Tim Shawcross
26-Jan-2007, 17:35
I've been shooting LF for about a year now, and all though I started with colour, I've been shooting BW for the last 6 months as well. I have no darkroom experience, so I thought the simplest route into developing my own BW would be using the tray method.
Over the last 6 months most negs have come out quite well (though I'm still working on trying not to scratch negs during the process - sometimes I do better than others.)
The last batch I did though, I had some unusal streaks, which I think is caused by over/underdevelopment in certain areas. This is most noticable in sky regions. I have seen this before occasionally, but never this bad.
I'm using D76, 1:1 (one shot) for 11 minutes. Water bath first for 30 seconds, develop, followed by 30 seconds stop bath in water, followed by 5 minutes in Ilford fixer (i think 1:5 dillution - whatever it recommends on the bottle). Both the fixer and the developer have been on the shelf for a couple of months, in bottles. The last batch I did of negs before this one was only a day or so before and I noticed no problems.
I'm using 8x10 trays (which are probably a little big, 5x7 would be better), and I used 600ml of developer (300 dev + 300 water). This is the amount I usually use. I was developing 9 sheets - this may have been too many? I've done this many before with this setup without noticing problems, however I usually do between 4-6.
I've attached 3 examples. The bottom left has the worst streaking of the bunch, and is I think totally unusable. The top left has it present in the sky (noticably), and with a little photoshop work I think should be ok. The right image has a big patch on the right hand side, I think I might be able to manage something to rescue this in photoshop as well (I hope so, cause I like that image). Not all images in the batch of 9 came out like this. I was only noticable in about 4-5 of the images. Another thing is that I wouldn't have noticed it just looking at the negs, it was only after I scanned them I could see the problem (though now if I look at the negs carefully I can see the problem).
Any thoughts?
Tim
Over the last 6 months most negs have come out quite well (though I'm still working on trying not to scratch negs during the process - sometimes I do better than others.)
The last batch I did though, I had some unusal streaks, which I think is caused by over/underdevelopment in certain areas. This is most noticable in sky regions. I have seen this before occasionally, but never this bad.
I'm using D76, 1:1 (one shot) for 11 minutes. Water bath first for 30 seconds, develop, followed by 30 seconds stop bath in water, followed by 5 minutes in Ilford fixer (i think 1:5 dillution - whatever it recommends on the bottle). Both the fixer and the developer have been on the shelf for a couple of months, in bottles. The last batch I did of negs before this one was only a day or so before and I noticed no problems.
I'm using 8x10 trays (which are probably a little big, 5x7 would be better), and I used 600ml of developer (300 dev + 300 water). This is the amount I usually use. I was developing 9 sheets - this may have been too many? I've done this many before with this setup without noticing problems, however I usually do between 4-6.
I've attached 3 examples. The bottom left has the worst streaking of the bunch, and is I think totally unusable. The top left has it present in the sky (noticably), and with a little photoshop work I think should be ok. The right image has a big patch on the right hand side, I think I might be able to manage something to rescue this in photoshop as well (I hope so, cause I like that image). Not all images in the batch of 9 came out like this. I was only noticable in about 4-5 of the images. Another thing is that I wouldn't have noticed it just looking at the negs, it was only after I scanned them I could see the problem (though now if I look at the negs carefully I can see the problem).
Any thoughts?
Tim