Starting off the New Year with a whimper, I have run into a series of minor ball’s ups. Shooting a lot with the 35mm Leica; I noticed my negatives are a bit shit and hardly printable to a good standard. The first issue is somewhat annoying. To load the Leica, you need to pull a fair length of film out of the cassette. It appears that doing this is causing a light leak into the cassette. It penetrates up to 3 layers of the wound-up spool, fucking up about the first 3 exposures. Now before I blame Ilford HP5 and get on the phone to complain, Ill hold back and do some further experiments.
The next issue was my negatives base fog had been getting worse, shadow details getting lost in a purple’y haze. Recently I noticed some weird ‘hint of a tint’ yellows in my negatives. It appears my Fixer has expired! I cannot really blame anybody but myself here, it does have a shelf life. Reading the forums most people seem to get about 20 billion rolls of film with some fixer they’ve had for 30 years, whilst others say it goes off after about a week once mixed. It appears I am one of the unlucky ones. In future I’m sticking to Ilford Rapid Fixer, not getting the cheaper stuff. If you’re an occasional user, it’s probably best to by two 500ml bottles rather than a large bottle as air in the container is bad for shelf life.
Finally, after Kodak HC110 being out of stock for months, I finally got a new bottle of it. I appear to of lost a stop of speed. I’m not reading too much into this as I’m still refining my development process. It’s possible that my first film tests done months ago where inaccurate or maybe I have changed too many variables over time or something mechanical/electrics gone awry. For reasons unknown, my Ilford HP5+ is now only ISO 200 with HC110. Just to pile on a little more misery, the 35mm film did take about 6mins to develop, now is 7 – 7mins 30.
All those issues combined have totally knacked my images up. But onwards and upwards! I aim to do a few little tests over the coming months. I might buy film direct from Ilford just to put my mind at rest that I’m not buying a dodgy batch of HP5+. I will also try developing in distilled water, easier said than done as I’ll need to heat it via a water bath to 20c. I also must remember to test film more.
