Condensation on film?

[Liam:]

Hi,

This morning I went out and shot some images of the snow we have had in the south of England. I have just developed the 6 sheets and all of them look similar to below...



Here is a digital image taken at the same time



Any idea as to what would cause this? The film is fomapan 100 developed in rodinal 1:50 9 minutes. The film was room temperature before I took it outside (around 1 degrees c) Is it my developing or condensation on the film?

[Liam:]

Here is a snapshot of one of the other negatives, you can see the faint outline of the hill (I was going for the minimilstic look) but then it is really 'cloudy"

[Gem Singer]

Probably condensation on the lens.

Condensation on the film (if that were possible) would show areas of underexposure on the negative where the layer of moisture blocked the light.

[bobwysiwyg]

I've never experienced any problems shooting 4x5 at similar or much colder temps. Usually, condensation issues occur the other way round, that is taking something cold into warm/moist air. Even so, after acclimating to the interior temps and humidity, the condensation would evaporate, if there were any. I'm leaning towards some processing issue. Can you describe your process in more detail?

[al olson]

Bob, I concur with regard to getting condensation on the film. Processing is a possible culprit.

Liam, could you possibly have breathed on and fogged the lens while you were setting aperture and shutter? In freezing temperatures it takes a while for the frost to sublimate. There might be similar patterns between light and dark on some of the sheets if the frost patterns were not affected between those exposures.

[Liam:]

Thanks for the help.

My process:

Taco method in a patterson drum
Rodinal 1:50 9 minutes (5 sec agitation every 30 seconds)
Stop 1 minute
Fix 7 minutes I then have to adjust the position of the negatives so that they fix properly, fix for a further 5 mins
Wash and dry

I am currently developing 2 sheets taken inside 10 minutes ago using the same process. I used a lens that has some scratches on the rear element, could this be the cause? It looks fine through the gg.

[bobwysiwyg]

Bob, I concur with regard to getting condensation on the film. Processing is a possible culprit.

Liam, could you possibly have breathed on and fogged the lens while you were setting aperture and shutter? In freezing temperatures it takes a while for the frost to sublimate. There might be similar patterns between light and dark on some of the sheets if the frost patterns were not affected between those exposures.

Good point.

[Liam:]

Al, the patterns are very similar on all of the negatives, I must have breathed on the lens every time I set up the shutter speed!

The negatives I just developed look fine, typical....

[Pete Watkins]

Liam,
This won't help with your current problem but it's not recommended to use an acid stop with Foma 100. About 4-5 rinses in a water stop seems to work well for me. If you didn't use an acid stop I'll mind my own buisness in future.
Best wishes,
Pete.

[Roger Vadim]

Looks more like development error to me. Or some light leak, because hazed or foged lenses do look different, they tend to blow out the highlights (at least with my old Summar). If you shoot the ok shots indoors and the screwed ones outdoors it could be that your bellows/ lensboard etc. developed a light leak which just occurs because of the much greater amount of light outside...

edit: oops... just figured out that the pics then would be whitish... wrong assumption, obviously.
not enough developer?