warning on film storage for beginners

[Ralph Barker]

Jim Rice said: "The newest mistakes are always the best ones."

Yeah, I agree. I hate it when I make old, stale mistakes.

[mark blackman]

Is this the place to admit to silly mistakes? OK then. Last shot I took was of a stone urn in a nearby cemetry. To darken the background I used fill-flash, 4x multiple pops with a handheld gun. There I was, carefully recocking the shutter, waiting for the flash to recharge, holding the release cable in the other hand, standing in front of the camera.... you can guess the rest.

[Paul Butler]

In lieu of shading the lens with the dark slide, I recommend the traditional method of shading the lens with your hat. There are several on-line retailers of these items of equipment nowadays, and you can make a natty fashion statement while you're at it. You'll want one with at least a 3 inch brim.

[MIke Sherck]

I cut off the top 1/3, top 1/4, top right 1/5, and top 1/8 of my four sheets.

Damn, I've been cloned! Ohh, the horror of it all!

Mike

[Kevin Crisp]

Macgregor: All this is not to say that a darkroom fridge isn't a good idea. Keeping your faster films and, especially, paper, in a fridge down in the 35 to 40 degree F range will greatly extend its useful life. Living in a warm area, I found that hot summers were just killers to paper and in a relatively short length of time your purest white will be about a Zone VIII-IX. If refrigerated, papers can last 8 years or longer. I still have some of the original (original) Oriental Seagull I am using which is just fine, it must be 14 years old, at least. The frig made the difference. And if you think about the loss from losing a couple boxes of paper, the fridge can pay for itself very quickly. With color material I absolutely agree it should be in the fridge whenever possible. With all films and papers, let the material slowly return to room temperature before you open the box and start using it. A final fridge caution, assuming you'd get one of the little cubes or cheaper rectangular ones for your darkroom, defrost it a couple times a year or you will have a flood down on your materials if the power goes out or a GFI trips and the outlet goes dead. If the paper and film are in plastic bags (a good idea anyway for condensation issues when taking it out to use) then the drips won't do damage to anything but the floor.

[Bill Fay]

I'm a real amateur at photography so don't have experience at effects of temperature - humidity. My input is if there is a dryer in the laundry room you are introducing massive warm humidity in that area and could that be the cause? My profession is woodworking and I have seen the results of laundry room humidity on wood. I know in the early days humidity affected film in tropical climes. Could be the culprit.

[MacGregor Anderson]

More excellent advice, and also some good tales. Thanks to all of you.

There is a dryer in the room and it's something I had never considered. It is vented to the outside, but I'm sure it could still be a problem. Fortunately, I'm a bachelor living in the woods and seldom do laundry. My girlfriend handles most of that for me at her house.

Now that's not a sexist thing going on, by the way. I do all the cooking and shopping, and keep her kitchen clean. It's just a preference for certain chores.

I'll advise her that my artistic well being depends heavily on my not doing any laundry at all. Perhaps if I pick up vacuuming at her house all will be well.

I shot eight sheets of Tmax 100 today. Sunset over the local mountains (Three Sisters, Oregon). I may be weird, but I like b/w sunset shots. I'm not too worried about my zone III detail in this batch, since I can't process Tmax the same way twice anyhow. Sometimes I get lucky with it and it's great, other times I'm a degree off and too fast in my aggitation and I get junk. We'll see.

Cheers,

Mac

[Frank Bagbey]

Just a note. In the early 1960's I was given some photo paper dating back to world war 2, which printed amazingly well. Once I added some additive to improve the blacks, I was in paper heaven since all this paper was 16X20, including some mural paper, and this allowed me to do a great deal of printing ( and learning) at practically no expense. The prints from that time period still look great.