Hi folks.. well part II of my quest is in the process of being done.. my first Medium format black and white developed film.. The first set of negatives are drying in the garage right now. At a glance they look like they've come up well.. again i'll scan what i can and put them on my flickr site and post another link up here when i have done.
Sadly this time it didn't go as painless as it could have.
I now have storage bottles so i was able to make up my stop and fixer and then pour them back into these bottles ready to reuse again.
Doing medium format requires more chemicals.. 500ml in my patterson super system 4 universal developing tank, the storage bottles above thankfully hold ~500ml so i'm all set for 1 reel at a time developing
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Actual development went pretty well.. again i decided to not bother inverting the tank rather just vigorously used the agitator spindle as I am too concerned of the flimsy lid leaking and didn't want to make a mess. The first cheapy tank that i did my first roll of 35mm with actually recommended to just use the agitator and had no mention of turning it upside down, infact it said whereever instructed to do so use the agitator instead.
The pain was in the reel loading.. and boy did it hurt. I butchered a fuji superia ISO 400 film this afternoon and started practicing with the reel and tank, also getting the opportunity to see how the paper and negative were seperated. In daylight it all looked fairly ok, I was testing on an unexposed roll and didn't really take in that the tape everyone was talking about was conveniently found at the start of the unexposed roll as i fed it onto the reel, absolutely convenient. Later on with film that mattered this situation is sadly not replicated.
I didn't end up practicing with my eyes closed or in the changing tent.. a mistake i think.. but having found it relatively easy with my first 35mm effort i was filled with false confidence in my ability to reel up the film onto the developing reel. In everything went into the bag... in went my arms, and what i hoped to be a few minutes as it was with the 35mm turned into nearly 40mins of frustrated attempts.
I'd read the posts here advising about using the sticky tape to reinforce the end as you thread it, I decided to have a go at this, of course this required that i took the film off its own reel along with seperating the paper from it. Having done so I met with real problems trying to thread the thing onto the reel.
I should mention that i've brought and used with 35mm the Nova Spiral EasyLoader, as shown on this page
http://www.novadarkroom.com/acatalog/Darkroom_Accessories.html
Its a little piece of plastic with 2 cylinders attached.. your reel threads onto one and the film entry point on the reel is moved to line up with a notch in the base that you can feel with your fingers once you are in the dark. Your film drops inside the other cylinder which has a small slit which you can feed the film out of and it naturally heads perfectly square to the entry point of the reel. With the 35mm it really is trivial, once the film is threaded past that initial point you can literally just hold onto the reel only and the contraption holds everything else in perfect places to just load the reel with the usual action.
Having lost the film off the spool to try and use the sticky taped end to thread with I was in a difficult situation to try and use the easyloader to help me with this medium format film. Stupidly i tried just putting the film in the cylinder without it being on the film spool, all this did was let the film expand inside the cylinder and get quite stuck inside it, I had to horribly scrape it as i pulled it out of there.
Getting desperate (and hot and sticky on the arms through the changing bags sleeves I decided this was my only hope.. the patterson reel was so hard that I think i'd spent at least 10 minutes trying to thread the film onto the reel the wrong way!!!!!!
I decided to try and thread the film back onto the reel leaving the taped end out last, to do this i had to fumble and find the paper and re-thread it onto the film spool roll it on some and then force the film and paper back together and wrap it all up.. wasn't easy but eventually had success and had it all back together, not exactly tightly or neatly but small enough to fit inside the easyloaders cylinder..
Thinking this would be it now i trudged on with the aid of the easyloader and tried to load the thing.
I just couldn't do it!
By this point i had put my hands all over the negatives, left them all over the changing bag as i'd manipulated different things trying to suss it out. I think i'd made the reel and the film a little damp, it certainly started to feel more tacky.
