My third round of home development, complete with advice on how to modify the process so far (including very helpfully on previous post called ‘Strange but true’) and a new tank which had a few ‘unique features’ ie. the middle tube is missing.
First I mixed all the chemicals up. Bigger tank so more chemicals: I made sure I had all the right bottles, and mixed up new everything to prevent mixing new with old (except the vinegar stop bath, which hadn’t been around for long anyway), having measured the volume I’d need by filling the tank with water while empty and then measuring that. All well and good.
This tank is one of those massive ones you can do five rolls of 35mm in, and I was told to use all five reels every time to keep it light tight, as the absence of the tube (spindle?) would mean the light came in at the top. Obviously I forgot entirely about that until I had my three rolls of 120 wound up in the changing bag, and even that was slightly more fiddly than normal because the inside of the tank still had a few drops of water on, but it went fine, and three reels expanded to 120 width seemed to fit okay – couldnt feel a gap in the centre at all.
But I wasn’t sure, and if I really had to I could have taped myself into the bathroom/darkroom properly and done everything there (really extra fiddly though, as it’s not exactly palatial in there). In the end I left the stuff in the bag, extra carefully and with the tank lid on, and measured up again – five reels at 35mm width is only 4mm less than three reels at 120 width, so I put some 4mm wide film cartridge case tops in there, which may or may not have made any difference. In the end, you just have to try it out eh?
Meanwhile I noticed that my fingers, on my right hand, were looking a bit purply….not sure if the pen leaked or something happened with the film getting wet in the bag. Either way, the spectre of doom from a number of sources is threatening my films now but who knows, I really don’t know enough about the limits of these factors to predict it. Good job I like purple anyway, because before I did the development I did the fixer test recommended by rwyoung (’strange but true’ post) and the purple remained there for quite a bit longer than normal fixing time, longer than the film became clear (though still purply). Hmm!
Anyway, did the deed. Turns out the developer didn’t quite come to the top of the tank, where the top of the spindle would have been, so I did slow rotation all the way through the development time to try and keep the dev level up on the top film. No idea if that worked. Did the usual inversion, tapping and the like anyway.
Everything else was fine: stop, fix (left it in a few minutes longer as a result of that fixer test, as the purple itself did go in the end, but not too much longer), wash etc. Did the same half an hour running water at 68 wash, as I don’t have any other wash chemicals yet.
Learning this time:
1. Sort the reels and capacity of a new tank out *before* starting to develop in it.
2. Don’t load in a wet tank, dry it properly first.
3. Don’t make notes with a leaky pen. Or, use a permanent marker (not purple)!
4. Make more than you need of all chemicals, in case you either understimate the amount you need, as I did today, or the tank leaks or you drop some! Seems easy now, but that’s the main thing that could have scuppered things today, it seems to me.
5. Label the bottle lids as well, and remember to wash the tank lid between chemicals too.
6. Find out if using developer in a washed ex-fix bottle is adviseable. I washed it carefully and ran water through it, but wondering if that was enough.
Results:
The film at the top was definitely affected by lack of developer coverage (or light) as there’s a darker fading band across half of it. The images themselves worked okay (bar the line). It was the black Daci Royal, I knew that one worked okay. Not a film to see the light of day that often!The emulsion has splodges on it in the area that was closest to the centre of the reel, and this is true of the other two films as well. This could be a drying issue oddly enough – usually I run a film squeegee thing down the films right away, took me a few minutes to do it this time, maybe that was it.
The other two films are a lot better. There is a narrow line of dark on both sides where light has got in, but it doesn’t encroach on the images much (not enough to write them of, to my eye). I used two cameras for this; a Franka Soliday Record and a Zeiss Icon. The Franka film was okay, the Icon film came out really well. Posting imminent.
