How nuts are you about temperature?

I like my temperature to be...

  • Spot on

    Votes: 34 36.6%

  • Close enough, and I adjust the time

    Votes: 28 30.1%

  • Close enough, no adjustment

    Votes: 27 29.0%

  • I don't think temperature is that important

    Votes: 3 3.2%

  • I didn't know temperature was important

    Votes: 1 1.1%
  • Total voters
    93

DREW WILEY

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We've all been students and know the mantra. So also respect someone who, even when nearly broke, still managed to make un-compromised prints! Yeah... kids so poor they gotta figure out how to make a single pack of Dektol last six months, but then spend twice as much every morning on a latte. Can't afford a decent thermometer, but have three $200 pair of designer sports shoes laying at the front door. It's all relative. Make your choices. Where there is a will, there's a way. Can't afford cat food for the kitten, or fresh vegetables for the kids, but buy a $90 of Vodka every week - seen it all.

I figure that with 99% of the lemmings all racing toward the same sea of mere web presentation of their shots, or desktop printing, those who seek an alternative these days are apt to be committed, and willing to endure a little boot camp to get into fighting shape. Plus, it's by far the most affordable era for acquiring not only excellent used darkroom gear, but even used pro camera equipment if they're interested in that.
Affording a serious darkroom space, or having a place to build one, is getting more difficult, but many of us learned in some small bathroom or closet with the light blocked off.

And nowadays, old white guys are not the ones who buy fancy cars, but young techies of all stripes, some of them wishing they could afford the time and space for their own darkroom, because they're already damn sick of the slavery of their day job in digital imaging and software! No exaggeration. Hear it all the time, when one of them encounters me on a trail on their day off. They're over their heads in debt too, whether education debt or the sheer cost of housing in a hot financial area, or else the cost of a long commute to and from. It's all relative. At least we despised old geezers already paid off all our debts, and deserve the right to enjoy our darkroom toys. I personally designed and built much of my own equipment- so there's always that option too. One doesn't need to be rich or even hire a plumber to have a really nice darkroom space; but one does need the space itself somewhere.

And yes, I drive a truck nearly 30 years old, and prefer it. I don't want any newfangled thing with a dashboard that looks like an airliner cockpit. Like me, it wears its scars proudly.
 

tokam

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Actually I did it twice, a week ago and a couple of days ago. Was shooting scenes around Sydney Harbour in late afternoon summer sunshine. The sails of the Sydney Opera House are white ceramic tiles.

I develop at ambient room temperature which meant both films were processed at 24 C. Both films were Fomapan 200 processed in D76 1+1. The first film from 4 Jan 2021 was developed for 6.5 minutes and highlights on the Opera house sails were totally blown out. The second film shot 11 Jan 2021 was developed for 5.5 minutes and the same scene retained detail in the highlight areas. The tonal range of the negs was compressed a little but I can recover this in post. Just as I used to switch from grade 2 to grade 3 in my wet printing days. That 1 minute time difference was nearly 15% reduction in dev time. A little bit more than the 10% difference in your case but a 15% change in development time at such short overall dev times will make quite a difference.

Attention to timing is very important during short development times.
 

warden

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tokam said:
I hope that most of us keep notes of how each film is processed. .
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Nope, only when I deviate significantly from my normal routine, normal films, or if I'm trying new chemistry. I did keep careful notes when I was starting out, but I never refer to them so I stopped worrying about it.
 

Sirius Glass

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takilmaboxer said:
Thanks Sirius! You even use pyro! I've always been afraid of it!
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A suggestion: Use Pyro for developing film, but never never drink it and you will be OK.
 

DREW WILEY

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Never put bare fingers into pyro either, or inhale the powder if mixing your own. But if you're more of the Confederate mentality, maybe you miss that kick of moonshine brewed in lead-soldered vats, and with lighter fluid added. I personally prefer living longer, keep plenty of disposable nitrile gloves on hand, and never drink hooch.
 

DREW WILEY

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You're not far from the truth, Michael. It was built in place due to sheer massiveness. I started with a big structural strand beam, and fortunately we had a huge 440V 22 inch diameter blade table saw in the company mill capable of precisely squaring it off. This beam material is engineered to be quite dimensionally stable to begin with, composed of about 25% phenolic resin. But I additionally picked it with penetrating marine epoxy, and then fully laminated it with something impermeable. Nice looking too. Then with a lot of help I got it raised and firmly anchored in place for seismic resistance as well as capable of handling the far higher weight load of the rest of the custom enlarger without anything flexing. I won't bore you with the other endless details. Took me three years to complete, during off-hours of course.
 

MattKing

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Was it supplied by the Ents?
 

radiant

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tokam said:
Attention to timing is very important during short development times.
Click to expand...

Yes that is true. The problem however in your case isn't the temperature, it is the unnecessary short "box speed" development time. Maybe your exposure measurement was correct on these different days you shot the negatives you are comparing, but you cannot rule out the effect of exposure.
 

tokam

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Agreed. I am talking about late afternoon sun, maybe 30 degrees above the horizon with minimal clouds. The scene brightness range would have been very high. Some people would advocate downrating the film and reducing development time to compress the tonal range of a bright scene, i.e. pulling the film. I don't understand how downrating the film would help as it would increase the exposure which would, in turn, lighten the highlights. My other option here was to reduce development to pull the highlights down. As I was processing at 24C ambient I was caught between a rock and a hard place with my development times unless I increased the dilution of D76 and I haven't tried greater dilution than 1+1. Maybe time to experiment next week as this has become my favourite location for test shooting while I check various cameras and lenses that I am preparing to sell.

@warden Because I don't have a tempering batch my ambient temps in Sydney can be anywhere from 18C to 24C throughout the year. Tap water maybe 2 - 6C lower than ambient. I keep multiple half gallon jugs of filtered water in my laundry for film processing use. Refill them with filtered water as last cleanup step after a developing session.

Taking note of processing details time / temp / dilution assists me in establishing my own EI for a film and how to develop in according to the lighting conditions it was shot.

Oops. I just rethought that. Reducing development will also push my shadows down. Next time I'm out in bright conditions I will also adjust exposure. Didn't really want to get into formal Zone System with N + or - processing but it is what it is.
 
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faberryman

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My enlarger column is fabricated from a meteor originating in the Gamma Quadrant.To square it off, I went through seven adamantium saw blades. Fortunately, Abraham Cornelius was running a special when I picked them up. Carter Hall loaned me his anti-gravity dolly so I could move it into place. It is pretty sturdy.
 
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takilmaboxer

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My apologies, Drew. sometimes I blurt inappropriate things I hate my new car, too much computerization, loved my 30 year old cars till they all died. But I love my antique cameras and I watch my developer temperatures. And I have always wondered if pyro contributed to Weston's Parkinsons.
 

Dr. no

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Which store? I wanna look...I don't drive a Lexus and I'm happy to talk to kids. My cars are newer than most of my cameras, but not all of my film.

This thread has diverged significantly and it looks like most of the 0.1° advocates have given up on the rest of us and left. OF COURSE time and temperature are variables that need to be controlled. What range is acceptable to produce results that are negligibly different was the point I was pursuing. Time is relatively easy to control. Temperature is relatively easy to control at the beginning...
 
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cramej

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When one considers all the variables that could possibly affect film development, temp is only one, albeit an easily controllable one.

Do you compensate for your developer stock being 3 days old? 6 months old? How about the chemistry of your tap water? Consistent agitation? Different batch of film? Was the roll stored and transported exactly like previous rolls? How long ago did you expose it - yesterday or 3 months ago?

For me, it's "am I close to 68* across the board?" and "am I getting good results?". If yes, to both, then there probably isn't anything that I would need to change that is actually under my control. I don't have the space or resources to cover all the bases. It's like risk management. You can avoid, mitigate, accept, transfer or reduce your risks. I'm willing to accept that I can't control certain variables of processing so I don't worry about it much.
 

DREW WILEY

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Hi again, faberrman, Why don't you move here six blocks from the Hayward fault, and ten miles from the San Andreas fault, both infamous, and see how well your darkroom and enlargers survive in the next big quake? The side advantage is that my enlargers are exceptionally vibration free during normal usage, with a visible effect in the precision of big prints themselves. So I would have built em strong regardless.
But if you prefer to install yours atop a bouncy hay bale left over from a local banjo festival, have at it. I'd rather feed it to a horse, the banjo too.
 

pentaxuser

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DREW WILEY said:
Can't afford cat food for the kitten, or fresh vegetables for the kids, but buy a $90 of Vodka every week - seen it all.
.
Click to expand...

