hi,
on july 9, 2014, i developed a large batch of 4x5 negatives.
they were part of a project that i had been working on since the month of May.
in all, i had 34 exposures on Portra 400 iso.
the negatives were stored in the same place where i have been keeping them for the last four years.
there was nothing different in the way i handled the film compared to the other hundreds of 4x5 negatives i have shot so far.
however, all of the negatives were ruined by some mysterious over-exposure to light.
i have attached some examples for your reference.
they are all panoramas of the parks in my city.
needless to say, i lost two months of work.
however, going beyond that, i am trying to come to an understanding of what happened.
in the process, i came up with a few possible explanations.
1. the negatives were damaged before they were placed in the film holder.
(this might have been possible, i thought. i kept the negatives in a fridge full of food and at some point the kodak cardboard pack smelled of pork steak. i also had also two bottles of chemicals four months ago in the fridge, but they were tightly capped. during the past year i never noticed any damage on the negatives. during the development process i took two test shots from my balcony with the same setup i used for the damaged negatives. the two identical shots came out perfect. they all came from the same fridge. so it's not the unexposed negatives.)
2. the negatives were damaged inside the camera, while shooting.
(this could be possible as well, but less likely in the given time-frame of two months. the same kind of damage should be consistent across the negatives, and it also should show up in more recent photos. however, the two identical test shots came out perfect. this means that the camera and the holders are not the problem, and neither is the development process.)
3. the negatives were damaged during the unloading of the film holders.
(i converted my bathroom into a darkroom. i have been using this setup for four years now, and it never failed. at the same time, i have been unloading negatives from the film holders in the past two months at different times, with random numbers of negatives. had something occurred during the darkroom unloading stage, the damage should have been random as well. some of the negatives should have not been damaged at all.
if there was a consistent flaw in the darkroom, the test shots should have been damaged, and they were not, so it's not the darkroom.)
4. the negatives were damaged during the development process
(the tank might have had a light leak, for instance. also, the over-exposure pattern on the negatives does not suggest light coming through the top of the tank and hitting the curved surface of the film. the negative damage is quite geometric, square even, which rules out damage within the tank, where it would have been somewhat curved in shape. moreover, the two test shots deny this possibility, as there was no damage due to the development process.)
5. the negatives were damaged by the stabilizer or by the wetting agent, or by switching one with the other
(at some point during that day, i forgot for a second which tray was which. i pretend to have recovered afterwards, and to have placed things in the right sequence. even so, the negatives were black all over out of the tank, way before this stage, so it is out of the question that the damage occurred on this level.)
6. the negatives were damaged in their kodak cardboard boxes
(after exposing a shot and unloading, i put all my negatives back in their original packaging, and then seal it with tape. it seems highly likely that something happened at this point.
we are at the stage where i am still shooting and negatives pile up in their boxes after they have been exposed.
as all the images have been damaged, one could assume that the damage occurred at the end of the shooting period.
i started to work on the project on March 21 and stopped working on July 2.
the negatives were developed on July 9.
my guess is that something happened between July 2 and July 9.
but what did happen? how can four unopened, sealed kodak film boxes, as well as two unloaded film holders, containing 34 negatives altogether get damaged in the drawer?
a) radiation from a neighbor
living on the 7th floor, i thought that my neighbor downstairs might have some source of radiation, that could damage film. however, the negatives are all damaged, but to a varying extent. some of them came out completely black. the four different boxes seemed to be more damaged on the top negative out of a stack of ten. the bottom negative seemed to be almost ok, if one ignored different amounts of fogging.
a source of radiation should have produced a consistent result in the whole stack. three boxes of kodak film over-exposed on the top and not so over-exposed on the bottom deny any consistent radiation of any kind, for the whole stack of boxes.
b) inappropriate storage place
i also considered that there might be something wrong with the drawer where i keep the film.
but that is not possible, because i have been keeping fresh and unloaded, exposed film in that drawer for the past four years.
c) the boxes were opened before development
this seems to be the most plausible explanation. by the look of the negatives it can be said that they were properly exposed. there is some information there from the shooting. however, after being exposed, something happened to all of these exposed negatives, while they were sitting in their boxes.
over time, i have made it a habit to monitor and accept my mistakes, either during shooting or developing. i keep a record of both shooting and developing and of the errors that i make. i sometimes make mistakes of various kinds, but they are punctual, i can observe them and note them down.
this does not seem to be the case.
if it was indeed an error that i made, i should have unconsciously pulled the dark slide on the film holders after exposing each negative.
as funny as that sounds, it is quite impossible, because one might do this a couple of times, not 34 times, not missing one negative.
also, the test shots deny this possibility.
if the setup i use works, as shown by the test, there is no explanation left to my mind than this - the boxes of film were opened in daylight and then closed again. the almost burned negatives on top of each 10-sheet stack, as well as the mostly undamaged bottom negative seem to suggest that. the pattern of the damage is also pointing in the same direction. the negatives were stored in their kodak envelopes. it seems that they were only partially removed from the pack, and this is where the complete over-exposure occurred. there is then a strip of gradient in between, and a more or less undamaged part, that i presume was left inside the envelope.
my question is this.
what do you think about this whole story, and what do you think actually happened?
thanks,
mn
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks