Dense, dull negatives - overdevelopment, overexposure, or something else?

Hello everyone.
I'm currently on holiday and just started developing some of the pictures I took. However, when I took the first roll out of my Paterson tank I was surprised to see that my negatives were very dark - or at least far darker than I'm used to. There were also some dark marks along the edges of the film, mainly at the start of the roll. After the negatives dried, I took a picture of each frame on a white screen with a digital camera+50mm lens to get a closer look at them. This was admittedly quite a poor scanning setup but it was enough for me to invert the negatives in photoshop and see that they are very dull and bright. Here's some information about my developing setup in case it helps.
Since I'm abroad I couldn't buy my chemicals from where I usually buy them, so I purchased them on a site that is similar to eBay. I bought a litre of Ilford ID 11, which I mixed into its stock form and then diluted 1+1 to develop my film. I mixed a litre of Ilford's stop bath as well, which I used in its stock form. As for the fix, I accidently mixed it at the wrong dilution thinking it was the stop. I added 50ml of fixer concentrate to 950ml of water, and a little while later, when I realised my mistake, added 200ml more of the concentrate and 50ml of water.
I then developed my film (HP5+) in the working solution of the developer at around 20-22C for 13 minutes, stopped the development at around 22C for 30 seconds, and then fixed the film for 5 minutes at around 22C. I washed the film in 18-24C running tap water for 30 minutes, and then did a final wash in demineralised water for a another few minutes.
As for my metering, I used the built in meter of my Minolta SRT101 to meter all of the pictures. I compared it to a small shoe mount light meter and my digital camera's light meter and they all seemed to be within one or two stops of each other. It particularly complicated scenes they could differ by as much as three stops though.
I should also mention that the film went through two different X-Rays on the way here if that makes a difference.
I've attached some images below of the negatives and the scans of the negatives. If anyone can provide some insight into what went wrong I would really appreciate it.

Xray exposure maybe could "preflash" your film and make it a bit less contrasty but also prone to overexposure. Your developing sounds fine. The negatives look totally printable - maybe at a boosted contrast. They don't look overdeveloped. A scanner may have trouble with them but an enlarger wouldn't. Well, a couple just look like black rectangles, but I have no idea what they're supposed to be.

An SRT101 needs a proper battery and also has a string-on-a-spring connected to the aperture ring that may or may not be accurately reporting the actual aperture to the meter.

The negatives look fine to me too. There are a few with dense cloudy skies or other expanses of bright, not-well-defined areas. Those conditions, i.e., low-contrast bright clouds, etc., will result in dense-looking negatives and you may not like the result without a lot of working with the contrast, but that's just the nature of the lighting. The architectural details and the foliage, etc., look just fine and definitely printable. Your down-and-dirty camera scans could probably be made to look much better with a bit of work. Plus, remember, most cameras do a bit of image "adjustment" on their own.

Best,

Doremus

Again, negs look fine.

You need to make prints - "Get thee to an Enlarger" Gospel according to Biff XX:Y

I'll be the contrarian here: they look both over-exposed by maybe 1 stop and over-developed to me. The shot of the bridge in particular looks overexposed to me.

I'd start by shooting 5 frames of the same scene with the same lighting on 35mm and clipping it out of the camera. Shoot at -2 -1 0 +1 +2 stops. Develop as you do now. If you find that you get better results with a non-0 exposure, then that's good information. You can either adjust development or exposure at that point. I would normally suggest shooting at 0 and adjusting development.

You also say you developed at "20-2C". There is a big difference between the times you need for those two temperatures. And those times are just a starting point. If you were to skip my suggestion above (you are on holiday, already have rolls) and just develop another roll, then I'd back down to 11 mins without changing exposure and see what you get. If that gets closer, try adjusting until you are happy with that.

relistan said:

I'll be the contrarian here: they look both over-exposed by maybe 1 stop and over-developed to me. The shot of the bridge in particular looks overexposed to me.

I'd start by shooting 5 frames of the same scene with the same lighting on 35mm and clipping it out of the camera. Shoot at -2 -1 0 +1 +2 stops. Develop as you do now. If you find that you get better results with a non-0 exposure, then that's good information. You can either adjust development or exposure at that point. I would normally suggest shooting at 0 and adjusting development.

You also say you developed at "20-2C". There is a big difference between the times you need for those two temperatures. And those times are just a starting point. If you were to skip my suggestion above (you are on holiday, already have rolls) and just develop another roll, then I'd back down to 11 mins without changing exposure and see what you get. If that gets closer, try adjusting until you are happy with that.

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+1

Exposed like that, I would have cut the development time to 11 minutes (from 13 min). The shadows would look good and the hightlights and midtones not as dense.

relistan said:

they look both over-exposed by maybe 1 stop and over-developed to me

Click to expand...

Yes, I agree. Although I'd consider the overexposure not problematic (a bit of extra shadow detail often doesn't hurt) and the overdevelopment won't be all that much of an issue either on most shots. Maybe cut back on the development a little as @JPD says.

Smokwawelski said:

far darker than I'm used to

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So maybe the problem is not so much with this set of negatives, but the earlier ones were a little on the thin side

I think as long as highlight detail is well separated, and there is no blocking up in them, I would say you are where you want to be, unless you can get more density. The greater the dynamic (density) range the negatives have, the better separation of values (tones), especially neighboring ones, whose difference in tonal value is slight. I once had a roll of under developed film, of portraits, whose subject was wearing a green shirt with blue stripes, well away from shadows or highlights. You could not see the stripes against the shirt background color because of insufficient development. The straight portion of the exposure/density curve (maybe zones 4-7) is the area of best local tonal separation. The longer this is, the better, in my book. Wet printing or scanning, makes no difference to this principle.