You wouldn't believe what darkroom error I managed today... I am still banging my head on the wall...
I just have to share this "funny" story to alleviate the anger. I developed 4 negs in my jobo tank, stopped, fixed and proceeded to hypo clear. I hypocleared them well, than 'where is the wash water' (I have a 5litre jug of washing water to keep it at room/dev temp)... I found the canister I _thought_ was washing water... shall I continue? I use the Ilford archival sentence, although with 5 steps instead of their 3, as a safeguard. I also test the water from negs for signs of fixer/hypoclear residue (**see bellow for my testing technique). Well, after 5 complete washing steps the negs were still full of the residue! I was mindbogled... until it dawned on me, after filling the container with another 5litre of 20 deg. C water, and repeating the 5 steps..., that I was washing it NOT with water but with HYPOCLEARING AGENT!!! I wasted 5 litres of it... (not the kodak stuff, homemade stuff) The canister with washing water was put somewhere else by other family member... AAARGH! And I was perplexed why the hell the negs are still full of fixer/hypoclear residue!!! Not surprising when I was "washing" them in hypoclear all the time! Now, hypoclear is easily washed out of negs, but NOT if you drinse them in it for about 45 minutes! All in all, it took me 2+ hours to wash damned 4 negs, and wasted 5 litres of hypoclear... ** my technique of testing: I am using rapid fixer and sodium bisulfite (?) hypoclear. When any sulphite salt is combined with KNMO4 (kalium hypermanganum, the household/pharmacy stuff), the react, and the pink-purple colour of the KMNO4 solution clears to clear or muddy brown, depending on strengths. What I do is take a sample of washing water BEFORE washing, another sample AFTER few washing steps, and drop into each 1 crystal of the KMNO4 or few drops of solution. When there are no sulphite salts anymore, the colour of pink of both samples should be the same. When the after-wash sample is clear or lighter pink, I can see that there is still some suplhite salts. Of course, this tests only for S salts, not iodide and others, but with few more steps for safeguarding, this works for me well. I of course don't do it every time I wash negs, just once every 5 or more sessions to check. Good light, Frantisek Vlcek - 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 .
