As noted elsewhere in these archives, I've never really had any luck shooting FP4+, in all 2 times I've tried
Conventional wisdom says to develop it roughly as Tri-X, which for me at box speed is HC110H for 10 minutes. When I tried this on a roll of well-expired FP4, it came out very contrasty with blown-out highlights and pretty extreme vignetting. Not a bad look, all told, but it would be nice to have it start out at a baseline of "normal" so I can tweak it from there. So then I acquired another 2 rolls, closer to being in date, but still unknown expiry. I shot one roll at box speed again and developed it as Tri-X, and still it came out contrasty and blown out. Here's an example from that roll:
Again, not a bad look, but I wanted to try to "normalize" it a bit. So with this last roll of FP4 in my possession, I did something I normally wouldn't do and changed TWO variables at once. I shot half the roll at 100 (to me, that's box speed since most of my cameras only meter at full ISO stops), and half at 200 to see if I was simply overexposing the film. Then, during development I kept the same developer, time, and dilution, but instead of agitating every minute, I agitated every 2 minutes, because the contrastiness of my previous two rolls looked kind of like over agitation.
So, the results. It looks like ISO 100 with agitation every two minutes is the winner. Shooting at ISO 200 wasn't bad, but there is a definite loss in shadow detail, which I don't think has anything to do with the agitation scheme (although, who knows).
Here we are, ISO 100 agitation every 2 minutes:
ISO 200 agitation every 2 minutes:
It still vignettes noticeably compared to the same camera with Tri-X, but I like that. Just out of curiosity, any thoughts as to why a certain film would vignette more than another on the same camera & lens?