Green blobs on negatives; any hope?

[ntenny]

I've just gotten a roll of Superia 400 back from the developer (a minilab at a place where I've historically had good luck with the results---I don't shoot enough colour to justify doing my own). I had them develop only and return the roll uncut, for reasons not germane to this discussion, and when I got the roll home, I discovered that there were several substantial areas of blobby green colour on the negatives.

I can't see any particular pattern to how and where the green appears; it doesn't follow frame lines, has no particular consistent shape, and seems to overlay rather than replace the image---I can still see the actual image, but stained green. The edges of the discolouration are distinct in some places, and in others it fades away with no clear boundary. The total affected area is maybe 10-20% of the roll.

The store's processor is something called an AKS 19 FP, sold by the somewhat weirdly named "KIS Photo-Me Group", and as I say I've gotten perfectly good results from them in the past. The guy who did the processing is off until the weekend, when I'll go back in and talk to him about what happened, but in the meantime I'd like to solicit APUG's wisdom. Is there a standard cause for this sort of thing, and is there any hope for recovering the affected frames? Bleach and redevelop, or something like that?

The images aren't particularly critical, fortunately---there are a couple of pictures of my son that I'd like to recover, but it was just a "messing around" roll.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

-NT

 

[Sirius Glass]

Maybe PE or others can be more helpful, but your first line of approach would be to talk to the processing people at the store.

Steve

 

[Ian Grant]

Sounds like some kind of contamination.

KIS are a medium sized manufacturer of processing equipment, problems with colour processing are usually down to poor maintenance and operator errors.

Ian

 

[bob100684]

re bleach and fix.

 

[ntenny]

Wow, thanks for the quick wave of responses, everyone.

I'll talk to the processing guy (the lab supervisor is the one who ran this roll, and from my past interactions with him I think he's a reasonable guy who actually gives a damn about film processing) when he's back at work. Mainly, I'm trying to find out if there's anything I can expect him to *do* about it, or if I'm just registering a concern and maybe getting a free roll of film or something.

Someone suggested redoing the bleach-and-fix step. Is that something I can expect the minilab to be able to do, or am I on my own?

Thanks

-NT

 

[archphoto]

There are 2 things here: bad processing and bad wash, maybe dirty rollers.

AFTER you have spoken to the guy from the lab you can roll this film in a reel, let it soak for a minute and apply a luke-warm shower to it and see if the green stuff disapears.
If it is just on the film carrier you can try a wet cotton swab under running water.

Peter

 

[Photo Engineer]

If you do anything that rewets the film, remember that the last step must be to give it an authorized Final Rinse or it will have image stability problems.

Otherwise, I could not hope to guess at this point. The dyes will shift color with extremes in pH, but if this were the case, they may be ruined. IDK. Can you post a scan?

PE

 

[bob100684]

Wow, thanks for the quick wave of responses, everyone.

I'll talk to the processing guy (the lab supervisor is the one who ran this roll, and from my past interactions with him I think he's a reasonable guy who actually gives a damn about film processing) when he's back at work. Mainly, I'm trying to find out if there's anything I can expect him to *do* about it, or if I'm just registering a concern and maybe getting a free roll of film or something.

Someone suggested redoing the bleach-and-fix step. Is that something I can expect the minilab to be able to do, or am I on my own?

Thanks

-NT

If the guy knows how to trick the equipment, then yes. At least on fuji equipment, you can trick the lid sensor of the film processor and put the film attached to a leader card back into any chemical instead of starting at the developer. He may or may not know how to do this, and this may or may not be possible with KIS equipment.

 

[ntenny]

Here's one of the more dramatically affected frames. In this one the discoloration spans the whole height of the frame; in some others it's only at the bottom. It spills across into the rebate and all the way to the edge of the film---unfortunately I already cropped the scans.

Look like anything?

Thanks

-NT

 

[Sirius Glass]

What kind of camera? If it is a Hasselblad, based on this one photo I would suspect a problem with light seals.

Steve

 

[bob100684]

fogging. Probably time to replace the seals on your camera.

 

[ntenny]

fogging. Probably time to replace the seals on your camera.

Hmm, you might be right. I'd thought the positioning on the roll was just random, but now that I look at it it *could* be a sudden but intermittent light leak. I'll put another roll through tomorrow and see if I can reproduce the problem.

-NT

 

[Photo Engineer]

Looks like fog to me, but not from the camera. If it were, the fog patches could not be at right angles the way they appear to be. At least that is my working opinion right now.

PE

 

[ntenny]

Well, the test roll says it isn't the camera; I got a complete roll of clean, unfogged frames. I'll talk to the guy at the lab tomorrow and see what he says, but it looks as if the fogging (or whatever) must have happened in processing rather than in camera.

For them as asked, by the way, it's a Wirgin 35mm stereo camera from the 1950s, basically two Edixas stuck together. As far as I can tell, it doesn't have foam light seals like modern SLRs, so much as light traps created by overlapping metal layers. I think it would be quite flattered if it were aware that someone mistook it for a Hasselblad.

-NT

 

[Sirius Glass]

The good news is that it is not your camera and that it was not a critical roll of film.

The bad news is that it happened to you.

May things only improve for you.

Steve

 

[ntenny]

Well, I spoke too soon; on closer examination of the test roll I did find similar, but very minimal, fogging in a couple of places. So I worked out where on the camera the light leak would have to be, took the camera out in bright sunny conditions today, and made sure to fiddle around with pressure from different directions on that area---and lo and behold, the resulting roll exhibits substantial chunks of fog, though nothing nearly as drastic as the colour roll that started this thread.

So I've got an inconsistent light leak, and I'm off to figure out what to do about it. I guess a good first effort would be to just put electrical tape over the section I think is leaking, after loading the camera, and verify that that actually does fix it.

Thanks again for all the analyses and suggestions.

-NT