Is my black and white film fading?

[yeknom02]

Apologies if this is a too much of a newbie-style question, but I'm worried.

I developed two rolls of Agfa APX 400 in Rodinal (1+50). I used a Zonalpro stop bath and fixer, then washed the film using the Ilford method (5, 10, and 20 agitations with fresh water). When I pulled the film out of the reels and hung them up to dry, they looked stunning! The darks were dark and the lights were light - a lot of contrast! I squeegeed it and let it hang in my shower all day to dry and took it down at night. By then, it seemed like the contrast had died - like the silver had faded!

I'm not sure if it's just a figment of my imagination. I did test the fixer with an Arista Hypo check before fixing, and it passed that test. My question is, am I seeing things, or is this a real effect that I'm seeing on my film? If so, is it just due to the film drying? If it's a problem in my development process, how do I prevent it in the future?

Note: unfortunately, some of the scans from this film are not available, since I just moved and am having to wait to get the Internet hooked up. Hopefully I can show an example soon.

 

[Q.G.]

Try a non-destructive, quick, easy and cheap test, and wet a bit of the film again.

 

[clayne]

They'll always look better wet. APX is normally low contrast and you're better off this way anyways. Not an issue.

 

[Ian Grant]

Film's quite robust and even over fixing, using heavily over used fixer is unlikely to cause fading problems, it's a dry down effect. Wet film also makes thefilm base more transparent and the shadow areas.

Ian

 

[wclark5179]

I find film on the emulsion side looks quite different dry than wet. The dry emulsion side looks rather dull. Kind of like me! Smiles!

 

[kevs]

Hi, yeknom02, if your film has a milky white look to it (possibly patchy), it's under-fixed. If so, you can re-immerse it into fresh fixer until the white disappears plus a few minutes, rewash and dry as normal. It's easy to miss this whilst the film is wet, but it's more obvious when film is dry.

If this isn't the case, then your film will be fine. As the other posters have said, film looks nice and sparkling when wet, but it gets dull when it dries. This is called 'dry-down'; if you make prints on fibre-based papers you'll soon become familiar with it.

Good luck,
kevs.