Yes, it's scary in the dark - strange odors and sounds, creaking floor boards, eerily glowing lights. But that's like the Tunnel of Love compared to the last couple of days trying to process a couple of rolls of film.
Friday night I mixed a batch of ID-11 in preparation for processing a few rolls of film I knew I'd be shooting on Sunday. Sunday night I loaded the film into the tanks, and on Monday afternoon I got ready to process them. I poured the stock solution from the storage container and it was brown, and smelled a little funny. I thought I might not have tightly fixed the cap, and that the developer had oxidized, so I rinsed the bottle in super hot water (120+ degrees), and this morning mixed up a batch of fresh developer. This evening I got ready to process the film. When I poured the developer from the container, it was again brown. I can't believe it oxidized in twelve hours! Well, it wasn't too brown, and it was freshly mixed, so i decided to process a couple of rolls anyway - some tests I'd made to compare a couple of lenses. maybe not the best way to do the processing, but I was in the mood to develop film, and if the results came out OK I'd then process the film I shot on Sunday. So, I grabbed the developing tank with the two test rolls in it, and spent my half hour listening to the Shirelles and some 60s doo-wop, opened the tank to hang the film to dry and ... bada-bing! The reels were empty. I grabbed the wrong tank. It's enough to drive a man to digital! or at least to some 25yo Springbank. OK, now that you've heard my take of woe, what could be causing the developer to go bad so quickly? It looks just fine in the package, and the solution mixes up to be clear, as it should. Could the developer be bad? Could there be some contamination in the container that wasn't cleaned out even with hot water? Tomorrow I'm going to try to find some glass bottles, or at least get a new brown plastic container. Meanwhile, any thoughts on the subject would be appreciated. This has never happened to me before, although I once got a bad batch of D-76, but the powder was brown when I opened the package, and mixed up brown, too. -- Shel Belinkoff mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~belinkoff/ "If you are a bad technician, it doesn't matter how big your negs are." - PDML member - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
