Ive ordered grade 2 paper to try to tame the 2x contrast a bit rather than messing with contrast filters on the camera! Joe Van Cleave has written about this a bit.
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I’ve watched several of his videos (which are great), but his channel is a bit unwieldy. He goes years between project updates and it’s hard to follow along. Where did you order it from? I’m hesitant to have to cut down larger sheets.
aug 25, 2025, 6:50 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh for sure, 💯. But he also posts on Photrio where I found this rec. Well, my cam is actually an old postcard size 3.5x5 rather than 4x5. I already had a box of ilford 3.5x5 from Ultrafine. So as an alternative I ordered 5x7 grade 2 Arista (what JVC recommended) and I’ll halve them. 🤷♂️
aug 25, 2025, 6:54 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh, and I got it at freestyle. 🤦♂️
aug 25, 2025, 9:08 pm • 1 0 • view
I was already doing a fair amount of cutting down for other formats, so halving full sheets in red light is ok with me. One q I was struggling with is how fast will fix efficacy degrade with no stop or water after dev! 🤷♂️😅
aug 25, 2025, 9:11 pm • 1 0 • view
Regarding cutting down, I don’t have a good cutting board or a real dark room, so I’m hesitant to try. But it would make sense financially to buy a cutting board if it saved me from using positive paper exclusively.
aug 25, 2025, 9:46 pm • 1 0 • view
❤️ My system is NOT fancy. I have a cheap guillotine cutter from staples (which does NOT cut perfectly), and a cheap drop light with a red LED bulb (tested safe) clipped to the mirror in a bathroom! 😅😅😅 Using it to cut ortho stuff is easy! Using it to cut panchromatic stuff is trickier. 😅😅😅
aug 25, 2025, 9:59 pm • 1 0 • view
I actually asked Lukas that and he said he changes the half tray he uses every 25-30 photos. Which surprised me. I thought it would exhaust faster. I haven’t been pushing it that far.
aug 25, 2025, 9:45 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh wow. That is surprising. I guess my follow up then is what vol do you get in the trays in that camera? I was using already nearly exhausted fix so it wasn’t surprising that it wasn’t working well. But wondered how much worse I was making it without stop. 😅
aug 25, 2025, 10:03 pm • 0 0 • view
Ive regularly used water stop but not NO stop. I did realize, belatedly, that because of the red light peep hole I could tip off excess dev more than I thought I could because I could SEE what I was doing! 😅😅😅
aug 25, 2025, 10:05 pm • 1 0 • view
I have no peep hole, but it took about 300ml to halfway fill the tray.
aug 25, 2025, 10:12 pm • 1 0 • view