Edwal 12 was close but no cigar, but it did have it's uses. Generally it was dissapointing, but if you had to photograph Times square at night from a helicopter and the top of a building using flash fill and street and traffic lights, Edwal 12 and a film with a good anti halation backing (and a bevy of assistants) was the ONLY way to do it. 777 was perfect for anything else. Extreamly smooth fine grain, totally flexable mystery soup. Shadow detail that dumbfounded folks, and which made those great long scale shots in smokey Jazz clubs possible, without ever burning out a highlight. Negatives that far outstriped the dynamic range of the papers of the time. (Almost unprintable at times on Kodabromide), really amazingly long scale with gently curving heel and toe but with a accutance and snap the boggled contemporary concepts of scale and depth. The only thing that worked to photograph thousands of pages in Brides magazine with the Ascor flash units of the era. The dresses simply always still had detail.(posted 8243 days ago)777 has a give away smell. It is a nice but very distinctive one. It was poorly marketed, and very expensive. It was originally only available as a mixable kit packaged on what seemed like a too large cylinder, with the components inside. It was hard to mix, and once mixed it was a broderline suspension that if you had never seen it before seemed like it was not mixed. It was sold premixed for a while, but this falling out of suspension problem disuaded most from ever buying the expensive and seemingly unstable (read bad) contents. A bottle of relatively fresh perfectly good 777 looks very funky. Putting 777 in a 500ml tank is asking for dissapointment. It is very soft working and is unpredictable when there is 250ml of solution attacking 80sq. inches of silver rich emulsion. (Edwal 11, 12 and 20 do this too)
W. Eugene Smith and I would make sure our friendly competors never discovered our secret sauce by giving them 16 oz out of out "ripened" 3 1/2 gal tank of 777. We knew they were used to things like DK-50, DK-60a, UFG, acufine, FG-7, Clayton P-60 and the like, and we would wait for the blue smoke, phone call that was sure to come a few days later.
Standard practice for changing overworked 777 was to dump 2/3 of what you had and adding fresh to the worked stock. Rarely, did any 777 addict mix a totally fresh batch. For us guys who shot everything from 35mm to 8x10, 777 was a god send. perfectly predictable, stable, consistant, do anything, at any temperture, magic stuff. It will work well (unlinear) from about 55f to over 100f. Dead on predictable and linear from 65f to 90f. It is hypercritical to agitation. Testing is the starting point. Not an endevour for the occasional user.
In the 50's thru the 80's social life for many like David Vestal, Bill Pierce, Nick Samardge, Guy Terrell, Aurtour tcholackian, Henri Kertez and a bunch of others was getting together at somebodys studio, The Tcholak Lab or the Pierce mill/home to chart out a new time and temp sheet for a new film and 777. There was a lot of inspection developing going on. The product of these get togethers, those hand drawn charts, were some of the closest held secrets in the photographic world.