I haven’t been doing much urban landscape photography lately, so a quick trip to Philadelphia seemed to be a good opportunity to take my camera to the streets and shoot a roll or two. I am not very familiar with Philadelphia, but after walking the streets for a few hours I seemed to get the hang of it and found quite a few spots I liked. I shot most of a roll in this little alley near Rittenhouse Square.
Unfortunately I continue to be plagued by technical difficulties and much of this roll is in very bad shape. March hasn’t been a very good month for me, photographically speaking. In this case, as has been the case with my last few rolls of film, I have been experiencing very uneven development, with bubbles or patches of light and dark showing up on the left edge of the photographs. I’ve never had this problem before, but since it’s always on the left side I suspected I wasn’t using enough developer or agitating enough. This time I used a larger tank, a different reel, added an extra 200 ml of developer, and agitated a bit more, but I’ve got the exact same problem. I think I’m going to shoot a couple of rolls of gray card and hit the darkroom tonight to figure this out.
If anyone wants to take a look at the symptoms, here’s a version of this photo before I fixed the sky. As you can see, I did a rough job of covering it up because I liked this image enough to post it to the web… unfortunately, it will never look good enough to print. If you have any ideas as to the cause of my developer troubles, please drop a line in the comments.
Just as an update for anyone who’s been following the Taking a Picture series, I’m afraid I won’t have a new post on that topic for a little while. I am entirely unhappy with the contact sheet I posted last week and I’m considering using a pre-existing photograph for the scanning and printing examples. I’m not sure yet if that spoils the intention of the project—to follow the process from start to finish… on the other hand, with my luck, it will be months before I have any new photographs I’m sufficiently happy enough with to dedicate that much time and energy to.
2 Comments
I’ll take a shot at it:)
Uneven development is usually caused by agitation problems. I also wonder about the left side part of it, you are using a hasselblad, therefore the sky is mid-roll not on the left or right. Regardless, areas of flat tone like skies will show development issues.
You didn’t mention what developer you are using or what tank-in general however smaller tanks that hold one or two rolls tend to exacerbate agitation issues, or developing one roll at a time. A four reel tank is great, and I’d recommend using a stainless one if you have one. The plastic reels impede agitation also…
as for your agitation technique what I was taught was this-once per minute, five seconds, a toroid, you rotate the tank and invert it, maybe three inversions in five seconds and then put it down with a little knock to get rid of bubbles. That’s it. Nothing vigorous. Just easy gentle inversions with a twist.
you also didn’t mention developer strength, but mottling of the kind you show can be cause by using developer too hot and fast or too concentrated. Try going back to the book values, or better yet, shoot a film speed test to find out the true film speed/development time combo for your Normal. Henry Horenstein’s “beyond basic bw” has the details or I can email them to you.
good luck
Thanks Robert. To give a better description of my current process, I develop in a 4 reel plastic tank with plastic reels. I agitate once every thirty seconds: just a flip over, let it settle, and flip it back, tap for bubbles. Nothing too vigorous at all. Maybe I’m under-agitating, but it’s weird, because I’ve been developing the same way for a couple of years now and never had this problem.
I develop in xtol, usually at 1:1, sometimes at 1:2, and I am very meticulous about concentration and temperature. I have been planning to do a speed test for a while now, I have a couple of books that go through the process, I guess I might as well go ahead and do it.
I wonder if there’s any chance that this started happening when I mixed up my most recent batch of xtol? I seem to remember it starting about 3-4 weeks ago, which is right around the time I mixed up a new batch. I guess it could be a concentration issue of some kind, I’ll develop my next roll in HC110 and see what happens.
Thanks again.