Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Wednesday, Wednesday, January 06, 1999, Dan Post wrote: > In fact, when I was doing photos for the > yearbook in high school I actually developed some negs in Dektol to get a > high contrast, grainy, graphics effect for a cover page! Dan, When working news we used Dektol fairly regularly for doing film. At the last news paper I worked at we always ran what we jokingly called 2b's, local feature art in B&W. All photos were always shot in color (chrome back then) so we would dupe the negs to tri-x and soup it in dektol. 30 secs with a little shake at the start then quick water wash to the fix. Worked great, but we were bracketing the dupes all the way up the scale...from several secs to 1/60 so there was always a good exposure somewhere in there. But I did do this on assignment film once. It was during the snow storm that paralyzed Atlanta in '93 (9 inches of snow in my back yard in MARCH!-was driving my convertable with the top down on Wednesday, had 9 inches of snow in yard on Friday night and had top down again by following Thursday...very weird. NASCAR fans will remember this as it canceled the AJC 500 at Hampton, GA.) Anyway I had taken home an enlarger, drum transmitter, color chemistry for film, and B&W print materials from UPI's bureau. We shot everything in color in case we needed color later, but transmitted most stuff in B&W. I discovered my color chems were bad after processing 2 rolls of film....so I had to re-shoot stuff on tri-x and soup the film in dektol. I was shooting people in snow, not exactly a low contrast situation, but still had fairly easily printable negs and moved several photos over the weekend from my house. They were grainy, but not terrible. Note I do not recommend this as a standard developer, but in an emergency it will work. Best regards, Harrison McClary http://people.delphi.com/hmphoto preview my book: http://www.volmania.com mailto:hmcclary@earthlink.net Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film.