to signify exposed so I figure writing it in big obvious letters is foolproof ;)
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k.i.s.s. tbh.
 
Another thing I do is write in pencil on the white bit what film is loaded so I can quickly see any unloaded and usually write something about the scene or exposure settings if relevant to reinforce that side has been exposed.
 
Has anyone sent any 4x5 film off to Peak recently? Their website is confusing me... I need to send off a few sheets of C41 and a few sheets of E6, but there are no options to differentiate them. I assume that I just select the total number of sheets I need, and make sure that I label the two boxes really clearly as C41/E6 when I post them?
 
I sent stuff earlier this week, and I (rather archaically) send my stuff off with the paper order form. Your assumption is correct. I note on the form the break down of number of c41 and e6, and indeed send them in separate labelled boxes. That’s how I’ve always done it and it’s never been an issue, at least as far as they have communicated :)
 
Woodsy said:
I sent stuff earlier this week, and I (rather archaically) send my stuff off with the paper order form. Your assumption is correct. I note on the form the break down of number of c41 and e6, and indeed send them in separate labelled boxes. That’s how I’ve always done it and it’s never been an issue, at least as far as they have communicated :)
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Brilliant, cheers Woodsy. It's been so long since I've sent off any 4x5 film!
 
I spent some time yesterday checking dev and scan prices for 4x5.

a) Peak now cost £4 per frame for dev-only (plus £3.95 for return postage, but freepost out to them), and for scanning you have to choose their Custom Scan option at £4.96 for small and £7.50 for medium, plus, it appears, at least £2.50 for download or £2.75 for CD!

b) Harman Labs charge £3.60 per frame for dev only, add £2.40 for 1200 ppi scans and £3.90 for 2400 ppi scans, with no obvious cost for online or CD-based delivery. In fact, they don't seem to charge for return delivery at all; OTOH I'd be up for £3.45 postage to them, and they suggest turnround times of around a week. They don't offer E6.

c) CC Imaging don't seem to offer C41 processing for 4x5, but do offer E6 and B&W for £9 and £10.50 respectively. Easy to rule them out.

d) The Dark Room also don't offer C41 processing AFAIK, and charge £.50 for E6 and £3.45 for B&W. No scan option that I can see. Return postage £3.75 but do have freepost.

I chose to send my first two frames to Peak this time, with their known reputation and relatively quick turnround times. John @thedarkshed has offered to let me scan them at his.

I process my own black and white currently with an Agfa Rondinax 35, which is definitely no good for 4x5. I've backed the Lab-Box Kickstarter with 135 and 120 options, but I suspect that won't work for 4x5 either. However, I won't know until it arrives; it might be possible to remove the spool and do taco-style stand development. Who knows! I should have thought about this 2 weeks ago and grabbed that Paterson tank that was going begging at Onich, but didn't.

I can't really justify >£4 per frame for black and white in the longer run (assuming there is one!). So, what are the home dev options? One is presumably taco-style in a Paterson tank. Another is presumably the Stearman SP-445, but... £100! Or the MOD54, cheaper at £59 plus £7.50 postage, but loading looks a nightmare.

Any suggestions?
 
ChrisR said:
the MOD54, cheaper at £59 plus £7.50 postage, but loading looks a nightmare.
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I have two!

If loading 6 frames then although it isn't a nighmare, it can get quite awkward and "cluttered" loading them.

I generally dev two sheets at a time or 4 as a maximum, that way there is more space between the sheets and thus easier to deal with .

I have loaded 6 frames and they developed just fine but I did seem to be faffing with the loading process for ever!

Obviously two sheets means using more outlay for chems but once you get the feel of your kit and have had the initial "play time", the chances are you'll only be returning home with one or two exposed sheets anyway.
 
Keep an eye on eBay for a Mod54, managed to get mine for £30 all for a brand new one last year. I have been using a Paterson Orbital recently though, uses about 200ml of working solution and I can process 4x 5x4s or one 8x10, so far my sheets have had very even development too.
 
The other options for daylight development are the CombiPlan tanks (now no longer made as the moulds wore out) and the Jobo system. Jobo make reels for 5x4 to fit one of their tanks.

If you can produce a completely dark room, you could tray develop - on another forum someone said that they did this but wore infra red goggles to see what they were doing.
 
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FruitFlakes said:
Keep an eye on eBay for a Mod54, managed to get mine for £30 all for a brand new one last year. I have been using a Paterson Orbital recently though, uses about 200ml of working solution and I can process 4x 5x4s or one 8x10, so far my sheets have had very even development too.
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I use the Paterson Orbital as well, but they go for scary prices nowadays. I had a look for one on eBay just now for Chris, and there's one with a motor base at £160 :eek: I sometimes see them popping up in general darkroom bundles, but most of these are collection only and you'd need to be local to them.
 
