Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/01/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I've been reading over this Tri-X discussion with interest, also. In earlier decades, before I had a family and children and other such obligations, I shot a lot of Tri-X and many people including myself thought that what I got out of it was good. I never printed bigger than 16x20, and rarely bigger than 11x14, so the grain and I became friends. Now I have four kids, and I often have to clear clutter out of the darkroom before I develop film. And I've had a problem with developer stock solutions, which I thought I could solve by using T-max developer. But also in the past 10 years I've been terribly unhappy with the image tones I've gotten out of my pictures, so much so that it has been keeping me out of the darkroom. Just last month I spent a few hours looking sadly over the thousands of pictures I took in the 1960s and 1970s, trying to figure out why I had lost the ability to get pictures like that any more despite having traded my screw-mount Elmar 50/2.8 for a M6 Summilux 50/1.4. I think, after having read over all of this Tri-X correspondence, that I need to dump my bottles of T-max down the drain and buy D-76 and just live with the greater effort of keeping current stock D-76 mixed. If I can get the Christmas dishes and rolls of gift wrap moved out of my darkroom to wherever else they belong, I'm going to load up with Tri-X and try again, but develop in D-76 1:1, as I did for 25 years, rather than this newfangled T-max stuff. Brian Reid