Sprocket Hole Shadows

[divewizard]

It appears that the film is acting as a light pipe for the bright lights in the center of the image. The "piped" light appears to be reflecting off the edge of the film and shadowed by the sprocket holes.

The picture was taken with a Kodak TMAX 3200 in a Nikon FE, Nikkor-SC 55mm f/1.2 lens, Nikon Y44 light yellow filter, hand-held, NCPS process & scan

©2012 Chris Grossman

 

[sevo]

Looks more like developer vanes to me - the shadows strictly follow the sprocket holes without any visible influence from the lights. If so, it is a agitation (or lack of) issue.

 

[Tim Gray]

It's more likely due to the processing. For some reason, TMZ is more susceptible to this in my experience than slower films, maybe since it's more prone to having high base fog? I usually see it in areas where there's higher density though.

In the case of your image, I'd say it's more noticeable since the black point is set so low. If you set it a bit higher, you won't see it at all, while preserving all the detail in the actual exposed areas of the film.

 

[mdarnton]

What they mean is developer being aggressively pumped through sprockets as you agitate. Either over- or under- agitation, or putting fewer reels in a tank than it's designed for so that the reels shoot from one end of the tank to the other when you invert agitate, or too much inversion agitation and too little spinning agitation. Anyway, proportionally, the developer is being jetted through the holes, locally, rather than being equally distributed in your agitation step.

 

[bhop73]

Yeah, I was having that problem and tried agitating less while developing and it helped get rid of them.

 

[NeeZee]

I had the same problem for a while when pushing hp5 to 1600 in hand development.

it's definitely about agitation, but in my case it was not a matter of how often i did it but how FAST. when i went back to taking my time of about 3 sec to turn the tank by 180 degrees, the problem was gone. so basically im withmdarnton on this one.

did i understand correctly that it was done in a lab? maybe a good time to start doing it yourself 🙂

 

[bhop73]

I had the same problem for a while when pushing hp5 to 1600 in hand development.

it's definitely about agitation, but in my case it was not a matter of how often i did it but how FAST. when i went back to taking my time of about 3 sec to turn the tank by 180 degrees, the problem was gone. so basically im withmdarnton on this one.

did i understand correctly that it was done in a lab? maybe a good time to start doing it yourself 🙂

I guess that's what I meant when I said less. Less forceful.. :bang: