Well, after the small grain creation discussion, I thought I'd give a go at one of the techniques I described. So, since yesterday happened to be Labor day, I decided to get to work and test things out. Since I had no in date Tri-X, I gave it a go with some expired bulk loaded HP5 instead. The film being old and not having any information about it's true expiry date, I tested it and it looked OK at about EI 200. So, to put chance on my side, I only exposed it at EI 1600. The day was a bit rainy. I had a new camera to test out. And an old timey traditional workmanship festival was on, so I set out to test the process. I took a lot of dog pictures too... they looked better than some of the stands
So, when I came back I rushed in the darkroom to get it all processed. The process I tried does take a heck of a lot of chemistry! HC-110 diluted 1+12 at 90°F had me a bit worried... I was afraid that the emulsion might start peeling... but it didn't. And when everything was done, surprise! There was a very distinct image on the negative! That was a 3 stop push in super hot developer. The base of the film is a uniform 18% gray card color. Printing through it makes the enlargement times quite long. For printing at grade 6 for maximum grain requires times in the 160 second range at f/5.6 just to fill a 5x7 print... not too convenient.
But anyways, here are a few of the images to show the grain... and you haven't seen what the grain looks like up close!
These images were scanned without any sharpening or grain reduction. Curves are not adjusted either.
