*now with added disaster pics* One day I'll perfect development

abdoujaparov

abdoujaparov

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I think I'm relatively clever. I went to university, I've never set myself on fire, etc. Yet surely a clever person would have tested their car-boot-sale Jessops development tank with 580ml of water instead of 580ml of Rodinal 1:50 with two films inside? So, apparently, when the adhesive holding the seal to the body fails, it gets a bit leaky. Who knew?!

Mercifully, it looks like the film has developed fine, from a look at the negs. We'll see when they've dried. Anyway, tank's gone in the bin. Kept the reels though, so still worth the £1 I paid.
 
A £'s worth of super glue to seal it? I got done about 3 months ago when I bought a nice keyboard for 50p and some of the keys don't work..you can't trust anybody these days;)
 
abdoujaparov said:
Mercifully, it looks like the film has developed fine, from a look at the negs. We'll see when they've dried.
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Complete disaster. Dunno if this is underexposure, under development, under fixing. The camera was new to me, the meter untested, the tank leaked . . . god knows.

img2016008-1.jpg


The film is TMax 400, and a search suggests the pink tint might be the dye in the film - so bad fixer, maybe? Not enough washing? But also underexposed negs?
 
No idea, strangely like it! Very abstract! Bet you couldn't replicate it! Also being serious, not sarcastic.
 
Some more from a different roll, same day, same development. Scanned as greyscale to get rid of the colour.

img2016020-1.jpg img2016023-1.jpg img2016013-1.jpg

Huge marks around the perforations. Any suggests of what combination of things has gone wrong here? I'm guessing I sloshed quite a bit of development out of it the one time I inverted and got the leak. Could quite easily have left insufficient Rodinal to complete the development. On the other hand, maybe the meter on the Praktika is out (I'll check that against a known meter tomorrow)
 
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BMG said:
No idea, strangely like it! Very abstract! Bet you couldn't replicate it! Also being serious, not sarcastic.
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Yeah, normally I'd like this sort of thing too! But two rolls of TMax wasted :(
 
Solved! I think. I've refixed one strip, and it looks much better. I think my fixer went bad - I hadn't used it for more than a couple of rolls, but I did make it up quite a while ago . . .
 
Back in January I had some film from a trip to Paris that I didn't fully fix as my fixer expired, but I was able to refix with some freshly made stuff. Was quite weird to see how the film looked when it wasn't fully fixed, will make it easier for me to identify next time I do it wrong :LOL:

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Glad you figured out the problem! Quite satisfying when you get to the bottom of it :)
 
Kevin Allan said:
I have a couple of rolls like that which need refixing, and I have done so with one, but it's much more of a pain to dry the negs once they've been cut up.
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Yeah, and I managed to scratch some of the negs quite badly refixing them. I think I'll deffo be bundling up my rolls to dev all at once, and throwing away the fixer afterwards. This was far too much effort. (I should have used a tray instead of a jug to do it.)

This is what I used to solve the drying problem, though - http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/80189663/ Had to be careful to clip just the perforated edge, though.
 
Streaks around the perforations are usually due to inadequate agitation.
 
chuckles said:
Streaks around the perforations are usually due to inadequate agitation.
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Cheers! That would have definitely been the case here, because I couldn't invert due to the leak. All I could manage was a bit of a swirl. Thankfully, they seem to have gone anyway, so I think it was inadequate agitation of nearly spent fixer that did for it this time.
 
abdoujaparov said:
Cheers! That would have definitely been the case here, because I couldn't invert due to the leak. All I could manage was a bit of a swirl. Thankfully, they seem to have gone anyway, so I think it was inadequate agitation of nearly spent fixer that did for it this time.
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How bad was this leak? I have a Jessops tank and it always leaks, but my negatives come out fine. It always seems like a lot of liquid is coming out, but when I pour the chemicals back into the bottles afterwards, I realise that I'm not losing anywhere near as much liquid as I think, as the bottles are nearly as full as when I poured them in.
 
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skysh4rk said:
How bad was this leak? I have a Jessops tank and it always leaks, but my negatives come out fine. It always seems like a lot of liquid is coming out, but when I pour the chemicals back into the bottles afterwards, I realise that I'm not losing anywhere near as much liquid as I think, as the bottles are nearly as full as when I poured them in.
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The plastic seal had come away from the body of the tank and was deformed into it by the lid - we're talking about quite big sloshes, rather than a drip. Even swirling it around led to wet gloves.

I already have a perfectly functional Paterson, so I binned the body of the Jessops tank. Shame, because the Jessops was easier to handle, but really not worth the hassle of trying to reglue the seal.
 
Yeah my jessops tank seemed to leak like a seive but it wasn't really a lot but it was enough to make a mess so I swapped it for a Patterson.
Though yours does sound more of a catastrophic failure! Been there though, too much of a hurry to play with toys not nearly enough to test!
 
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