Sometimes I buy 'weird' film on a whim. I was recently noticing that my supply of 8x10 Kodak Clinic Select Green x-ray film was running low. I bought 100 sheets of it a few years ago and for the most part I cut it down to 4x5 sheets and shot it in my Graflex Speed Graphic. I had good luck developing it in various developers using the Mod-54 device. The emulsion is very thin and on both sides of the film, so it tends to get scratches where the Mod-54 holder grips it. But other than that I was happy with the results. So I went looking for some more. I found it, but not before I noticed a box of Kodak Camera 2000 film in 10x12 for sale. That's 6 sheets of 4x5 per sheet of 10x12, so that made it very cheap to shoot, but I knew nothing about this film. So the research began. Turns out that it is copy film for line art and half-tone images (like newspapers print with the grid of little black dots of varying size to create the illusion of grey scale). So it is a 'black-or-white' kind of film... very high contrast. The only example I could find of true pictorial use was from Mike Rasso on Flickr. Even then he had only posted a couple of shots. They were contrasty, but not terribly so. The catch was the iso. He had shot it at iso 0.8! Now that's some slow film. But if you have read many of my other posts, you will know that I'm not afraid of low speeds. You might say I'm a low speed junky. So that was it. I bought the box and set about reading the Kodak spec sheet in anticipation of taming this beast. It is ortho-chromatic. That is to say it has no sensitivity to red light. That's a bonus when it comes to cutting 10x12 sheets down to 4x5 since I can work under a safe light and don't have to operate the guillotine cutter in total darkness. The base is 'thin'. I read this, but didn't really realize what they meant by that. I have used thin base films in 35mm and it can be a bit of a hassle, but this was large sheet film. Certainly it wouldn't be THAT thin. But it is. It's really thin. That makes tank developing a little more tricky. You can't slosh it around or it will come out of the Mod-54 tracks and stick to other sheets and hilarity will ensue. The one thing I didn't anticipate was that it is not notched. So it's difficult to tell which side is the emulsion side. I took a sheet out into the light and looked at it. One side is shiny brown and the other side is shiny purple. Neither one gave an indication by visual inspection that it was emulsion. So I put a drop of developer on either side. Sure enough, the purple side turned deep brown and the brown side stayed brown, no change to speak of.
The next question was "Which developer will make the best negatives?" My go-to is Parodinal (DIY Rodinal), then My-tol (DIY X-Tol), but for this I thought I would try an off-the-shelf developer. So I bought my first bottle of HC110. This is a legendary developer for those who wade into the miry waters of long-expired film. It does a good job developing the exposed silver without bringing up the base fog. I thought I would give it a try on this odd-ball film to see if I could coax some length into the tonal range. So I tried a high dilution (Dil. J) which is 1:150. For the first go-round I thought I would do tray development under safe light since I had no idea how long I would need to develop this stuff. As it turns out it's still hard to see how far the development has progressed, so it's still largely a guess. My first try I shot at iso 6 (by accident) I pulled at 6 minutes. That seemed really short, but I could see an image and didn't want to over-develop (I'm scanning, not wet printing). Here's the result:
That looks pretty good off the scanner. If I zoom waaayyy in, there is no detail in the darkest shadows. In fact, you can see the weird 'plaid' pattern of the substrate. That means there is really no exposed silver there and it happens with thin negatives, but at 'sharable' resolutions, it looks fine. It is too thin to ever use for either contact printing or wet enlargement. IT's okay. I got an image with a full range of greys and little to no grain at all. I'll count that as a success.
The next shot was at iso 3 and developed for 8 minutes. The negative was still pretty thin. Here it is. You can see that the handle of the knife and the bowl of the pipe are a bit lighter and the highlights on the blade are a bit whiter. Overall there is more contrast, but it is still manageable. The negative is still too thin for printing, so maybe a little stronger developer is called for.
I have in the past added a little bit of Parodinal to dilute developers to give them a 'boost' and put some meat on otherwise bony negatives. So next I added the same amount of Parodinal as HC100 (1:150 of each, bringing the 'developer' dilution down to 1:75). I also bumped the iso down to 1.5. This negative is definitely lower in contrast, but not really more dense. You can also see the fog rolling in around the edges. This is heading in the wrong direction.
Finally, I shot one at iso 0.8 like Mike Rasso. It just exaggerated all of the problems with the previous one. There is definitely a LOT more experimenting to do with this film to get it where I want it. Good thing I have 600 sheets of it!!
