Damaged 4x5 Negatives

It seems that at some point your sheets stick together and cause the pattern seen at the attachments. Try a single negative in the tray. The place where the negatives touch have lower density at the negatives. That means underdevelopment, compared to adjacent (uncovered) areas.

 

That actually looks like a light leak to me. I say that because one can clearly see the outline of a film sheet in your second example. The line is sharp, the corner looks to be exactly 90 degrees. So I'm thinking that your darkroom maybe isn't as dark as it should be.

Another possibility is that it's a developer take up issue -- that one sheet is sticking to another and delaying the initial take up of developer where the two are stuck together. But if that were the case I'd expect the line of demarcation to be less sharp and more diffuse. If you are doing the water bath and then picking up the entire stack and transferring to the developer as a block this could happen. The cure of course is to transfer the sheets one at a time being sure to fully immerse each sheet in the developer before moving the next sheet.

To that end I'm impressed you can do 15 sheets at a time and get any decent results at all. Most I could do was six, and then I couldn't figure out how to eliminate the occasional scratched corner. I cured my film development problem(s) by moving to a Jobo 3010 tank. Unfortunately I don't know how to cure the problem you are having.

Finally, I'm a little concerned by the very short development time. You might want to try moving to dilution H (aka "twice B") and more or less doubling development time to go with it. Anything below about five minutes often leads to some level of uneven development. The increased development time might be sufficient to even out what you are seeing if indeed it's a development issue.

 

The sheets are sticking together, and you are not shuffling them. Don't throw the whole pile in at once, and shuffle through them as the technique calls for, and that problem will end. Also, 15 sheets with a 3:15 development time is a big problem. That is too much to handle in 3:15. Try half as many sheets with a longer time by increasing dilution of the developer. You need enough time to shuffle through all the sheets in the tray at least a few times. You also need to make sure that your amount of working solution contains enough developer activity for one roll of 135 or 120 film for every four sheets you are processing. You need 3 mL of syrup per roll minimum in my experience, and 6 mL is actually the minimum stated by Kodak. So, for 15 sheets (let's just call it 16), you need 12 mL total syrup (24 if going by what Kodak sez). At dilution B, you are using a 1:31 ratio of syrup to water, so multiply the minimum amount of syrup by 32. That means that you need 384 mL of working solution (768 according to Kodak) to do 16 sheets.

 

Not a light leak Bruce, I've seen similar with too many prints in a tray, not exactly sticking but not sliding freely.

It's not the way to process negatives, get yourself a dev tank Robert.

Ian

 

when you process a pile at once ( i sometimes process 25-35 4x5 sheets at once )
you have to be very careful ...
in the pre-soak bath. you need to put each sheet in 1 a time
and then go through the bath and separate them all ... they will stick together badly ...
once they are unstuck + soaked ....
put into the developer ... count them again and shuffle them ...
same for the stop and fix ...

i agree that your development time is kind of short ... a lot of companies do not recommend
any sort of development less than 4 mins or so because it tends to be uneven ... and rocking a pile
of negatives in a tray seems like asking for trouble.


nice portraits by the way!

john

 

What film is this?

I agree with all of the above.

Note that the edge of a piece of sheet film is quite sharp and stuff... it can easily scratch the other negs. So the shuffling technique always has the risk of scratching if you aren't very careful. As you noted, pre-wetting the negs individually is very important or they will stick and then you have a big mess.

I recommend a combiplan. In fact, just get two- then you can just transfer the holder from one vat to the next. I also like to do a few complete lifts (out of the developer) a few times during development, particularly at the beginning, and the combi makes that very easy.

 

Back in the “good ole days” when I worked as a graphic arts cameraman we would hand develop in a tray our 16x20 color separation masks and negatives , This was before the days of film processors.( they had ‘em but they were not very reliable) .At that we would only handle 4 sheets of film at once each entering the tray at a different time so all ended up developed at the same time Even so we used one gallon or more of developer in a tray slightly larger than 16x20 and a wet suit would have come in handy when interleafing and agitating I had considerable experience handling film in a tray and would never consider doing 15 sheets of anything at ones time!.

 

Why not get yourself a tank where you can process 6 negatives at one time ????
I have used one for the past 25 odd years or so and never had these problems.......

Peter

 

hi robert

daylight tanks and rotary processors
work very well, if down the road you decide not to "shuffle"

john

 

This is why I hate tray processing. My suggestion is that you pick up a Beseler drum, and use that (or taco dev in a tank)

 

With that sort of number of negs, one possibility is to use a 1 gallon deep tank and 4 up hangers. Like the narrow tank here:
www.adorama.com/images/Product/AY8114.jpg

The hangers look like this www.bhphotovideo.com/images/images345x345/65390.jpg and can be found used.

Best,

C