This video reminded me of a Modern Photography article on Brett Weston and his abstractions. He was using his faithful SL66 and shooting some no grain emulsion and the images printed in the article were impressive. Abstractions are a good remedy for confusion in scenes and also a good way to escape visual habits that often end up in the same place. Thanks for the memory.
Superb episode Roger. Love the abstract images. Making the most of light which a lot of photographers shy away from. A good lesson in being creative and using strong light to your advantage. The prints looked stunning, a great session which really went well.
You're soot film like a boss ! Today I soot digital like an idiot ! 1741 frames from the same 3 birds - luckily the memory card full . I have to go back to 4x5 !🙂 You are the best ! Peter
Nice idea... I love abstract forms also... and these pics don't bother people... like street photos sometimes do... I've had a few strange looks from people when I'm out doing street... trust is difficult... I'm going to try some hp5 pushed to 800... never done it before... It must be fun...
You may want to try Ralph Gibson’s technique that he used to get his high contrast shots. Tri x at 100-400 iso, then rodinal 1:25 for 11 minutes (over developed to hell), and you agitate by rolling the tank on its side on the floor. Very dense negatives.
Got some Ilford HP4 plus earlier.. its a 125 but Im gonna try pushing to 400 while also using an orange filter.. I love grain and contrast.. Ill be shooting indoors and a bit outdoors.. just not sure if using the orange filter will be too much...
Nice. I would have been grabbing my Nikon F4 for that shoot...BUT...its not the gear, it's the photographer. You have to dilute Xtol to 1:3 to sniff a little grain from TriX. Excellent developer for fine grain results. Rodinal is fantastic as well if you want to get after the edge of the grain. Rodinal is very unique and can produce stunning prints in the right hands. I suggest you explore it in detail because you are helping so many people learn about developing and dark room process. You never mentioned or I may have missed it, your dilution with the Rodinal... I assume 1:50. Keep up the great content. I'll be sending you a present some day
Cheers! Yeah, it was 1:50 for 33mins with 2 inversions each minute. I used my xtol replenished stock as I didn't want to lose contrast but you're right a diluted xtol would have got the grain out.
Tri-X 400 pushed to 3200 in hard sun and developed in Rodinal??! I was expecting potatoes instead of grain but this is pretty damm good. I've heard before that Tri-X and Rodinal is good combination. Rodinal is in general not suitable developer for pushing, specially from 400 to 3200, I'm really suprised.
What a lesson in how far film has come in fifty years. Your Rodinal developed Tri-X, pushed to 3200, has about the grain I'd have expected for 8x10 from 35 mm with normal development on Tri-X when I started shooting 35 mm back around 1970. To get grain like your Xtol, still at 3200, I'd have had to shoot Plus-X and develop in something like D-76 or D-23 (Xtol didn't exist yet back then).
Film emulsions must have had much improvement since the 70s. For better or worse I wonder? I mean looking back at some of the iconic portraits back in the 60s and 70s. Sometimes I find the films are so good it's hard to tell it from digital. Where as some of those classic portraits have an old look. If that makes sense.
@@ShootFilmLikeaBoss Grain reduction was the big quest in film innovation since cameras got small enough to carry around (as opposed to full plate and half plate, bigger than 4x5 and barely smaller) and such that needed a pack horse or wagon to go out photographing. See if you can find a photo made on Royal X Pan in 35 mm -- want to talk about grain like golf balls! That film was fast (pre-1960 ASA 800, IIRC, equivalent to modern ISO 1600), but back then the only way to make film faster was to make the halide crystals bigger. Over time, various methods were found to get more from smaller halide crytals. Then tabular grain came along, same sensitivity for half the silver, and still finer grain. The last innovation was formate doping, allowing the same size grain to give a full stop faster film -- and this was behind the last reformulation of Tri-X in the early 2000s (it had already been applied to T-Max and all the Kodak color cine stocks like Vision2). End result is that modern 400 speed film has about the same grain as 1950s vintage ASA 50-64 film like Verichrome Pan, Plus X, or FP3 (which became ASA 125 after the 1960 testing method change). Meanwhile, developers have changed, too -- phenidone-ascorbate developers like Xtol can pull as much as a full stop of speed out of the same film as compared to Rodinal (which goes back to the 1880s!). That means a modern ISO 400 film in Xtol (or EcoPro or XT-3 -- Ilford has one too, but I don't recall the designation) has similar real speed to Royal X Pan, but with the grain we'd have gotten from Panatomic X (ASA 32 *after* the 1960 reform) in developers like Dektol or Rodinal.
