Hello, first post here. I've learned a lot from this forum over the past year and wanted to offer some advice to the less experienced large format black and white photographers on the board. It's pretty basic, but I was still careless and it has cost me several hundred dollars.
Store your film properly. That's it. I have some unexpired FP4 and HP5 that I kept in a laundry room for about eight months. No air conditioning in my house, and that room hit well over 80 this summer a couple times. But mostly it was in the low 60s.
I picked up my 4x5 for the first time in a few months recently. There have been some great opportunities in the area lately and I was excited to get back into it. But my negatives, carefully exposed and developed based on testing I'd done a year ago were greatly lacking in shadow detail. Not enough to flat out ruin the prints, but enough to make a very noticeable difference. Even shots bracketed to put shadows in zone four were very very thin on the negative.
I had always thought that differences were subtle unless film was left at very high temps for long periods. I've known so many people who were casual about this in the past. And I learned my lesson the hard way. I doubt I'd have seen it on 35mm or even 645, but it's obvious on the big negative.
At least it's a small boost for Ilford...a hundred HP5 and 200 FP4. And the local appliance store. Small refrigerator is now a must.
I'll be testing the various boxes of film I have left. There is some Tmax 100, some Tri-X 320, and even some Tech Pan that I never got around to trying out. See if there is a speed I can use that still leaves decent latitude.
Hope this helps save someone a bit of money. Thanks for the great forum and site.
If there is a school out there or student that wants some of this film let me know. Might be useful in learning tray developing or something. It may be a few hundred sheets I won't be using, and definitely is 50 or so. Obviously, no charge to a good cause.
mac
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