Getting Into The Weed, Photographic Chemistry Edition
I've spent the last couple of weeks reading up on photographic chemistry. It started when I got the new 5th edition of The Darkroom Cookbook by Steve Anchell. I have three previous versions and it's a classic. There's a lot of great information in there. This is the book that convinced me to go to an all alkaline development process for my black and white films. Turns out that when you use alkaline fixer, the bad stuff you need to wash out (specifically hypo, typically sodium or ammonium thiosulfate) just drops right out after about 40 seconds of washing, unlike acid fixer, which requires a good ten minutes of washing. I started using Photographers Formulary TF-4 when I tried using a Pyro-based developer several years ago. Pyro didn't stick; I didn't see any benefit from using it. But the fixer did. And when I read The Darkroom Cookbook's earlier editions, I understood why it's a good idea. The new edition has a new section on digital negatives. I think I'm going to try the approach laid out there. I've tried others with step wedges and never really got things dialed in. I'm considering trying Platinum/Palladium printing, and digital negatives would come in very handy for that.
Steve Anchell also helped out on another book, The Film Developing Cookbook, whose primary author is Bill Troop, who it turns out formulated my favorite fixer, TF-4. The Darkroom Cookbook points to The Film Developing Cookbook for elaboration on several items, so when I finished The Darkroom Cookbook, I pulled The Film Developing Cookbook (second edition) off the shelf. Again, another very worthwhile read.
One thing that I noticed reading it this time is that Troop calls out a man named Grant Haist quite often. Now, I happen to know who Haist is. He was a research chemist at Kodak and an author and also a fine arts photographer. I have two of his books, George Eastman's Cameras, which is a survey of all the cameras Kodak put out during Eastman's life, and Modern Photographic Processing Volumes 1 & 2. I happened to discover Haist, who died in 2015, when many of his cameras went up for auction on the auction site Everything But The House. I wound up buying four of his cameras: A 5x7 Press Graflex that gets mentioned in his George Eastman book (he even mentions the serial number in the book, which is the one on the camera I bought), a Graflex RB Super D 4x5, a 4x5 Super Graphic, and a 4x5 Super Speed Graphic. Those latter two were the end of the line for the Speed Graphic line, and oddly, didn't have the focal plane shutter that distinguished the Speed Graphic from the Crown Graphic. I find those two less useful than my older Pacemaker Speed Graphic. Anyway, I have this two volume set by Grant Haist that I bought from the same estate sale, and I hadn't read it because it looks daunting, but I figured it was time after reading these other two books, one of which quoted him extensively.
It was a lot less daunting than I expected. It is a bit chemistry heavy, but that's a good thing, and the first couple of chapters are basically a lesson in chemistry down to the atomic level, learning about electrons and how elements bond and stuff like that. It's a good basis for the rest of the books. Volume 1 has most broadly interesting stuff. It explains how film stores the latent image when you expose it, and how developers amplify the latent image and make it visible, down to the atomic level. I have a much better understanding of how developing black and white film works after reading this. Then there ar several chapters that describe various classes of developers. There are of course solvent and non-solvent developers, but even those can be broken down. He even covers my favorite, Rodinal, briefly. There are formulas for dozens of different developers, as well as explanations of how they work. The Anchell and Troop books have a lot of this in them, but Haist goes over and above. There's quite a bit of history in there as wwll, with formulas for archaic and no longer useful mixtures that maybe wouldn't work so well with modern films. The first volume closes with an explanation of how fixing works. Troop calls out Haist for recommending alkaline fixing but saying that Kodak had prevented him from writing much about it because they considered it a trade secret. Sure enough, the section about fixing is acid this and acid that and all acid all the time. I didn't find much about alkaline fixing there.
The second book gets further into the weeds, if you will, covering topics that you may never need to use but that are still interesting. There are chapters about intensification and reduction with formulas on how to save over or under developed negatives, and toning, which is specific to darkroom printing and which many modern film photographers who practice a hybrid approach will never need. Haist also wrote about book about monobaths, The Monobath Book, which I don't have. There's a chapter about monobaths in volume 2. Almost all developers work best in an alkaline environment, not acid. So by definition, if you're using a monobath, you'll be using an alkaline fixer. And there, in the last paragraph of the chapter about monobaths, is the information that alkaline baths wash out so much more quickly, reaching archival levels of hypo after only 40 seconds of washing.
Other chapters in volume 2 cover stabilization and incorporated chemistry, both of which relate to extremely quick turnaround development where time is of the essence, for example, in military work, and having a process to view film in seconds is important while perhaps longevity is less important or at the very least can be postponed. I would think that digital photography has completely and utterly obsoleted the information here. Most of the rest of the book is about stuff that will reasonably be used by fine arts photographers for years, but these chapters, which were current in 1979 when the first edition of these books was published, are unlikely to find any use at all. They still made for interesting reading.
There is a chapter on reversal processing of black and white film, a niche even when it was written. I do this, and found much to be interested in here. I was trying to experiment with the Sabattier effect recently, with mixed success. There is information here that helped me understand why. There's also a very interesting chapter on diffusion transfer, the basis of instant photography. There's a lot of history in this chapter, but there's also a ton of chemistry. As someone with a passion for Polaroid, I found this particularly interesting. I think it gave me some insight into why. for example, New55 prints looked the way they did (I miss that film). I have a case of Polaroid 809 with dried up chemistry in the basement (fuck you, CatLABS) and may use some of the information in this chapter to replace the development pods and see if I can actually use that film.
Then there are two chapters on color processing. The chemistry here is at another level. It's like jumping from a 100 level beginners class to a graduate seminar. I read it. I'll probably have to read it a couple more times to really understand it. But I got some basics out of it. Again, another section with a lot of history in it. I have a better understanding of how Kodachrome was processed and understand why it will never return. (I also have a reference to a magazine article from 1939 about how to process it at home that might be worth looking up.)
I enjoyed reading all three books. The first two are readily available, still in print. The Haist books are a little trickier to find. The copies I have are from Haist's personal press, released in 2000. Haist Press died when Haist did, so the books are no longer in print. There is a seller on eBay who has copies of them, though. They're a little pricy, but if you want to go deep into this stuff, you would have a hard time finding a better read.
Now that I've read all these books, I'll almost certainly just keep using Rodinal for 98% of my photography. But at least I'll know about other options and when I might want to use them.
Posted at 3:21 AM