Roger, you could have more control by using an nd filter (perhaps 2 or 3 stop) in addition to an orange or red filter. Not the most easy with an slr, better with a rangefinder. I used a 2 stop nd with an orange #16 filter for quite some time to get the look your after, the orange or red filters will cut the blue light from the shadows and give much more contrast as well as giving you larger apertures and varying shutter speeds.
Thank you, I am getting so much out for your videos! I just got back into photography in January 2020 and purchased a digital Pentax K3. I am now looking for a film camera, probably a Pentax K1000, K1000 SE, or a Pentax MX because I can use some k mount lenses I already have. I had a B&W class in the mid-80's and enjoyed it. I will be processing my own film and getting my film for scanning as I don't have the space for a darkroom. Keep up the good work!
Hey Boss, you should try Tri-X at EI 3200 in low light conditions vs bright sun as you did this time and you would see dramatically different results in terms of grain and contrast.
I almost never push film. I recall having to do it a couple of times when I was a parttime freelance photographer for local newspapers. On the screen the 400 pushed to 3200 that you developed in XTOL stock surprised me. Was it really as fine grained as it appeared on the video? TH-cam video useful but very difficult to see fine detail. Rodinal makes everything more grainy. Indeed a good developer to use if you want grain. I've never been a big advocate of the formula. I use XTOL generally 1:1, HC110 at dilution B or H, and modern microdol. All fine grain developers. Based on your experience I think I might try to push triX to 3200 and use XTOL 1:1. Do you keep your enlarger lens on 5.6 or 8?
I can't remember now Erich. The video cameras are pretty sharp so if I was in focus on the print it would pick up grain. I use my enlarger aperture usually 2 stops down from wide open. But sometimes close it down more if I need to do any work on the print to give me more time under the enlarger. Over exposed negs can take time for the light to hit the paper so that's when I open the lens up for a quicker process.
Thank you Roger for yet another great video. I especially enjoyed the sound quality. I won’t ask if you had to block out the sound of a child saying “Mommy why on earth is that man taking a photo of a chair?”
Haha, right at the start when you said you were looking for lots of grain, I thought to myself "Rodinal...". My early experiences shooting film were on TX and Rodinal, mostly because I didn't know what I was doing. At the time I was hugely disappointed with the wild contrast and grimy grain. I couldn't understand why everyone said TX was such an amazing film. Looking back now, it just shows what an amazingly flexible film it is. Shot at box speed in X-Tol, it's amazingly sharp and smooth, but it can be pushed insanely far with great results, and if the grainy aesthetic is what you're going for, it can do that as well. After watching this video, I'm thinking of going back and trying this combination again. Just for a laugh, it might be fun to add a red filter and over-agitate the development to really exaggerate the grain and contrast.
Wow. Great comparison. Thanks a lot. Just a quick question: I regularly shoot studio portraits on Tri-X @ 1600, relatively high contrast lighting. I'm just getting into developing at home. Would you recommend Rodinal? XTOL? Something else? Thanks!
@@ShootFilmLikeaBoss Yes, I am pushing Tri-X 400 to 1600. I sometimes shoot at 1600 because the budget "studio" lights I use are not strong enough to shoot at box speed (at least, not without a tripod. And sometimes I like to shoot handheld because it can make the shoot more dynamic). Also, I like a grittier, high contrast look. I was thinking of getting HC-110 for developing. Thoughts?
35mm + 400 speed film + pushed 2 stops + Rodinal would normally produce nasty grain. If you shot it at 400 or 800 you wouldn't have had to shoot at f. 16. But, somehow you pulled it off. Rodinal is my go-to for 100 ASA and XTOL for anything faster. Nice job, interesting video.
Planning to try Tri-X for cityscape/street - what was your under exposure and over development in N+/- ratings? Great photography/ darkroom video, thank you.
I don't know Graham. I under exposed by 3 stops and developed in Rodinal 1/50 for 33 mins. At 400 it would have been just 13 mins. XTOL was 11.5 minutes Stock and at 400 would have been only 7 minutes. If that helps.
@@ShootFilmLikeaBossA big thank you for your response, with the negatives ending up at your usual density I would read that as exposure N-3 and development at N+3.
Thanks for the great video! You chose two extreme developers: XTOL is the developer to choose if you want to avoid grain and Rodinal the one to choose if you want a lot of grain. That's what you've got. 😄
Roger, you could give classes to folks in photography and developing. I have learned way more from watching you than from books, which i have plenty of, and not to say they are bad. some are quite good but seeing it done is way better. you have good presence and don't use uh's and ya know's , things like that. I know about this stuff as I was an Instructor (master instructor actually) in the Air Force. (4 years in the Marines and 16 in the Air Force).
