2021-02-08-0003

Wow, that's grainy for Pan F. Reticulated? Or just heavily cropped?

grainy. I believe it is pretty underexposed too. This is the first roll of Pan F I have ever shot and the first one I developed. I was surprised by the grain too.

It doesn't look bad, just very surprising for a film that's usually pretty fine grained. I used to use HC-110 all the time, dilutions E, F, G, and H. That's why I asked about reticulation. Hot dev/fix into cold wash or vice versa could do it.

It does have that 'little worms' look of reticulation. Much denser than the large grain in the old 2475 recording film.

That aside, I like the few whitecaps which set of the distance over the water.

thanks Donald and Graham. It looks like there is a bug in my development process. Reticulation may not be as much of a problem with the films I usually develop (Delta 400, TMax 400, and HP 5+) but it seems that Pan F+ warrants a more careful approach to water temperatures. I've let stop bath go between 67- 71 degrees but the fix is "room temperature". While I keep my house heated to 70 degrees, it may be that the darkroom is cooler. The wash is the most obvious suspect. I start the wash at what seems to be 68 degrees but the hot water tap provides variable pressure. Invariably, the wash is colder than I want by the end of the wash.

Yeah, I just checked. The wash water comes out of the tap with the hot water + cold water set to give me 68 degrees but the hot water is all over the map. Usually gets colder. Seems to drop about 10 degrees from when I measure before dropping the film into the Hurricane washer. Fixer was spot on at 68 degrees as is the stop

Colder than 68F/20C isn't usually a problem -- gelatin softens more as it gets warmer. If you had a bath above 75F/24C I'd be concerned, but the other thing that could cause this is a sharp swing in pH. Gelatin swells in alkaline, shrinks in acid, so if your stop bath is stronger than it needs to be, you could be getting this there.

Probably a combination of factors - chemistry and temperature change. I always try to keep my first wash cycles and chemistry at the same temperature. Slow drops in wash temperature after that is fine. The first time this happened to me, I tried to replicate it, and failed!

Donald is on to something with stop acidity. I haven't been very careful about stop bath concentration. I've got a weird system where I match the color of the stop with a standard amount of yellow by eyeballing the prepared solution ("Is it yellow enough?") Perhaps I should revisit the stop bath thread. Or better yet, Donald should contribute the pH observations in that most long running thread.

All I do is mix my Kodak Indicator Stop according to the bottle label. When that runs out, I'll be mixing 75% acetic acid down to 2% and adding a few drops of bromocresol purple indicator.

Your pH for simple stop bath doesn't change as long as it's only acetic acid above some concentration threshold -- "solution pH" is a constant for most soluble compounds. Developer pH, on the other hand, does vary from one to another due to buffering systems. Fixers can also have varying pH. Using acid stop with alkaline fixer is (from my reading) usually a bad idea, but most common fixers are acidic.