This weekend’s learning:
1. You can use screw top brown bottles, perhaps wrapped in newspaper, to store chemicals in. This gives you an excuse to purchase and consume lots of German wine.
2. If you have acquired a Jobo unit, use the damn thing properly or your friends will laugh at you :):)
3. Pour out the developer about fifteen seconds before the end of the development time (and get a bigger container for it).
4. You can make stop bath out of red wine vinegar. Very nice too.
5. Fixing for about five minutes instead of ten (for my current film situation) is fine, and it didn’t work the first time because the fixer was crap, because I didn’t use stop bath, probably.
6. Washing after fixing at about 25degrees is still fine, only do about half an hour unless you have one of those tubes which takes the water right into the tank. If you do, it’s about fifteen to twenty minutes instead.
7. If you keep using the developer, add about ten percent to the dev time after the third or fourth use.
Good stuff! :)
#4 Acidic stop bath is typically 1% to 1.5% so you can start with just about any 5% acidic-acid vinegar. Cheaper is to use plain old “white” vinegar, the cheap stuff from the bottom shelf. Dilute 1+3 or 1+4 and there you go.
#5 Test your fixing time with film by dropping a bit of the exposed leader (assuming 35mm) into some fixer. Do this in room light. Wait for the film to clear (ignoring the base color). Then double this time for fixing the real deal. If you are using 120 or sheet film you can snip off a bit from a sheet or roll that is a test shot or otherwise “scrap” film.
#6 Consider getting or mixing up some residual silver test solution and residual hypo test solution. Use those for tuning up your wash time. The key to washing is allowing the hypo (fixer) to diffuse out of the film (paper). The “Ilford Method” fill-soak-dump method is pretty efficient and you can tune it up with the test solutions.
#7 One-shot developer dilutions are more consistent. But depending on the developer formula, the economics might not be right. Rodinal is best one-shot, D76/ID-11 undiluted on the other hand can be replenished and work well. Pyro based are also best one-shot as are HC110 and Xtol. E6 and C41 are replensihable.
Comment by rwyoung — July 28, 2008 @ 4:23 pm