Hi, I am developing Tri-x Pan with Sprint Standard chemicals. Two questions: 1) I took night shots and bumped down my ISO rating to 200. What development time should I use? I should note that I have a 5-roll tank that holds 64 fluid ounces... 2) I want to know if using my 5-roll tank, I should change my developing times? I usually use Tri-X pan at 400 ISo and the table produced by Sprint says that I should develop at 8:30 at 68 degrees? Any suggestions.... Thanks in advance...

-- Joe Woodring (woodring@hotmail.com), March 12, 2001

Answers

Joe:

I can't suggest any developing times for your night shots. I'm not familiar with the Sprint film developer. When it comes to developing film in the larger tanks, you can have problems agitating them rapidly enough just because of their size. I usually agitate my smaller tanks 5 secs every 30 secs, but with the larger ones, I agitate 10 secs every minute and increase my developing time 10%. That should at least give you a starting point.

-- Ken Burns (kenburns@twave.net), March 13, 2001.

Joe, in addition to what Ken has told you above, you might want to check out Sprint's website for dev. times. I haven't used their dev., but isn't it pretty much like D76 1:1? From just glancing at their data, I think you could probably just use the times for Plus-X, and extrapolate these over to Tri-X at 200 EI. If it were me, I might just pull the film 10-20% off the regular times. Like I said, I haven't used this stuff, so if you're really unsure, why don't you just run a test roll, or at least a clip, before running it all at once.

-- DK Thompson (kthompson@moh.dcr.state.nc.us), March 13, 2001.

Joe

why not do some densitometric testing to see what your proper developing time is given your methods and your equipment.

Kevin

-- kevin Kolosky (kjkolosky@kjkolosky.com), March 14, 2001.

I'd say develop your Tri-X at about 80 percent of your usual time, mainly because night shots may be a bit contrasty, not because you rated the film at 200 instead of 400. Going from 400 to 200 is basically equivalent to the usual exposure slipups we make and probably doesn't call for any development adjustment to produce easily printable negatives. If your current batch of negatives are a little contrasty or dense, make adjustments on your next batch.

-- Keith Nichols (knichols@iopener.net), March 16, 2001.