What did I manage to do?

[William Barnett-Lewis]

Two shots. Arista.EDU Ultra 100 @ EI 200. Developed in Diafine & fixed in a new batch of the regular yellow bag Kodak fixer. First sheets developed in a HP Combi-plan tank which, I'd bet, is at least a big part of the problem. Still, I thought I'd ask and see what those with much more experiance than this grasshopper think.

Suggestions? Ideas? Etc?

Thanks,

William

[Brian C. Miller]

What do the unexposed areas of the film (edges) look like? Are those normal?

What it looks like is that the tank wasn't filled up. Or else it was filled, and the volume went down during processing.

Try it again with just one sheet of film in the tank. First, though, make sure that the amount of liquid is correct. Just put the film holder in the tank, and fill it with enough liquid to cover the holder, then dump it into a measuring beaker. Also, when filling the tank the lid needs a tiny crack to allow air to escape.

[Louie Powell]

I agree with Brian that insufficient liquid volume could cause problems, and while I've not actually used a Combi-Plan tank, I have heard that they are notorious for leaking.

On the other hand, if this was due to insufficient chemical volume, then the nature of the damage suggests that the volume was insufficient from the very beginning, and did not leak out over time. That damage line is just too precise to have resulted from a gradually diminishing volume of developer.

I am also intrigued by what appears to be physical damage to the emulsion on the sheet on the right. Is it possible that the sheets were touching each other, or possibly touching the side of the tank?

[Donald Qualls]

Yep, insufficient developer. Inversion agitation will coat the uncovered portion of the film and allow some development, but you'll see lower contrast in that area because of local exhaustion, plus potentially some aerial fog. The "lightning bolt" in upper right of the second image looks like a flow mark to my eye, the sort of thing one might get from very slowly pouring developer into the tank via a filler that dumps the liquid directly onto a sheet. What I've seen recommended for the HP Combiplan to avoid that problem is to fill the tank with developer before loading the film, then when the film is loaded in the rack, drop that into the tank and close the lid in the dark -- which seems, to me, to be courting BIG leaks and potentially light leaks from an incorrectly latched lid. Some have claimed that the HP tank fills rapidly enough not to give this, but the filler could act as a reservoir to supply a runnel after inversion if you don't have enough liquid, and produce this kind of mark (and the runnel will tend to follow the same path after multiple agitation cycles, because the wetter, more swelled emulsion is more hydrophilic than the emulsion that hasn't been fully immersed); if you have a very short development time, you could also get a runnel mark like that during draining after pouring out the developer (stick with times longer than five minutes for tank development -- I prefer longer than ten).

[William Barnett-Lewis]

Thank you, folks. This gives me a place to work from for the next set. Using Diafine, I'm not in as tight a place as with some other developers, but if there isn't enough in the tank, well...

William

[Ron Marshall]

I used to use a Combi-Plan. A couple of times I didn't push the retaining clip on tightly enough and a sheet or two came partially out of its slot. When two sheets were in contact they looked very similar to what you have shown.

[Louie Powell]

I just processed some film, and as I was hanging the sheets to dry, I had to carefully arrange the hangers so that the sheets wouldn't touch each other.

Is it possible that the problem here is that the sheets came in contact while drying?

[scrichton]

I found I sorted most of my stains and so on by pre soaking in the combiplan

[Donald Qualls]

Louis, contact while drying will tend to give very limited watermarks at the point or area of contact, not the kind of sharply defined underdevelopment seen in the original post.

[John Berry]

Don pretty much hit the nail on the head. ( as usual )