Portsmouth Night photo (Dev error)

I see why you say slack tide. Shots around the Washington state or Canadian Gulf islands would need the same for a glassy reflection. Seems quite worth doing.

Yes. The water rushes in an out with whirlpools and impressive eddies. Sometimes small vessels cannot make way against the current. My cabin is about 15 feet from the water and looks straight out at it. Sounds great until you realise that big vessels are moving past my window at all hours of the day and night. I am an expert in the safety announcements broadcast as ships leave harbour! The noise of the water used to keep me awake but now I don't really notice. A colleague lent me his precious Leica, pre-war, table top tripod for this shot. I placed it on a wall and used the self timer to avoid shake from pressing the shutter as I did not have a cable release. It is a pity that I made a stupid mistake with the dev but I will just try again......and again. I am usually very bored in the evenings as where I stay is very isolated but within sight of civilisation. If I could only walk on water......

I like the image and I am wondering how you figured that the line across the sky had something to do with your process. When I look at the lights, you might benefit from using Pyro PMK, especially with 35 mm, as the edges of luminous areas stay crisp.

We better hope you stay isolated - or we'll really miss the fine images. 'Wish it were easy to spend a day or so exposing film & trading notes & stories.

@ Peter. The line is across every photo on the roll. I used 600ml of dev instead of 900ml. This was the top reel in a stack of 3. I realised my mistake as I was pouring in the dev but my response to the mistake was also silly. Instead of starting agitation immediately I mixed up another 300ml. This took maybe 40 seconds (out of 10 minutes dev time). If I had just increased the agitation with the 600ml maybe I would have got away with it but I knew the 2 lower films would be ok but might be ruined by excessive agitation.
I have heard of pyrogallol but I am put off by toxicity.

@ HiHo. Yes that would be nice. We need a teleport!

Aside from not using enough developer, the fill times for big tanks can cause evenness problems too. One way to avoid that is to pre-fill the tank and start the developing in the dark.

This doesn't look anything like Portsmouth New Hampshire, US

@ bdial yes that sounds like an interesting idea. It does take a while to fill a bigger tank and I worry that this may be a problem with short development times. In such circumstances, the fill time could be a significant percentage of the development time. It doesn't look anything like Portsmouth did either; it was once a historic town but more or less flattened by the Luftwaffe.

@Peter Rockstroh01 I have since repeated this photo with Ilford Delta 400 instead of FP4+ but the same dev. No halo effect this time.

I've never used Delta. Is that also a T-grain film ? I remember T-max producing crisp images with great value separation, but if you missed the exact development conditions, the film was not forgiving.

@ Peter. Yes Delta is T-grain. I like it personally.