A near perfect description and yet I could have sworn we have never met As we are in the comical phase of the thread I thought I'd try to contribute

pentaxuser
 

DREW WILEY

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Well, we're in good company. If we think it's fun to tussle over a degree Centigrade here and there, I've been around some serious physicists who do measure such things behind a decimal point and many zeros, but who nonetheless played some of the most outrageous practical jokes on one another I've ever heard of. Hopefully, they won't blow up the world just for fun.
 

Sirius Glass

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The developer is Boolean. It works or it does not work. I test it whenever it has been a while since I used it. If it turns the film back in the usual amount of time it is good. If it does not work or takes longer than usual then replace it. Playing games down rating is just chasing your tail. How much or how little to down rate? If it is questionable dump it and mix up a new batch. Are you going to risk the photographs you spent time taking just to play guessing games?
 

abruzzi

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michael_r said:
Seriously though, a hay bail should dampen vibrations ok.
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way back in the 80's when I was a high school kid, we used to make holograms on a large (10x10ft) sandbox suspended on some kind of rubber. We'd set a laser at one end, pass it through a beam splitter, the route each beam to some kind of diffusion device that took the laser beam and spread it back out. Each beam would illuminate the object we were photographing from a different angle and bounce from the object onto the holographic film. After setting everything up, we'd darken the room, put a card in front of the laser, put the film in place, then wait 10 minutes for all the vibrations to die out before lifting the card for 5 seconds, then replacing it. Your comment made me remember that. It would be fun to try that again.
 

DREW WILEY

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Well, I have baled hay. And I envied a friend whose father was a famous rodeo star with a big barn, with the best hay bale fort I ever saw. But there was a serious penalty to playing in it, because I got terrible hay fever as a child. So Michael - I don't even know the speed of light when passing through a hay bale, because I was too busy sneezing to clock it. Perhaps you could do so with your luminous hands Gralab darkroom timer. Might as well measure the fermemtation temperature inside a decomposing hay bale while your at it, after of course, you take the posterior temperature of a cow in the same barn - no difference, plus or minus eighteen degrees is good enough for most work.

Abruzzi - Tripod ball heads were invented for exactly the purpose you're describing. They wobble all day long.
 

grat

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Drew's discussion of his enlarger reminds me of a teacher I had once, who had previously worked for one of the big oil companies doing surveying. Living in Galveston, he decided to build a beach house that would be able to withstand a hurricane. The house was built on massive pilings sunk 20+ feet into the ground, and anchored with several hundred pounds of cement each. One of the larger hurricanes came through, and while the pilings did in fact survive, the house was never seen again.

The Minoans (also known as the Kefchu, and probably the origin of the Atlantis story) actually built their structures with a mix of stone and wooden beam to allow the buildings to flex during an earthquake. Pity they weren't really ready for the tsunami following the Santorini (Atlantis?) volcanic explosion.

.... totally off the subject, I know, but I think we left the topic some time ago.
 

DREW WILEY

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The most earthquake resistant structures ever built were under the Ming Dynasty, and involved hundreds of thousands of expendable forced laborers, whole army divisions enforcing it. Labor unions and strike delays were no issue; they just decapitated you. The incredible Grand Canal project brought the hardwood logs two thousand miles. It was all floating-joint construction which moved with the quakes without collapsing. Many of those Forbidden City structures are still there; but their Achilles heel was fire. A close friend of mine was featured in a PBS Nova science special where they built a 1/20th scale replica of one of the guard towers (still a pretty big thing even at 1/20th), and then put it in the world's largest earthquake simulator in Japan, kept ramping the power up as far as it would go, equivalent to 11.5 on the Richter scale, and nothing broke or collapsed. I saw the prototype 1/200th scale model of it in his shop. No nails, metal joinery, or glue whatsoever; basically an all-wood Rubics Cube concept instead. But that's not a good strategy for an enlarger support!
 
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takilmaboxer

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I survived a Richter 7.1 in Arcata, California. I ran outside, where I could see actual waves moving across the pavement and light poles waving in the breeze. That night there was a 6.9 aftershock. I could see earthquakes lights to the south near the epicenter and my bed was rocked across the room with me in it. Scary!
 
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