Another Development Without a Proper Darkroom

At least with my Ilford thermometer I can get the temperature right. Thought it's going to take a bit of trial and error with regard to how long the 1 litre of ID11 and 500ml of fixer need to be in the University's Hall of Residence freezer to bring them down from room temperature of 75F to the optimum of 68F. (Though, incidentally, the Ilford thermometer has 65F marked in red, as if that was the optimum... Perhaps it was in pre-central heating times. It's pure social history, this retro photography lark.)

[EDIT 9.30PM: I made a right arse of that. The roll stopped winding on, and in in the confined space of a halls of residence wardrobe, I was getting very hot and stressed. I thought I had most of the roll on, and it wouldn't hurt to sacrifice a few frames from the end...

So I snipped it off. Which was a blunder because only the first ten or so exposures were wound on, and I lost most of the film when I opened the wardrobe door. Bastardo! The roll's hanging up to dry now, and it looks as if there'll be three or four exposures that are ok. Which is piss poor out of 36 exposure roll.

I went through my collection of unexposed film and I've got a roll of Kodak TMax. It will be sacrificed to the Gods of Film Dev later as I play around with the dev tank's spool to see where the hell I went wrong.]

Comments

  1. DexterTue Jul 22, 10:58:00 pm BST

    My money's on a wet spool... It only takes a single drop of wet to fuck it right up! :O)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Garry NixonWed Jul 23, 07:07:00 am BST

    Bugger off, Stevie, you digital numpty.

    ReplyDelete
  3. DexterWed Jul 23, 06:45:00 pm BST

    No... Seriously... I did my own B&W and colour processing for years (1979-1991) and my continual bane was wet spools!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Garry NixonWed Jul 23, 09:12:00 pm BST

    I realised some time ago that your campaign of taking the piss out of my diy developing was based on knowledge.

    I would have thought a drop of water was the culprit, except that the last time I used the dev tank was in Libya, and it would have been left out to dry overnight - you could dry a fucking eiderdown overnight there, if you turned the AC off.

    Fucking nuisance, whatever it was.

    ReplyDelete
  5. DexterFri Jul 25, 12:14:00 pm BST

    Not that you want it, but I'm gonna give you another top tip :O) Don't rewind the film all the way back into the can before removing it from the camera (you'll hear the leader click as it comes off the takeup spool... Stop right there). That way you can wind the film onto the developing spool directly from the can and if it fucks up you can just wind it back into the can and diagnose the problem in daylight.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Garry NixonSat Oct 11, 05:46:00 pm BST

    Well, I've started doing that now.

    AND I've realized that my problems were caused by that particular spool being broken at a crucial point.

    ReplyDelete

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