Controlling Contrast on Wephota FO5 Technical Film using Moersch VGT Developer

Introduction

In a couple of earlier posts on my physical split printing and toning (Here and here) I used Wephota FO5 technical film for the transparency portion of the work. Being a technical film it is very high contrast which can be a benefit and a curse.

For the physical split printing project the film worked well enough; however I wished for higher contrast to allow more of the substrate image tones to show through the surface image. I also have been exploring masking in the enlarger and my work so far has struggled to get a high enough contrast dodge mask so there is a second use for controlling for higher contrast. 

Another area I have worked on was my Lith-Lith prints where I created a warm tone positive transparency from technical film that I mounted over aluminum foil for a spectacular look. In this case I want to reduce contrast so more of the primary image tones show. So again a desire to control for contrast.

The final piece to this was that a number of years ago I bought Wolfgang Moersch's VGT developer kit. This was during an early phase of my darkroom work where I sought to boost contrast beyond what multi-grade papers could deliver for some difficult negatives. I never got around to opening the kit as the instructions were a little confusing to me at the time. This seems like the right time to revisit the VGT kit.

The Developer

The Moersch VGT developer is a two (optionally 3) part developer. It consists Part A developer, Part B developer, Part C activator (alkaline), and Finisher Blue used to optionally cool the tone of the print. 

Part-A : to quote the instructions is " a hard-working but very slow developer which is of great benefit with the 2 bath systems as the shadows have time to differentiate and become richer." 

This confused me as I am not up on the meaning of the descriptive terms used with developers. However the bottle label says 'High Contrast Developer'. My experience has helped me tease the terms apart. It is relatively slow especially compared to Part B developer. Slow in this case means it takes more time for the image to form. 'Hard working' means it builds the shadows more rapidly. The rest of the text refers to how it works with Part B.

Part-B: to quote the instructions is "soft-working developer giving a neutral to cool image tone, the image building quite quickly." Soft working means it tends to work on all parts of the emulsion. Part-B is labeled "Low Contrast Developer"

The flexibility is that you can mix different ratios of A and B developer to tune the contrast the developer delivers for a specific situation. Alternatively you can keep the two developers separate and develop in each bath separately to give better control of the contrast. In the days before multi-grade paper photographers like Ansel Adams would use a 2 bath developer to manipulate contrast. In this case the Beers formula was used. Moersch makes the process simpler with a one-stop kit. 

Part-C: This is the activator. Most developers require an alkaline solution to reduce the exposed silver in a reasonable amount of time. Thus you can control the speed of development to some extent. It can also change the image tone.

The basic instructions say to take 50mL of Part A and Part B to 50 mL of Part C to make the basic developer. Since I wanted both high and low contrast I opted for the 2 bath method. So I mixed two developers simply as below. 

Part-A 

50mL Part-A

50mL Part-C

900mL Water

Part-B

50mL Part-B

50mL Part-C

900mL Water

I then put each in separate trays. Since I don't have a lot of trays I opted to use my stop bath tray and would use a water stop bath. I used normal Rapid Fixer. 

Reference Surface Image

My starting point was a reference print I made on the Wephota film based on my earlier work. The test strip I did indicated that f8 at 11 seconds would be the best balance between contrast and tone. I made a print based on this and developed in in Moersch Eco 4812 1+10 my normal paper developer for 3 minutes. I will be upfront here and say this negative needs some burning in the lower 1/4 of the print. I am running experiments so I didn't take the trouble to do this at this point. 

Reference Surface Image (film) (f8 11 seconds with Eco 4812 developer)

With this in mind I made a series of small test strips. 8x10 sheets cost about £2.40 each so I feel the need to be parsimonious when making test strips. I have summarized the results in a storyboard I made. I started out with the same exposure. This turns out to be quite over-exposed for the VGT developers I made. I developed the first few more by inspection and pulled the strip at a minute or less as the image darkened. This encouraged me to drop the exposure successively. 

Test Strips (8,11,16,22,32,45,64 seconds bottom to top)
(Any pink color is due to incomplete washing of the red anti-halation die in the film.)

High Contrast Developer A

The first few strips in Dev A were depressing as they did not show any improvement in contrast. Finally though when I reduced the exposure 2 stops the high contrast developer came into its own. My reasoning is there needs to be very little exposed silver in the highlights for the developer to work on. Developer doesn't really 'know' where the shadows and highlights are; it is more a process of getting the exposure where the developer can work the best. (In fact the f16 Dev A test strip looks a lot like a test strip on multi-grade paper made with a #5 filter as it goes from almost nothing to blocked out blacks very rapidly with exposure.) 

Finally at f16 I could run the development out to 2 minutes and get a full range of developed images. Comparing the 32 second strip against the reference image I found very deep black but the adjacent highlight was much more open. Success! I then made a full size print at these settings. See below...

High Contrast Developer (A) f16 32 seconds 2 minute development time. 

Low Contrast Developer B

This developer produces an image very quickly. It also keeps working away and in the more exposed examples it was clear it would not stop until the image was obliterated. Finally I worked my way down to f22 to get reasonable results at 2 minute development. Again I compared this against the reference print and found in this case that 22 seconds gave me a better range of tones. 

I made a full size print of this as below. In this case as I neared 2 minutes of development I was concerned I wasn't getting a good range of tones. The test strips are from the left side of the image while the center of the main trunk has some of the lightest highlights with details. These exposures are very hard to judge under a red safelight so I used a magnifying glass and focused on this area of the tree trunk and continued developing past the 2 minute mark until I saw this detail come up. The development stopped at 2:30 minutes when I pulled the print. I consider this a success as well. 

