I've been playing around with a few film and developer combinations to try to settle on a 50-100 speed combination that provides high sharpness, reasonably fine grain and nice gradation. I'm playing around with Acros and TMX in Xtol and Rodinal, and after setting an Xtol and 1:50 Rodinal baselines, I processing a test strip of TMX in Rodinal with some added ascorbate.(posted 8080 days ago)As I don't have a local source of Sodium Ascorbate, for my first test I mixed developer using 1/2 tsp of ascorbic acid (Vit C), 1/4 tsp of baking soda, 500ml of water (lots of fizzing when the soda was added to the ascorbic acid/water mix) with 10ml of Rodinal (1:50). I developed for 8 minutes and got an image - thin, but still printable at EI 50.
To boost the density, for the next test I doubled the ascorbate proportion by using 1 tsp ascorbic acid with 1/2 tsp baking soda an increased the dev time to 10 mintues - the result, a very, very faint image that was completely unprintable. Thinking that the ascorbic acid may not have been fully neutralized by the baking soda, I tried again by adding soda until the ascorbic acid/water mix stopped fizzing ended up being about 1 tsp ascorbic acid, .6 tsp soda. The result - no image at all, no edge markings, blank film base.
I can't for the life of me figure out what I'm messing up. I thought that I was following Patrick Gainer's suggestions regarding teaspoon mixing (where he suggests consistency is more important than absolute accuracy), but it appears that my ascorbate addition is neutralizing the Rodinal.
From the positive feedback I've read from others, I don't want to give up but don't know what I'm doing wrong. Any suggestions?