Response to Compensating developers and accutance developers

When I was young, about 30 years ago, someone told me about the magical compensating powers of divided D-23. For a while, I thought it was the next best thing to sliced bread. Then I built a densitometer and started comparing curve shapes of a lot of film-developer combos. Much to my surprise, there was no discernible difference between D-23 and divided D-23. In those days of Super XX and the like, we wanted as much shadow speed as we could get. Compensation was our name for that. No one thst I can recall thought much of trying to produce a shoulder. I still do not. We have both Kodak and Ilford procucing long-toed printing paper to counteract the upsweep in some of the higher film tones of modern films, and people trying to get a shoulder and then cursing the manufacturers for the long-toed paper when they succeed. I have found that in two radically diferent developers, D-76 1:1 and my own phenidone-vitamin C stuff, when you find the normal developing time for periodic agitation, say 5 sec/0.5 min, you can multiply that time by 1.42 to get the time for no agitation except the first 30 seconds. I get somewhat better shadow contrast with the same highlight density. As an old available light people photographer, I am just tickled pink with that knowledge. This works for a normally 5 min developer, my PC, and for D-76 1:1 which I did for 7 min at 70 degrees with agitation and 10 minutes with no agitation. You worry about lack of agitation. I have done 35 mm and 120 in reels and 4x5 in tray both face up and face down, and standing on edge in a Combi Plan tank without agitation and have seen no sign of bromide drag ot other smearing or uneven development. I think the problem is that once you make up your mind not to agitate, stick with it. Continuous agitation can be worse than none if it causes eddy currents, which is very likely to happen when developing film in reels in a rotating tank. I plan to do more work on this subject. It is very tedious because one thing at a time must be varied in order to make sense out of the mess. Too many of us change too many things at once in our experiments. The final answer may be simpler than changing dilution and accelerator and method and degree of agitation and developing agents and...you name it. Maybe in the end we'll find that a simple change in agitation procedure will be all we need. Wouldn't that be great?

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