Best Combination of Film and Developer for Sharpness?

[Joe O'Brien]

In the new year I will be embarking on a mission to shoot one film and develope the film in one developer. I will be shooting with a Sinar F that my school owns. The only question left is what film/developer combonation to use. I do mainly landscape work and I have no problems with long exposures or long developing times. I've been looking at a few different films: ADOX 25, Efke 25, FP4+, T-max 100, Foma 100 (baisically anything from freestyle that is 4x5). I have no idea what combination of film and developer would give me maximum sharpness while still allowing me to experiment with expantion and contraction processing. All ideas and pieces of advice are appreciated.

[piu58]

Shaprness is not all you want to achieve, Good balanced grey tones is another item. If you work with 4x5 grain ist not the first problem you'd pay attention to.
I recommend to select one of the films above, but select one, which can be delivered fort a long time. For maximum of visual sharpnesss you can experiment with Rodinal as developer.

[Curt]

My suggestion is to use FP4+ and ID-11 or D76. Get a copy of Fred Picker's book "The Zone VI Workshop". Follow the procedure for establishing the E.I. and normal development time. Then move onto Expansion and Contraction. It's going to be a lot of standardization. Time and temperature, quantity measurements and accuracy in agitation etc..

Look at the price, anyone can find change in their sofa to buy one of these little gems. You can read the entire Ansel Adams series and applied it to your photography and in a year you will get it all together or buy Fred's book and get it done in very little time at all. He lays it out like no one I've ever seen.

Before there was an Internet Fred Picker of Vermont had a newsletter, he was quite a guy and I savored everyone of those issues. Sadly he is long gone but his book remains.

http://www.amazon.com/Zone-VI-Worksh.../dp/0817405747

Best,
Curt

[RobertV]

Efke 25 is a single layer, slow speed film with a lot of sharpness.
When you are going to develop with a surface high acutance developer you're going to the max.
Rodinal 1+50 - 1+100, Tetenal Neofin Blue, Beutler A+B, FX-1 is then the way to go.

But as already said more other things can be important too.
Concerning sharpness I can give you these combinations.

[A49]

If you want the ultimate in terms of sharpness and resolution, then give the ORTHO 25 or Rollei ORTHO 25 a try. I recently testet a first few sheets: It beats every "conventional" film-developer-combo.

If the negatives are 5 times enlarged you have an extreme sharpness and a wonderful smoothness of grey tones. Even 7 or 10 times enlarged, the pictures are very sharp from the film side but limitations of the lens get slightly visible. Even 10 times enlarged the ORTHO 25 shows nearly no, maybe very, very decent grain in the shadows of the print.

With the ORTHO your no longer limited by film but by the lens/ aperture and other sharpness decreasing factors like exactness of your camera and random factors like vibrations due to wind and other things that appear while shooting in the field. The fact that it is an orthochromatic film plays no big role as long as you don´t have much satured red tones in your picture which would recorded darker than expected and darker than with panchromatic films.

I shot the ORTHO 25 at ISO 6 to ISO 8. Then I developed the ORTHO 25 with Rodinal 1+150, which is very good to keep maximum sharpness. The development time at 20 C is about 11 to 12 minutes.


Best,
Andreas

[cp16]

I'm quite sure that some people might cringe at the thought, but I get excelent results from boring old ERA developed in Fotospeed's pd5 PRINT(gasp) developer for 8 minutes just so long as I follow with an aggresive fixer. nice and sharp, fairly high contrast but not too much, very little grain and buckets of fine detail where you wouldn't expect it! Unorthadox I know but it's almost the only combination I use these days - and thats because of the results, not the bargan bin prices!

[andrewkirkby]

As per other people: slower emulsion (efke 25/50, fp4, or Delta 100/Tmax 100 for ultra, ultra sharp) and Rodinal or PMY Pyro are good options. Test and find an effective film speed before shooting an important project. Take notes!

Lens choice is also important. Newer, highly corrected lenses will give you ultra sharp results but may be too clinical for your application.

[A49]

Here is an overview over the resolution abilities with high contrast details in lines per millimeter of some (already mentioned films) as an orientation, how "sharp" you can get. These numbers are in reality (with normal, pictoral contrast) a lot lower, maybe only two thirds:

(Rollei/Adox) ORTHO 25 = 250
Rollei Retro 80S = 180
TMX 100 = 200
FUJI ACROS 100 = 200
(new) TMY 400 = 200
Delta 100 = 160
Pan F = 150
APX 100 = 150
Delta 400 = 145
EFKE KB 25= 125
Plus X = 125
FP4 Plus = 110
HP5 = 100
TRI-X= 100

As a comparison: The highest resolution a "perfect" lens can achieve at f/22 is about 67 lines per millimeter. Not every of these mentioned fils is available as sheet film.

Best,
Andreas

[Slixtiesix]

Ilford "Plus" range with Perceptol 1+2 or 1+3 is also a good choice for sharpness+smooth tonality.

Best, Benjamin

[Nicholas Lindan]

The highest resolution combination is TMAX-100 in Xtol. It is also very linear and has a large exposure latitude.