Yeah... xtol will give you the most with the finest grain. If you’re looking for grain, xtol isn’t it, but it you’re shooting in low light, xtol is excellent.
this was one I missed I think Roger, definitely a worthwhile stroll around the island you picked up some cracking images.
Just got a few rolls of TriX. I love that grain in the 3200 push in Rodinal. Never thought about pushing 400 when it's sunny out! Great idea!!
4:35 I loveeee that picture!!!!!
This video reminded me of a Modern Photography article on Brett Weston and his abstractions. He was using his faithful SL66 and shooting some no grain emulsion and the images printed in the article were impressive. Abstractions are a good remedy for confusion in scenes and also a good way to escape visual habits that often end up in the same place. Thanks for the memory.
Yes it's nice to try something else and in hard sun also. Cheers James
Grain, grain, grain!! So much nicer than digital noise. Great video and experiment Roger.
Shooting digital means doing everything possible to control noise, we analog shooters go out of our way to get it.
Thanks Dave 👍
Damn never liked tri x but I never pushed it and it looks so good pushed
Superb episode Roger. Love the abstract images. Making the most of light which a lot of photographers shy away from. A good lesson in being creative and using strong light to your advantage. The prints looked stunning, a great session which really went well.
You're soot film like a boss ! Today I soot digital like an idiot ! 1741 frames from the same 3 birds - luckily the memory card full . I have to go back to 4x5 !🙂 You are the best ! Peter
Nice idea... I love abstract forms also... and these pics don't bother people... like street photos sometimes do... I've had a few strange looks from people when I'm out doing street... trust is difficult... I'm going to try some hp5 pushed to 800... never done it before... It must be fun...
Yeah Street can be difficult if you want facial expressions. I'm not into that kind of street. HP5 is solid too.
Very interesting video. It's exactly the kind of look I want.
You may want to try Ralph Gibson’s technique that he used to get his high contrast shots. Tri x at 100-400 iso, then rodinal 1:25 for 11 minutes (over developed to hell), and you agitate by rolling the tank on its side on the floor.
Very dense negatives.
A fun and interesting and educational experiment. Great results.
Always nice to see your videos..
Thankyou Lars.
Got some Ilford HP4 plus earlier.. its a 125 but Im gonna try pushing to 400 while also using an orange filter.. I love grain and contrast.. Ill be shooting indoors and a bit outdoors.. just not sure if using the orange filter will be too much...
Man, I thought I was brave with Rodinal and Ilford HP5+ at box speed lol. I like your results a lot!
I chucked when u said Golf balls size grain
Such a timeless images you made there. IMO for abstract work such as these; a square capture or printing, yields a lovely look on photographs.
I like shooting 66. It's my fav format
Oh, and expose for the shadows but develop for the highlights!
Hello, very impressed 👏. You should try a yellow filter. Thanks to share with us.
You should try split grade printing on really high contrast negatives. It’s a great way to independently balance the highlights and shadows in prints
Nice. I would have been grabbing my Nikon F4 for that shoot...BUT...its not the gear, it's the photographer. You have to dilute Xtol to 1:3 to sniff a little grain from TriX. Excellent developer for fine grain results. Rodinal is fantastic as well if you want to get after the edge of the grain. Rodinal is very unique and can produce stunning prints in the right hands. I suggest you explore it in detail because you are helping so many people learn about developing and dark room process. You never mentioned or I may have missed it, your dilution with the Rodinal... I assume 1:50. Keep up the great content. I'll be sending you a present some day
Cheers! Yeah, it was 1:50 for 33mins with 2 inversions each minute. I used my xtol replenished stock as I didn't want to lose contrast but you're right a diluted xtol would have got the grain out.
'Taking the Pix', now there is a slogan for the merch if ever I heard one!!
Rodinal will always see you right!
I would have never thought of pushing 400 to 3200 on a bright sunny day. Very interesting. I have one question. What is a beach hut?
Beach huts were used ( some still do) to get changed into your swimming costume and also to sit in out of the sun and to store your things
Also used, if you can afford them, as a beach party gathering with a few beers and a guitar. They are very expensive. Some are easily 30K
Very expensive!😱
killer photos in this video. some of this stuff is way better than "artsy-fartsy" would let you believe
Tri-X 400 pushed to 3200 in hard sun and developed in Rodinal??! I was expecting potatoes instead of grain but this is pretty damm good. I've heard before that Tri-X and Rodinal is good combination. Rodinal is in general not suitable developer for pushing, specially from 400 to 3200, I'm really suprised.