West Yorkshire Cameras have a presumably unmotorised one for £49.
 
I don't use a motor for with mine, I continuously tilt the processor, I do it gently so as not to make the liquid inside slosh against the walls which would cause uneven development.
 
OK Folk are using all sorts of stuff, I see. I quite liked the look of the Paterson Orbital, specially the parsimonious use of chems, but eek the prices! I think I can get a Patersons tank for a tenner or so of fleabay. How have people got on with the taco method? Any marks on the film from the band?

Someone mentioned making tubes from some sort of plastic mesh that they use instead of the band; being finer and more widely spread it apparently reduced the problem. Others report no problem at all. Still other say they can see marks on their negs but not on scans...

I saw mention that you can dev one sheet of 4x5 by dropping it into a Paterson Tank without the band. Bit worried that it would float around a bit too much!
 
ChrisR said:
I saw mention that you can dev one sheet of 4x5 by dropping it into a Paterson Tank without the band. Bit worried that it would float around a bit too much!
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Thinking out loud on this one Chris, but I would imagine that it wouldn't float much if you filled the tank up to the inner lid thingy? You could then try using something like D76/ID11 straight, so you're not dumping the dev for a single sheet. Agitation could be tried, or else perhaps stand development with a weaker strength dev used one-shot? :thinking:
 
Peter B said:
Thinking out loud on this one Chris, but I would imagine that it wouldn't float much if you filled the tank up to the inner lid thingy? You could then try using something like D76/ID11 straight, so you're not dumping the dev for a single sheet. Agitation could be tried, or else perhaps stand development with a weaker strength dev used one-shot? :thinking:
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It's probably the agitation that's bothering me, probably because I've never done it. I just wind the little knob on my Rondinax, everything nice and stable. EDIT: I've no real idea how much the contents of a tank will move about during agitation.

I could take the reel out of the Rondinax and do one taco in there (I think... it may be too small), but without the reel in the chems would leak out and light leak in! Ideally, my Lab-box would arrive before I exposed any more sheets of film, so I could evaluate whether it could be used before spending more money!

I read a bit about devving in plastic pipes, but I think you need a darkroom to get the chems in and out. (As for chems, I've just picked up a bottle of HC 110, as I think my Ilfosol 3 is going off.)
 
ChrisR said:
saw mention that you can dev one sheet of 4x5 by dropping it into a Paterson Tank without the band
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Don't try that as occasionally the sheet will "stick" itself to the inside of the tank and not develop correctly.:(

The taco method works,:) …..When I shot a handful of sheets of whole plate film on the old Marion camera ( that is in classifieds btw ;):p) I used the taco method for those negs in a very large patterson tank that I recently gave away ( someone else obviously snatched it up at Onich before you got chance!)
I have also developed smaller obscure film sizes, namely quarter and half plate in the same manner and only once had a mark left on the negative( i stupidly used a coloured ( green) elastic band) instead of a "plain" one:rolleyes:
Nonetheless as the band is attached to the outside, thus non emulsion side, I was able to rub the mark away with a certain amount of finger pressure and cold water. There was no evidence left of it on the neg nor the scan…..Film is surprisingly tough contrary to what some folk may believe;)

To be fair Chris, LF is never going to be cheap cheap although there are ways to keep prices down and still have the enjoyment of shooting the format.
That said, if you really want quality results from your gear then trying to make severe cost cutting in developing , scanning and printing is potentially going to give you end results that you're not happy with even when your LF outfit and yourself as a photographer have captured a top notch shot…...Please don't take any of this the wrong way as I don't wish to cause upset it's,simply something that you may want to give some thought to;)
 
Thanks @Asha, I appreciate that. It certainly is not cheap cheap to get into LF, I've spent quite a lot already! But I'm still not certain whether it's for me, so it's hard to put out another £100 or so for a SP445, say. However, I've given myself a bit of a talking to this afternoon, and I really have to give it a proper go, of at least 6 months. Still trying to work through the dev options, though.

@Woodsy are you still using the taco method?
 
You could always make a bathroom totally light tight and then try tray developing a negative? Only cost then is for four small trays for the chemicals and rinsing water. Beats paying out a hundred notes when you're not convinced you'll get on with the format.

It's easy peasy too. Your film sheet is in the DDS, flick the light off, take the film out and put it in each of the trays in turn for the specified amount of time, turn the light on and wash it in a fourth tray in the sink.
 
