Friday, February 27, 2015

Kodak HC-110 Developer

 I shot a roll of Tri-X in my Pentax K1000 at the zoo yesterday.  As I often do to get close to the subject and eliminate foreground clutter, the camera was mounted with a 135 Super Takumar plus a Vivitar 2X telextender.  The film was processed in HC-110 which has long been my favorite for black and white work as it seems to handle about any film well, and it does particularly well with TMAX and Tri-X.


The liter bottle of HC-110 which I popped open yesterday was the first I've used in about two years since the price doubled.  BHPhotovideo where I usually get my film won't ship HC-110 any longer, so I put in my order with Freestyle where I also get my Unicolor kits for color work.  The price for the HC-110 was $35.99 plus about four bucks for USPS shipping.


While I was sufficiently irritated with the price gouging to avoid buying the HC-110 for a long time, the truth is that even at the current price the developer is still one of the most economical resources for home black and white film processing.  The concentrate is used by most people in the 1:32 one-time-use Dilution B form.  That means the liter bottle will produce nearly 8.5 gallons of working solution to process around one hundred rolls of film.  In fact, it is possible to go to Dilution H with little loss of quality, and get twice the mileage.  For the specifics of mixing and using HC-110 the best source of information is still the old Covington Innovations web site.

3 comments:

Jim said...

The cat shot is just wonderful. I can almost count the hairs.

Mike said...

The snow leopards are the most photographically cooperative among the big cats. They seem unbothered by the presence of people, and often make eye contact.

The lighting in the enclosure is dim but nice. I shot these at 1/250 and wide open.

The slight color tint in these two images is the result of scanning with the software set to T100 and then not converting to grayscale. My impression is that I can retain a bit more detail this way in the highlights and shadows.

JR Smith said...

I've never tried HC-110. Your results here are exceptional!