Great episode. Interesting when you show the final result compared to the real scene with you engaged in the shoot. Nice video!
That reminds me an expired roll of FP4 ;) Very interesting Roger, as always!
Ha ha, cheers Jean
What a lesson in how far film has come in fifty years. Your Rodinal developed Tri-X, pushed to 3200, has about the grain I'd have expected for 8x10 from 35 mm with normal development on Tri-X when I started shooting 35 mm back around 1970. To get grain like your Xtol, still at 3200, I'd have had to shoot Plus-X and develop in something like D-76 or D-23 (Xtol didn't exist yet back then).
Film emulsions must have had much improvement since the 70s. For better or worse I wonder? I mean looking back at some of the iconic portraits back in the 60s and 70s. Sometimes I find the films are so good it's hard to tell it from digital. Where as some of those classic portraits have an old look. If that makes sense.
@@ShootFilmLikeaBoss Grain reduction was the big quest in film innovation since cameras got small enough to carry around (as opposed to full plate and half plate, bigger than 4x5 and barely smaller) and such that needed a pack horse or wagon to go out photographing. See if you can find a photo made on Royal X Pan in 35 mm -- want to talk about grain like golf balls! That film was fast (pre-1960 ASA 800, IIRC, equivalent to modern ISO 1600), but back then the only way to make film faster was to make the halide crystals bigger.
Over time, various methods were found to get more from smaller halide crytals. Then tabular grain came along, same sensitivity for half the silver, and still finer grain. The last innovation was formate doping, allowing the same size grain to give a full stop faster film -- and this was behind the last reformulation of Tri-X in the early 2000s (it had already been applied to T-Max and all the Kodak color cine stocks like Vision2).
End result is that modern 400 speed film has about the same grain as 1950s vintage ASA 50-64 film like Verichrome Pan, Plus X, or FP3 (which became ASA 125 after the 1960 testing method change).
Meanwhile, developers have changed, too -- phenidone-ascorbate developers like Xtol can pull as much as a full stop of speed out of the same film as compared to Rodinal (which goes back to the 1880s!). That means a modern ISO 400 film in Xtol (or EcoPro or XT-3 -- Ilford has one too, but I don't recall the designation) has similar real speed to Royal X Pan, but with the grain we'd have gotten from Panatomic X (ASA 32 *after* the 1960 reform) in developers like Dektol or Rodinal.
Lovely grain!! Also, nice Gant t-shirt, New Haven in about 10 minutes from where I live.
one of your best (vicarious photo shoot)
Roger, you could have more control by using an nd filter (perhaps 2 or 3 stop) in addition to an orange or red filter. Not the most easy with an slr, better with a rangefinder. I used a 2 stop nd with an orange #16 filter for quite some time to get the look your after, the orange or red filters will cut the blue light from the shadows and give much more contrast as well as giving you larger apertures and varying shutter speeds.
Thanks, I'll give that a go next time
I also appreciate this and have made a note.
Really interesting Roger, Thankyou.
Thank you, I am getting so much out for your videos! I just got back into photography in January 2020 and purchased a digital Pentax K3. I am now looking for a film camera, probably a Pentax K1000, K1000 SE, or a Pentax MX because I can use some k mount lenses I already have. I had a B&W class in the mid-80's and enjoyed it. I will be processing my own film and getting my film for scanning as I don't have the space for a darkroom. Keep up the good work!
That is awesome!
Absolutely love your eye on these compositions!
Nice images
Congrats on 15k!
Thank you so much 😀
LOL @2:57 a dog like George looked at you like, why's that guy talking to himself.
I noticed that too lol
Hey Boss, you should try Tri-X at EI 3200 in low light conditions vs bright sun as you did this time and you would see dramatically different results in terms of grain and contrast.
You mean push try-x 400 to 3200?
Thats a huge push haha! Great photos
I almost never push film. I recall having to do it a couple of times when I was a parttime freelance photographer for local newspapers. On the screen the 400 pushed to 3200 that you developed in XTOL stock surprised me. Was it really as fine grained as it appeared on the video? TH-cam video useful but very difficult to see fine detail. Rodinal makes everything more grainy. Indeed a good developer to use if you want grain. I've never been a big advocate of the formula. I use XTOL generally 1:1, HC110 at dilution B or H, and modern microdol. All fine grain developers. Based on your experience I think I might try to push triX to 3200 and use XTOL 1:1. Do you keep your enlarger lens on 5.6 or 8?