I recently sold a jobo 2508 tank which with the correct reel works great for 4x5 and only uses a little volume of chemicals but it needs to be constantly agitated and that got on my nerves. I've still got the manual rotary base you can have if you can find a tank for reasonable money.
 
Would you like to borrow a CombiPlan tank? I have several (probably 4 or 5) so I can spare one. You could then decide if large format is for you before splashing out :)D) on a tank of your own. The downside that everyone mentions for these tanks is that they take a litre of solution and hence 20cc of Rodinal as I use it. I don't consider this a lot of neat developer, but others clearly do ;)
 
StephenM said:
these tanks is that they take a litre of solution and hence 20cc of Rodinal
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StephenM said:
I don't consider this a lot of neat developer, but others clearly do ;)
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Me neither;)

I use HC110, it's like 31cc to make a solution B

A liter bottle of developer will give you approx 32 developments.

I pay best part of 30 euros / bottle so it works out less than a euro each time I dev.

Even developing 2 frames at a time which is the norm for me, it's like 50 centimes each.

Obviously 4 frames works out at 25 centimes a piece

and if I really pushed myself to load the Mod54 with 6 frames at a time then we're looking in the region of 15 centimes a frame which atm works out at about 12 pence!!

On top of that, one can make a weaker solution which I've never done but of course it would reduce costs even further and who knows, maybe even give a more pleasing result

I think HC110 is probably one of the most economic developers in liquid form at the moment, perhaps there are powder forms that work out a better deal but with the films I use ( fomapan 100 and ilford delta 100) , I'm happy enough with the results.:)
 
I've never used HC110, perhaps I should try it when my Rodinal stock runs out in a decade or so...
 
I've just calculated that if I shot two frames of 5x4 Delta 100 every week for a year and developed four sheets at a time in HC110 solution B, it would cost me less than 290 euros/ year and that isn't taking into account it's possible to buy the film in "bulk" ( ie 100 sheet boxes) which are considerably cheaper than 4 x 25 sheet boxes and of course it is far from the cheapest film on the market!

I don't know how much beer is nowadays as I haven't drunk the stuff in 25 years, but I'm pretty darned sure that one pint a week would cost more annually ;)
 
StephenM said:
I've never used HC110, perhaps I should try it when my Rodinal stock runs out in a decade or so...
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If the bottle is 500ml, which i think they are then using 20cc each time will give you 25 x 1 liter solutions.

I dunno what you pay for rodinal but that may be even cheaper than what I'm using:thinking:

Asha goes off searching rodinal prices with abacus in hand! :D:D
 
@ChrisR, Yes, I am currently. Long story short, I started using the taco method when I first started and, bar the very rare mishap with not washing the anti-halation layer off properly in pre-soak, it works fine. I funded the SP-445 kickstarter and quickly realised that the film holder design caused frequency issues again with the anti-halation layer not washing off. Following a recent effort to cut the centers out of these holders and leaving too many burs and rough surfaces, I went back to the taco method. When I can stretch to the £18 odd for the revised design though, I'll likely retry the SP-445.
 
On the SP-445 you might find this thread on another forum interesting.
 
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@ChrisR I'm using the Jobo system - you can have an experiment with that when scanning to see if it works for you.

I started out with trays for 4x5 but moved on to a Jobo setup after finding a good deal on ebay. Now I do all my dev with it - a larger investment but can be used for all film formats, I'm even using it for 8x10 now with a CatLabs reel.
Fantastic consistent results and very economical on chems give it up a thumbs up from me! :)
 
So with the taco method, do I need a 2-reel or 3-reel tank? The one I have my eye on in fleabay is a 2-reel. I think I read somewhere that's enough for 4x5 tacos, but somewhere else that you need a 3-reel tank for a MOD54...

@thedarkshed thanks John. I'm on tenterhooks waiting to see if the first two sheets are completely blank! Hope I'll get the first sheets back tomorrow. I don't think a Jobo is realistic for space and (ahem) decor reasons; I currently get my dev stuff in a cube crate that goes under the stairs, and I'd prefer to keep it to roughly those dimensions. Though adding a Paterson tank and (probably) a larger measuring cylinder might be a stretch...
 
ChrisR said:
I don't think a Jobo is realistic for space and (ahem) decor reasons; I currently get my dev stuff in a cube crate that goes under the stairs, and I'd prefer to keep it to roughly those dimensions. Though adding a Paterson tank and (probably) a larger measuring cylinder might be a stretch...
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Why is there no shed smiley when you need one? :thinking:
 
images
 
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