Recently I took a pinhole camera to Alaska and exposed several negatives on a developer-incorporated, B&W, variable contrast RC paper.
Upon my return, development of these paper negatives resulted in very dense, very flat negatives, as if the whole negative had been uniformly and heavily fogged. This was a complete surprise because exposure and development were exactly as I had done in the past with no problems. My first thought was that the latent image had degraded in the six days between exposure and development. However, a subsequent test reveals that while the latent image will change a little in six days, the change is not nearly enough to explain this problem. I also wondered if the airport carry-on x-ray machines had fogged the paper, but unexposed paper that went through the x-rays has since been used and shows no fogging at all. Another thought is that maybe the abundant UV at higher latitudes had simply overexposed the negatives. With no glass to attenuate UV, the UV-sensitive B&W paper negatives were exposed to the entire UV spectrum. Do any of you have any answers, suggestions, thoughts as to why a process that works fine here in sunny California would meet with such disaster on a trip to Alaska??? Bob
