One year between exposure and E6 development,push?

[Spencer Cliss]

Hi

I have 15 sheets of 13x18 Fuji RVP and Fuji RDP III that were exposed a year ago, stored at room temperature but not yet processed, due to certain circumstances of my private life. These are backup sheets of landscape photographs, meaning I took every subject twice.

How much push (or pull?) should I tell the lab to apply to these sheets so that the new sheets and the old ones come out as close as possible? In addition, I would of course apply the desired push and pull based on the review of the first set of sheets.

Thanks much for all comments!

Frank

(I searched before I posted.)

[Gem Singer]

Hi frank,

I think you answered your own question. Have the lab. develope the first set of film sheets. Check them out on the light box. Then, determine if the second set will need more development time. You should be able to come close, but don't expect the colors to be exact after spending a year as latent images.

[Spencer Cliss]

Oh, sorry, I was not clear enough. The first 15 sheets have been exposed and developed a year ago. Only the second set of 15 has not yet been developed.

I guess I could take a few sheets out of the second set, develop and review these, then do the rest. But I was hoping to save a trip to the lab.

[Alan Davenport]

I'm ashamed to admit, I just had a roll of 120 processed, that had been half exposed almost a full year ago, then finished off a couple days ago. Normal E-6 processing. No problems.

What's relevant here, is that the almost-year-old exposures were also shot -- same subject at the same time -- on 4x5 film which WAS processed promptly. There's no appreciable difference between the two (other than being different films.) A latent image is a lot more durable than some would have us believe.

[Bill Jefferson]

Frank,
Process only 1 sheet normal time and determine from the results what to do with the others.

[Stan. Laurenson-Batten]

I agree with the above, a 'CLIP' test is called for, it will be well worth the trouble.

[Spencer Cliss]

Two sheets of the set that was exposed a year ago came back from the lab. I found a lot more of a difference than Alan did. About 2/3 to 1 stop darker and an easily seen magenta color cast - maybe something like 15 cc. The caveat though is that it was another lab. These sheets were unrefridgerated in my apartment in Switzerland. We don't get very hot summers. The lab technician, who seemed competent, said that the result was not unexpected for a year. She also said that it's hard to predict what color cast will result and that this was actually random. For what it's worth.

So I added a 1/3 stop of push for the remaining sheets, but I probably should have added 2/3.

I also will rethink my bracketing strategy. The concept of taking every subject twice and applying corrections to the second set of sheets after revieweing the first may be tempting. It has the advantage that only one cassette has to be spent for each subject. But the disadvantages are numerous. First, reshuffling the second set into bins of individual push and pull is a real bitch of work, second, if the lab or the user messes up the sequence of sheets, the second set could come out with all wrong corrections, third, one more trip to the lab is needed, and forth, the cost savings isn't that large because pull-push processing costs extra.

So, I think I'll switch to taking every subject three times, with a sequence of -2/3, 0, +2/3 stops. I'll have to accept that I have to pay for and load/unload 1 1/2 times more sheets, that it takes 1 1/2 cassettes for each subject which is a pain when it comes to unloading and reloading cassettes when an odd number of subjects were taken, this being worsened by using more than one emulsion. I use RVP film before sunset and RDP III after, but nearly always I have not enough sheets of one of the two in my pack. I seriosuly consider foregoing RVP for this reason and standardizing on RDP III. The advantage is, I'll be done with processing after one trip to the lab, there's no incentive to procrastinate with dealing with the second set of sheets. and there is no mental gymnastics required.

If someone wonders, I use the 13x18 format, so there are no cassettes available with more than 2 sheets. And I really need the bracketing because I photograph in far away countires and the last thing I want is coming back with unusable photos due to bad exposure.

Thanks for reading :-)
Frank

[Todd West]

Processing one or two sheets at time and taking the best guess for the rest is probably the way to go. I can't speak to RVP and RDP, but I had one sheet of RAPII which got stuck waiting for about six months before processing and color shifted quite significantly despite being stored at constant temperature. But no change in exposure. About the same time I found a 135-36 of RSX II which I thought I'd lost a year earlier and it came back without significant shifts but was a stop or so darker, despite having been in my car the whole time. So your milage can vary from film to film and situation to situation.