Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/06

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Subject: Re[2]: [Leica] FX39
From: Harrison McClary <hmcclary@earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 20:46:05 -0600

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.