Fomapan 100 Fog

[Barney]

Having trouble with fogging on this film in combination with my FX 55 Developer, it scans well enough and it is only a couple of clicks in lightroom to sort it out but its still annoying me. I have read a through the relevant sections of a couple of developing books and I reckon its solvable one way or another, Ian recommended ditching it and changing developer to Pyrocat HD, I had everything in stock apart from the Potassium Bromide so I have ordered some. When I started to look at the effect of KBr, thinking I may be able to omit it from the Pyrocat, lo and behold I discovered it is a well documented fog inhibitor. That got my brain ticking over and looked at the FX55 recipe again to notice that its one of the recipes where Crawley does not include an inhibitor in the make up. Looking further into the fog situation there are quite a few reports of fog with the fomapan 100 and a common theme seems to be acid stop baths, also causing white spots. I checked the Foma site and although they recommend a 2% acid stop on their data sheets, the specified duration is 10 seconds where I have been stopping in the 2% for a minute.

I was going to test another developer, but as everyone keeps telling me "stick to one" I am going to try and work through/around this. I like FX55, it is a simple formulae, has a long shelf life and cheap to make. And, it has given me my best results so far in film development !

I am going to test out a water bath stop and miss out the acid stop altogether see if that cures it, if that doesn't work and there is some peculiar thing going on between my developer and film Combo I will try a bit of KBr in a mixed up batch of developer,

Such fun chasing this one down !

 

[FishyFish]

I've used a water stop bath with Fomapan stocks before and it's worked perfectly well.

 

[Barney]

I've used a water stop bath with Fomapan stocks before and it's worked perfectly well.

Going to develop it now, fingers crossed.

I have 90 sheets left.

 

[Barney]

That looks like success, I can see a lovely crisp clear grey base.

I will try that water stop with type 517, that film gives me the run around and got me blaming myself for dust and it could have been acid at the emulsion all along.

At least I got a drying cabinet out of it,

I didn't like the reported side effects of KBr on the developing time so ordered some Benzotriazole, same fog eliminating effect but does not act as a reducer and increase the the development times.