Face to face comparison of film developers for portrait photographs.
Andy Go, Daria Gdeto, London
Abstract
We compared 7 different widely used developers for black and white film by developing portraits taken with two different films for direct comparison of the results. We are pleased with some of the outcomes and no-so pleased by others.
Introduction
Andy photographs for the past 12 years, on and off professionally. Mostly he makes portraits for people who would like to have portraits of themselves for any if any reason.
All of these years he non-exclusively uses film as a photographic medium, and recently, not lastly driven by lockdown times, he started to develop his films himself. The whole procedure wasn’t a huge miracle for a trained experimental physicist, but still left a lot of space for failure.
After getting ‘unpleasant’ results a couple of times, he asked the labs he used in the past about the developers they put my film in, and always wanted to make a ‘face-to-face’ comparison of the photos taken under the same conditions.
Daria photographs for 13 years, using almost only film in her work, but
her real introduction to film developing process started she met Andy and joined him in a small community darkroom in London, Daria also meets high unpredictability of the development the result when films are developed in different photo labs, and wanted to settle the procedure for the best wanted outcome.
Having joined our forces, we finally run a test involving several very different developers for two very different films in the similar settings.
We took some portraits of each other (mostly me, sorry!) — some are more closeups, some from further distance. We took photos both indoors with bulb light and contrast scene, and outdoors with rather bright background and much softer light, and run each roll of film through a different developer. Here we present the outcomes and our thoughts on the results.
Materials and Methods
Developers
Developers used in this study were as follows (in alphabetic order): 510Pyro, D76, Ecofilm, FD10, HC-110, Rodinal, Suprol. Such choice of developers is mostly defined by the ones that were at hand in our darkroom. D76 and Suprol were used in the labs where me and Daria had our films developed earlier, 510Pyro is proudly promoted by James and could not be avoided, HC-110 is my usual to-go developer, Rodinal is a classic, Ecofilm was attracted due to ‘Eco’ in its name, and FD10 once was bought by myself together with my to-go Fixer FX30. All developers were not outdated at the date of development, most were opened not long (within a week) before.
Films
We used short rolls (6–7 photos per roll) of Foma 100 and Ilford Delta 400 loaded from bulk into used film canisters. Loading method will hopefully be discussed in some of my future articles. Films were not outdated at the moment of photographing and development, according to the labels.
Cameras and lenses
For Foma 100 we used 3 Nikon F100 cameras with two 50/1.4 and one 50/1.8 automatic focus lenses set at 1.8 aperture. For Delta 400, two Nikon F100 cameras with 50/1.4 lens were used at 1.4. ISO was set manually, and built-in lightmeter of one of the cameras was considered more trustworthy as the base for shutter speed settings, other cameras were adjusted to this shutter speed manually, with minor fuckups.
Ambient conditions and temperature
We used tap water settled for about a week at a room temperature that is now very close to the ‘standard’ 20 degrees Celsius for all developers, stop bath (SB50) and Fixer (FX30). Importantly, the temperature for all the developers was similar. Film wash was performed with running tap water at slightly lower temperature, and the process was finalised with submerging into rinse aid (RA50). All times were kept consistent during the experiment, with minor fuckups. Stop bath time was kept around 25 s, and fixing time was slightly adjusted, which is, taking into account the area of the film, was a bit of an overkill. We used Ilford ‘standard’ agitation (if not mentioned otherwise) — 1 minute of continuous agitation followed by 10 seconds in the beginning of every subsequent minute. Agitation was performed with an agitation stick of the Paterson system 4 tank. Films were dried in a special purpose film drying cabinet.
Development times
Development times were taken from Massive Dev Chart and sometimes adjusted. Times for both films are given in Table 1.
ss is a semi-stand agitation, 1 minute of continuous agitation followed by 10 seconds in the beginning of every 10th minute.
Scanning
Scanning was done with a full frame digital camera, film strips were put into Valoi 360 film holder, Ulanzi VL108C CRI 95+ LED was used as a light source. Exposure and contrast were manually adjusted to our liking, or close to it, where possible. As we were testing the developers to choose one for our future use, this was more favourable scenario than equalising the absolute values. Such study may be performed in the future, if the need for it will overcome the laziness at some point.
Results and Discussion
The results are shown in the subsequent figures, followed by our conclusions that we’ve got for ourselves, and the choice of the developers we would go for in our photography practice, after this study.
Delta 400
This is a very well known T grained high speed film from Ilford, and as winter is approaching, it will probably become our first choice for the next 5–6 months. We used both natural and bulb light for these photos, and selected high and low contrast scenes, pretty much mimicking ‘studio’ or ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ portrait shooting scenery. We used 6 minutes for Suprol, insted of recommended 4.5 minutes, as we remembered underdevelopment of Foma 100 shown below.
High contrast bulb light portrait
My call here will be HC-110 as it delivers some grain, but not too much and preserves the details, and 510Pyro, that gave a resembling output, with even finer detail, I really like the render of Rodinal as well. Daria prefers Suprol, as it better matches her style, giving a second place to Rodinal.
D76 and FD-10 yielded lowest contrast and least pronounced grain, while Ecofilm developer combined extra huge grain with least contrast among all the developers.
Low contrast natural light portrait
My call again will stay with HC-110 and 510Pyro as a runner up, Daria picks Suprol again and HC-110 as a runner up here, as Rodinal did not perform well on this photo. Fine detail provided with D76, and extreme grain from Ecofilm, and a very low dynamic range, non-editable in post, for FD10.
Low contrast natural light portrait — more background.
This photo looks as if underexposed for all the developers, but to my liking, 510pyro did the best job here, and HC-110 is a runner up.
High contrast bulb light portrait with more background with a lot of low light details.
In this rather dark photo, all developers managed to render the darks well, HC-110 and D76 give a slightly better dynamic range to my liking. Ecofilm gave a very large grain again, so it is unlikely we will use it for high speed films in the future.
Some more photos in rather contrasty scene — these were the last frame on the roll, and due to slightly uneven rolling, did not happen for some of the rolls.
Again, rendering is rather consistent with previous results: HC-110 giving better dynamic range, D76 showing higher details, while Suprol yielding that contrasty grainy look Daria loves so much.
Foma 100
This is a very good and very affordable outdoor general purpose film. We still could use it for the same type of photos, handheld, with exposure times of 1/15th of a second in the worst case. 510Pyro was semi-stand developed, as the development time is rather short for this film. Also, we used a recommended dev time for Suprol here of 4 mins, which resulted in severe underdevelopment.
High contrast bulb light portrait
FD-10 performed surprisingly well here, Rodinal will be my second call for these film and conditions.
Low contrast natural light headshot
I think, Rodinal could have been underexposed here as well. Again, FD-10 works amazingly well, HC-110 is a runner up to my eyes. Eco film looks a bit too flat.
Natural light portrait from a further distance
Andy really likes HC-110, 510Pyro, FD10 and Rodinal on this image. Ecofilm looks pretty flat again, maybe it is worth trying to overdevelop with it as well as with Suprol.
I hope, from all the above photos, it is clearly visible, how the look of the photos depends on the developers used. Even at scans, that can potentially be digitally tweaked, the difference is highly noticeable, while the films show a very different optical thickness and could look completely different. If you ever going to use Suprol, please consider developing of 6+ minutes, as then it gives some amazing results.
Conclusion and outlook
These two short ‘experiments’ answered most of our questions regarding the choice of developer for portrait photographs — and as we tend to different styles of photography, our choice for developers will be different. Andy will go for HC-110 for most general purpose portrait shoots, and maybe FD10 for Foma film. For future prints, he will use 510Pyro, as it gives much thicker negatives allowing more control at print stage. Daria will be using Suprol, as it gives the closes look to the one she has in mind when thinks of bw film photos, but is quite pleased with HC-110 as a general purpose reliable developer.
We hope to do more experiments of a kind in the future. The main purpose for these was to choose an everyday developer for our portrait photography practice, and we thought we were not the only ones in the same situation, so we decided to share, and hope this was at least somewhat useful. We would be happy to hear any feedback, and, maybe, some more ideas we can experiment on.
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