I dun goofed

polyglot · Sep 28, 2013

Well, I thought I was hot shit - about 550 rolls processed with no errors. Until tonight.

Screw you, Kodak, for making your exposed Portra rolls look like tmax rolls when one is tired and not actually reading the text on them

So I ran a big batch of TMY2 in Xtol tonight and was puzzled when it poured out piss-yellow. And then noticed that 2 of the 6 rolls were kind of brown... surely my fixer isn't that bad? No... it was 400VC. And now my fixer looks like Fanta.

At least I got probably-usable B&W images on the film (I expect huuuuuuge printing times with the dark brown base) and they weren't from a customer's shoot. Not as bad as putting B&W into C41 or the fixer in first.

hoffy · Sep 28, 2013

Ya Wally!

I'm still yet to know if I dun goofed as well, as my carry on bag went through the big xray machine @ customs in Kota Kinabalo...

Vonder · Sep 28, 2013

Three things ruin the plans and hopes of men; inattention to detail, overconfidence, and ignorance. Oh, and electrical outtages, they suck too.

Sad to hear of your mishap, but you are perfectly correct that it could have been worse. Note the guy (me) who shot his son't birthday pics on C-41 film and used blix as the developer.

KenS · Sep 28, 2013

He (or she) who never screws up... or claims never to have made a mistake, either lies through their teeth or never actually does anything.

Ken

Pioneer · Sep 28, 2013

Not positive but you may need to print those negs on color paper, even though they will still turn out black & white. I know that is how I have to print my Kodak BW400CN. Tried to print on b&w paper but could never get the adjustments right on my Beseler color head to filter out the base so I was never really happy with them.

ulysses · Sep 28, 2013

Try bleaching and developing in C-41?

Truzi · Sep 28, 2013

Still, yours will probably come out better than my B&W when I do them right

Our school offered a photography class when I was in the eight grade. A few years later I had some B&W film left, and wasn't thinking when I gave it to my father to use for my brother's confirmation. Neither my father nor I (nor my friend who actually took the pictures) read the cartridges. We took it to the local mini-lab, which also did not read the cartridges - so there was a string of 4 or 5 people who all assumed it was color film.
The shop owner was angry, claiming it messed up his color chemistry. The pictures came out, though contrast was very off, and our family didn't want B&W for this. At least we have pictures of the event.

ic-racer · Sep 28, 2013

polyglot said:
At least I got probably-usable B&W images on the film (I expect huuuuuuge printing times with the dark brown base) and they weren't from a customer's shoot. Not as bad as putting B&W into C41 or the fixer in first.

I did that on purpose last week. I have some old ISO 100 color negative film and wanted to see if it would be worthwhile to develop it with B&W developer. I exposed some control strips and ran the film through T-max developer. It is probably not worth it to post the results, but it is looks un-usable. Without actually plotting it out, the '0.1-above base' step looks like it falls around ISO 6 and the base density is around 2.0.

mauro35 · Sep 28, 2013

Truzi said:
Still, yours will probably come out better than my B&W when I do them right

Our school offered a photography class when I was in the eight grade. A few years later I had some B&W film left, and wasn't thinking when I gave it to my father to use for my brother's confirmation. Neither my father nor I (nor my friend who actually took the pictures) read the cartridges. We took it to the local mini-lab, which also did not read the cartridges - so there was a string of 4 or 5 people who all assumed it was color film.
The shop owner was angry, claiming it messed up his color chemistry. The pictures came out, though contrast was very off, and our family didn't want B&W for this. At least we have pictures of the event.

Did I understand correctly you made them process B&W negs in C41 chemistry? How did any image come out? Isn't the bleach supposed to clear all the silver from the film?

Truzi · Sep 28, 2013

Well, we didn't twist their arms, lol. We're not sure when and if they caught it, but we did get some fairly bad B&W pictures. I'd have to dig them out to refresh my memory, as this was some time ago, but there were some images that survived.

mauro35 · Sep 28, 2013

Truzi said:
Well, we didn't twist their arms, lol. We're not sure when and if they caught it, but we did get some fairly bad B&W pictures. I'd have to dig them out to refresh my memory, as this was some time ago, but there were some images that survived.

