Jrewt
22-Dec-2007, 12:06
Ok, I'll try to keep this short and not ramble.
I just moved to new place, new darkroom, new water supply. I also ran out of fp4, and just happen to have a few 50 sheet boxes of Efke PL 100, which expired in august of this year. I did a few tests to get my dev time in the ballpark, and I headed out to shoot. I processed the negs just as always, pcat- HD 1:1:100 in a jobo for 8min. Negs looked pretty good to my eye, but when I went to print on my usual paper (kentmere bromide gr 3, ansco 130), the prints looked pretty crummy. Dull contrast, no blacks, but the whites were good. So now I'm going through variables to figure out just where the problem is coming from. I always match my film to my paper using a very simple method, and so far I've had no problem getting pretty excellent results. Does BW film lose contrast only a few month after expiring? Maybe my developer is bad, but it's the Pcat- HD kit from the formularly and I've only had it for 3 months, the bottles aren't even half empty. The negatives, to my eye at least, don't look any different than any of the efke negs I have done.. Kind of rambling I know, but I have noone to ask about such things but myself, and once I'm stumped I have you guys! ;)
I just moved to new place, new darkroom, new water supply. I also ran out of fp4, and just happen to have a few 50 sheet boxes of Efke PL 100, which expired in august of this year. I did a few tests to get my dev time in the ballpark, and I headed out to shoot. I processed the negs just as always, pcat- HD 1:1:100 in a jobo for 8min. Negs looked pretty good to my eye, but when I went to print on my usual paper (kentmere bromide gr 3, ansco 130), the prints looked pretty crummy. Dull contrast, no blacks, but the whites were good. So now I'm going through variables to figure out just where the problem is coming from. I always match my film to my paper using a very simple method, and so far I've had no problem getting pretty excellent results. Does BW film lose contrast only a few month after expiring? Maybe my developer is bad, but it's the Pcat- HD kit from the formularly and I've only had it for 3 months, the bottles aren't even half empty. The negatives, to my eye at least, don't look any different than any of the efke negs I have done.. Kind of rambling I know, but I have noone to ask about such things but myself, and once I'm stumped I have you guys! ;)