I can't remember now Erich. The video cameras are pretty sharp so if I was in focus on the print it would pick up grain. I use my enlarger aperture usually 2 stops down from wide open. But sometimes close it down more if I need to do any work on the print to give me more time under the enlarger. Over exposed negs can take time for the light to hit the paper so that's when I open the lens up for a quicker process.
Another great informative video
Glad you enjoyed it
Thank you Roger for yet another great video. I especially enjoyed the sound quality. I won’t ask if you had to block out the sound of a child saying “Mommy why on earth is that man taking a photo of a chair?”
Ha, I get some strange looks Andy.
Haha, right at the start when you said you were looking for lots of grain, I thought to myself "Rodinal...".
My early experiences shooting film were on TX and Rodinal, mostly because I didn't know what I was doing. At the time I was hugely disappointed with the wild contrast and grimy grain. I couldn't understand why everyone said TX was such an amazing film. Looking back now, it just shows what an amazingly flexible film it is. Shot at box speed in X-Tol, it's amazingly sharp and smooth, but it can be pushed insanely far with great results, and if the grainy aesthetic is what you're going for, it can do that as well.
After watching this video, I'm thinking of going back and trying this combination again. Just for a laugh, it might be fun to add a red filter and over-agitate the development to really exaggerate the grain and contrast.
It's a very good classic film. I only use it from time to time as most of the scenes I shoot I want a clean look. I have the same feeling for HP5.
Wow. Great comparison. Thanks a lot. Just a quick question: I regularly shoot studio portraits on Tri-X @ 1600, relatively high contrast lighting. I'm just getting into developing at home. Would you recommend Rodinal? XTOL? Something else? Thanks!
Why do you shoot at 1600? Are you pushing the film?
@@ShootFilmLikeaBoss Yes, I am pushing Tri-X 400 to 1600. I sometimes shoot at 1600 because the budget "studio" lights I use are not strong enough to shoot at box speed (at least, not without a tripod. And sometimes I like to shoot handheld because it can make the shoot more dynamic). Also, I like a grittier, high contrast look.
I was thinking of getting HC-110 for developing. Thoughts?
I've never used HC110 but I'd go for Ilford Microphen for pushing that film. Have a read up on microphen see if it's for you.
@@ShootFilmLikeaBoss Cool, thanks for the recommendation.
35mm + 400 speed film + pushed 2 stops + Rodinal would normally produce nasty grain. If you shot it at 400 or 800 you wouldn't have had to shoot at f. 16. But, somehow you pulled it off. Rodinal is my go-to for 100 ASA and XTOL for anything faster. Nice job, interesting video.
How are you metering for the shot at 2:47?
I didn't meter. I was in aperture priority. So the camera selected the shutter speed for me.
Planning to try Tri-X for cityscape/street - what was your under exposure and over development in N+/- ratings? Great photography/ darkroom video, thank you.
I don't know Graham. I under exposed by 3 stops and developed in Rodinal 1/50 for 33 mins. At 400 it would have been just 13 mins. XTOL was 11.5 minutes Stock and at 400 would have been only 7 minutes. If that helps.
@@ShootFilmLikeaBossA big thank you for your response, with the negatives ending up at your usual density I would read that as exposure N-3 and development at N+3.
Thanks for the great video! You chose two extreme developers: XTOL is the developer to choose if you want to avoid grain and Rodinal the one to choose if you want a lot of grain. That's what you've got. 😄
Roger, you could give classes to folks in photography and developing. I have learned way more from watching you than from books, which i have plenty of, and not to say they are bad. some are quite good but seeing it done is way better. you have good presence and don't use uh's and ya know's , things like that. I know about this stuff as I was an Instructor (master instructor actually) in the Air Force. (4 years in the Marines and 16 in the Air Force).
Thanks a lot.
I've been never ever able to make a fine grain photo with the Rodinal developer 🤣
Need faster film fir grain- 1600 or 3200. The old Fuji neopan 1600 was great for grain
What is the dev time with xtol sir ?
Sorry I didn't reference that! I would have got my times from the massive dev chart for XTOL/TMAX 400 at 3200.
@@ShootFilmLikeaBoss oh, thanks so much, I’ve found the chart !
This wold is crazy. Me trying to get mid tones from sound recording film and you trying to get contrast from continuous tone film 🤣😂🤪.
Loved it m8 :-)
Фотографировал как Родченко ;)
Я должен был гуглить это! Спасибо за информацию.
Where the good lady waits for you 4.52 was a directors dream......
Yeah... xtol will give you the most with the finest grain. If you’re looking for grain, xtol isn’t it, but it you’re shooting in low light, xtol is excellent.
1000th view!