40 minutes had gone, i was considering admitting defeat, but then i had one last brain wave. The reel that i'd had so little problems with was outside in the garage.. the tank itself was not suitable for medium format but i just hoped and hoped that perhaps the reel itself would adjust to suit MF. (I think i'd actually confirmed this when i was told earlier how the reels come apart with a clockwise twist, but in desperation and weeks later I'd forgotten whether it would do or not) I pulled my hands out, with icky feelings to how hot they'd gotten in the sleeves of the bag and went and got the developing tank. Thankfully it did adjust and i did so into MF mode.
The last stretch and with the help of family I covered myself and my changing bag with a blanket in a dark room and slowly opened the bag slightly to take out the patterson reel, and put in this other one. All sealed up i had another go.
Welcomed by the familiar and easy to feel enlarged tabs of this reel I felt confident it would work.. you are guaranteed that the film is going to be perfectly flat and square for the first couple of inches thanks to this larger tab, crucially its trivial to feel where the entrance is and you can also put your fingers underneath it to support the film as it comes off the tabs and through the bearings in a way that you simply cannot do with the patterson reel. With all these lovely features i had a go with the stubborn -and by this time as tired as i was- film.. sadly my fears were confirmed, it wasn't working as it should... i tried and tried... and thankfully what felt like an eternity but what was probably only 3-4 serious attempts in 2-3 minutes, the reel was feeding itself and we were in. I wasn't sure it was 100% cleanly threading but it was going on.
A couple of minutes later it was fully on and light tight inside the developing tank.
Dammit i've written far too much on this.. I think i just wanted to vent the wrath that went on in my head for those 40 minutes of struggling.
The short version for me at least is. I'm never going to develop any film using patterson reels ever again!!!!!!!!! sure the tanks look good, the reels seem fine but NOT having the oversized tab is just a killer in my book. Why struggle as i blatantly did feeling for the tiniest thing and even then once threading began getting kinked straight away and coming off the rails. I really hope they improve their reels up to this standard as everything else about them is great.
For now i guess i'm on the look out for more of the better reels so I'll know what to buy next.
As i said developing went well and though i was expecting to pull out the washed/rinsed negs and see a bundle of scratches and marks where i'd had to man handle the whole film for such a long time I was absolutely blown away to see that with the naked eye the negatives all looked in pretty decent condition. There is a bit of scratching at the business end of the film where i'd concentrated most grippings and pushings as attempting to just start the reel threading but other than that the rest looks ok!!!!!
I've saved the stop and fixer, I've noticed a few floating pieces of black inside them.. is this normal.. I'm guessing its the film stuff where the big scrapes are, as the pieces look too big for normal variations of tone in an actual picture.. is it normal to see these things floating in there? is it crucial that I drain and seperate these out from these solutions before reusing them on the next film, or wont they hurt any future stopping and fixing that i do? Finally just for convenience whats the rough lifetime of made up stop and fixer, 120 and 35mm is roughly the same area of film so roughly how many rolls of film can i expect to be able to put through before they're exhausted. The stop has an indicator in it i think so it should be fairly obvious?? Also regardless of number of films put through i'm guessing they're exhausted after say 3 months or so of just being mixed?
Other than that its all good.. negs should be dry soon and i'll cut them and put them into sleeves, and bring them up for a good scanning
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Sorry to rant, hopefully the details can be helpful to someone like myself as i was 2 hours ago before the pain began. I'll be more succint in the future.. well I'll try
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If you've not tried that easyloader i reference I encourage you to give it a go... its really helped me so far and i dont think i'd like to try and do it without it.. it really is like having 3 hands... I think in the future i'll try to avoid the advise of threading the sticky ended part.. I may even put some of my own tape in there ready to stick onto the end as it first comes off the spool.. its just with the easyloader i'd rather not have to try and rethread the film back onto the reel in the future.. of course the alernative if to fire the film back through the camera without exposing (lens cap on in a dark room) to reverse the film neatly on the spools... but i've heard of RF645s breaking with the film winder so I think i'll give that a miss just to give the camera as long a life as i can
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Cheers guys.. its fun now.. it wasn't 20 minutes into 40minutes of changing bag hell!!!!
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