Working with Technical Pan

I had the unfortunate experience of running out of 120/220 "chrome" (Fuji Provia, Kodak EPP and EPN) on toward the end of a 2 month trip to India, Cambodia and Myanmar. For this reason, I was scrambling to generate transparencies for projection when I returned. In the case of the color negative film which I shot, the use of Vericolor was easy. A little trial-and-error with the BW negatives led to the method described on this web-page for converting negatives to positives.

There are few things more dramatic than projecting black and white slides onto a screen in a darkened room. Unfortunately, the commercially available resources to generate BW slides are limited to Agfa Scala or Kodak's "T-Max Reversal" processing kit. Scala is almost always sent out via mailer to a central processing lab. Post September 11th, sending film through the U.S. mail is risky since high intensity irradiation completely exposes film. The T-Max Reversal kit is expensive, at $30 per litre, and time consuming.

A further series of problems with exposing your BW film for the expressed purpose of generating transparencies are: 1) the film must be exposed at about half the ASA normally used. If you want to use Technical Pan for it's almost transparency stock, this means exposing the film at ASA 25 (remember Kodachrome?). 2) if you want to produce BW prints, you will either have to scan the negative to a positive or generate an internegative.

My recommendation is to shoot Kodak, Agfa or Ilford BW negative film per normal, and generate a high contrast positive by using Technical Pan exposed at an ASA of 200 and developing in HC-110, dilution "B" for 9 minutes. Time and temperature will have to be adjusted to your particular situation, but figure that the above times are going to result in a good first attempt. The contrast index is about 2 with this developer/time combination. A graph of exposures of a Fuji step wedge at f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16 and f/22 vs density of the developed film presented below:

Extending the development time to 11 minutes increases the Contrast Index slightly, but results in more base fog.

A negative of bells inside the Shwedagon Paya in Yangon, Myanmar presented below.

This image was shot with a a Rollei 6008i and 80mm lens. The negative is somewhat over-developed (the scanned image is darker than the actual negative) but prints nicely. Below are four positive images generated from the above at exposure of 1/30th second, in 1/3 stop increments for f/11.3:

f/11 - 2/3

f/11 - 1/3

f/11

f/8 - 2/3

It's a little difficult comparing web-presented images to those actually projected on the screen. The image at f/11 projects best, while the image at f/11 less 1/3 stop makes a better web presentation.