Low Contrast Developer (B) f22 22 seconds 2:30 minutes development time

I have made a comparisons of the prints together with the reference print at the center. 

Comparisons left to right (High Contrast, Reference, Low Contrast)

These are a good starting point. I think the low contrast version could be pushed a little more in development to fill more of the tones in. The high contrast version could move to the next half step of exposure or selenium toning could be done to raise contrast further. Also the image tone has green cast. Selenium might help here or  perhaps the blue finisher supplied in the kit might help.

Results for Physical Split Toning.

With respect to this aspect of the film development I put the new high contrast film on a substrate (paper) I made previously that had been bleached and sepia toned. I then made a comparison image to show the changes. 

Image Comparison
(Normal Contrast film left High Contrast right) 

What is apparent is the substrate image tone comes through more on the right as would be expected. This is good news as I had this objective in mind. What this also reveals on close inspection is that the substrate needs to have a darker image as the highlights now look washed out so more tones need to come from the substrate. I think the green cast distracts and so getting this more neutral would be better.

I selenium toned the high contrast film using 1+19 dilution which can add a little density but doesn't produce the magenta/purple color shift of higher concentrations. The green cast was neutralized somewhat as revealed by a comparison of the histograms. Much of the yellow band disappears. To my eye I can still see a green tinge but it helps.

Histogram of original film

Histogram with selenium toning

Increased Exposure Substrates

With the newer high contrast surface image (film) I wanted to try higher exposure substrates to illustrate the change. 

I made some new VC prints based on the earlier test strip in the first post in this series. These were at f11 at 22 seconds and 25 seconds. I also burned the lower portion 1/2 stop to bring the tone up in that area. I need to do the same to the surface images to complete the process and keep the local contrast there good.  The first result is with the the 22 second substrate exposure and the high contrast surface image. 

Darker substrate with high contrast surface image. 

If I place the original surface image on the darker substrate (this time the 25 second exposure) we get a much darker image. You can also see the warmer tone of the high contrast surface image (above) when comparing the two. 

Darker substrate with original surface image

The next step is to tone one or both of these new substrate prints and see the improved visibility of the tones. 

Ilford MG Art 300 Paper

I also created two additional substrate prints using Ilford's MG Art 300 paper. I ran an experiment to confirm my hunch that the paper is more dimensionally stable than FB paper because it is made from 100% cotton rag. I made some measurements and found the print when wet was only 3mm larger and when fully dried seemed to return to the original dimensions. These prints are of similar darkness to the two above. I am intrigued to see what the paper's texture might do to the image and the difference in color from toning.

After the MG Art 300 prints dried I sandwiched them with the new high contrast surface image. During alignment it was clear the print was fine in the horizontal direction but was about 1 mm shorter in the vertical. It surprised me as the paper has shrunk. This was a disaster.  Below are some scans...

Full Scan registered at top. (Warm tone from the MG Art paper)

Top of image where images are well registered. (2400 dpi)

Bottom of image where it falls apart. (2400 dpi)
Note surface image extends further than substrate image. 

Cooler Surface Image Tones

The next step for me was to try and neutralize the green-warm cast in the high contrast developer (A). I added 10ml of finish blue from the VGT kit to the A developer. I then reproduced the same high contrast film  as before. f16 at 32 seconds with 2 minutes development. It was immediately apparent however the density was not building as rapidly during development. I let the development run about an extra 30 seconds. The result is below. Not nearly as dense but the color is much cooler.

f16 32 sec 2.5 min dev Dev A + finish blue

The finish blue appears to slow the developer either that or the developer has gotten slower overnight. My money is on the finish blue being the cause. I decided to rerun test strips. These are all developed at 3 minutes. I added these to my original storyboard; they are segregated on the right by the blue line. I ran f16 and then f11 as there might be something interesting past 64 seconds at f16. 

Updated test strip storyboard

Based on this I made a full sheet at f16 64 seconds. It was a close call between this and f11 at 24 seconds. Alas this was too dark. 

f16 64 sec 3 min dev Dev A + finish blue (B)

I then made another sheet at f16 45 seconds and this was a good match from my first VGT high contrast film.

f16 45 sec 3 min dev Dev A + finish blue (C)

Here is a progression of image tone. The center image is the original VGT A developed image. The one on the right if after toning with selenium 1+19. The left image is VGT A with 10ml finisher blue added. 

VGT A Tone comparison
Left to right VGT A +Finisher Blue, VGT A Only, VGT A + Selenium 1+19 

Next I decided to improve the bottom of the image with a 1/2 stop burn. Again f16 45 seconds with 3 minute development. This much improves this part of the image.

f16 45 sec 3 min dev Dev A + finish blue burn bottom 1.5 stop (D)

Putting It All Together

So all that is left is to take my improved surface print (D) and mate it to the darker substrates after they have been toned. I followed the same toning regime as on previous posts on this subject. The light version (f11 22 seconds #00 filter) I toned in straight sepia MT4 1+100 for 10 minutes. This gives a brown/purple tone. The darker print (f11 25 seconds #00 filter) I bleached in 1+9 potassium ferricyanide then toned in MT4 1+100 sepia for 6 minutes. This gives a brown toned heading towards mustard color. Both give lurid tones when seen alone as below. 

 

Toned Substrates Sepia only Left and Bleach + Sepia Right

Adding the surface layer improves contrast but also knocks back the toning to something more pleasing. The cool tones seem to fool the eye that the overall tone is different.

Finished images with surface image layer added 

I consider to project overall a success. Most of my ideas worked as I had hoped they would. The degree of control is good in this process.