Maybe they soon realized something was weird and stopped the bleaching earlier...just curiosity

nickrapak · Sep 28, 2013

There's actually a Kodak Tech Pub about this exact situation:

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/products/pdf/ae31.pdf

Apparently, you can either remove some of the orange stain by bleaching, or you can re-process them to try and get color images.

joshua029 · Sep 28, 2013

hoffy said:
Ya Wally!

I'm still yet to know if I dun goofed as well, as my carry on bag went through the big xray machine @ customs in Kota Kinabalo...

I have actually been through this recently, like last week recently. I just processed the film and it all turned out fine for me. So hopefully you'll not have any problems either. I was dragging around 7 rolls of T100 for me 2 week long vacation.

hoffy · Sep 28, 2013

joshua029 said:
I have actually been through this recently, like last week recently. I just processed the film and it all turned out fine for me. So hopefully you'll not have any problems either. I was dragging around 7 rolls of T100 for me 2 week long vacation.

Cheers for that. I have my fingers crossed! I still have a few locations to go, so I will be asking for hand inspections where I can!

Sorry for the hijack William. At least there is some good info posted. Are you going to try and recover, as per the PDF?

polyglot · Sep 29, 2013

thanks nickrapak, I'd totally forgotten about that redevelopment PDF! I have plenty of spare E6 bleach from an old kit where the CD went bad, so I'll probably give that a go. Just as well I read your response before cutting the strips up!

The images are just snapshots though - I'm more bummed that I screwed up than about the possible loss of 24 frames.

tnabbott · Oct 1, 2013

I recently came back from a trip to Hawai'i and ran fixer through my 6 rolls of C41 first. It was the first time for me too. My mistake: I decided the pics were so important that I used new fixer, then mixed up the clear soup for presoak water.

Lowly · Oct 1, 2013

polyglot said:
The images are just snapshots though - I'm more bummed that I screwed up than about the possible loss of 24 frames.

I seem to goof everytime I go into the darkroom!

Last night I developed five rolls of B&W and some frames have some strange marks on them - could be contamination on the reels from the E6 processing. Lesson learnt.

And talking about E6. I developed it for the first time on the weekend - first six rolls perfect. Then I went to reuse the chemicals for 120 film, and noticed the heater of my Jobo CPP2 not working. Pressed the thermal overload switch and nothing. So I thought to myself "the water bath should remain fairly stable, shouldn't it?". So I filled the bath with hot water and started the next batch with four 120 films. Then I noticed the temp dropping from 38C to 37C. Needless to say the next 20 minutes were most frantic - adding hot water, draining water from the bath, adding chemicals, draining chemicals, all the while seeing the temperature going from 36C to 41C. Finally pulled out the film and it was dark and milky. I walked away and cursed the machine. The next morning I came back and found the film perfect - the dark frames were there because my remote flash hadn't gone off. So to all people thinking of processing E6 at home - do it, if I can so can you!

Then there was the time I put the drum in the Jobo, walked away and didn't notice it sitting there not rotating...

GRHazelton · Oct 2, 2013

One of my earliest screwups!

Maybe we need a thread for dumb goofs! Here's just one of mine.

Many years ago I was new to souping my own negs, and noticed that hypo smelled like pickle juice. So I didn't label the developer or the hypo and used my nose to identify the hypo. Identical storage bottles. You can see where this is going! So I grabbed a bottle and measured out my developer and poured it into the daylight tank, banged it, and started to agitate... and notice a faint pickle smell through my head cold. Yep! Good, fresh hypo, too. Cleared that film in seconds!

Ever since I've been careful to label everything. I haven't made that error since, but there are always lots and lots of others.

septim · Oct 3, 2013

My biggest dumb goof to date (and there will be more, there will always be more) was when I didn't reset my camera settings after playing around with my camera and so I just assumed that my camera was set to ASA400, well you can see where I am going with this, my camera was actually set to ASA3200 (somehow the light meter readings didn't seem weird to me - go figure) and so I under-exposed an entire roll of Kodak Max Versatility (No great loss) by 3 (if my maths is correct) stops. I still have those negatives somewhere, perhaps one of these days I will try doing something with them. This film was also developed in ID-11, though that was actually on purpose to see what happened, not an accident like in the OP.

Well, actually there has been one bigger dumb goof but I still haven't figured out what actually happened there...

I dun goofed

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