Reticulation

Too Many Cameras · Jul 29, 2018

Is it possible to get reticulation on modern film stocks? I'm working on a YT video about reticulation, but I've never had a film exhibit it. So I read up on the causes and set about to reticulate to film stocks: Lomo Lady Gray and Bergger BRF 400+.

I used very hot water for the pre-rinse, room temperature developer, very cold water for the wash, hot fixer, and then cold water again for the rinse. All I got was slightly more pronounced grain.

So it got me to thinking, are modern films engineered well enough not to reticulate?

Alternately, did I do something wrong that kept the film from reticulating during development?

Bill Burk · Jul 30, 2018

I’ve never had it happen to me. Maybe you can try some of Nodda Duma’s dry plates...

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jul 30, 2018

I remember someone comparing reticulation with Yeti - everybody likes to about it but not many have seen it.

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jul 30, 2018

Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
everybody likes to *talk about it but not many have seen it.

Frank53 · Jul 30, 2018

I’ve seen it happen, must have been about 35 years ago. I was in a hurry to print the pictures I just shot. Developing warmer that I usually did, maybe 28C and washing under the cold tap. Don’t know what I did with the negatives, maybe I still have them somewhere.
Regards,
Frank

glbeas · Jul 30, 2018

I had it happen once with HP5 a long time ago. I think I was using Rodinal on it, never figured out why it did it.

xtolsniffer · Jul 30, 2018

Funnily enough, I had an incident a few days ago that I was sure would cause reticulation. I was developing a P3200 35mm roll in Microphen, all chemicals at 20 C. Due to the warm spell, my tapwater was coming out at 21 C. I usually use a mixer-tap to get the temperature to 20 C but this time I just stuck the rinse hose in the tank and stuck the cold on. Fifteen minutes later I went back and found the darkroom full of steam, I'd turned the HOT tap on instead and rinsed the roll at 60 C. I feared the worst but the roll was absolutely fine.

devb · Jul 30, 2018

xtolsniffer said:
Funnily enough, I had an incident a few days ago that I was sure would cause reticulation. I was developing a P3200 35mm roll in Microphen, all chemicals at 20 C. Due to the warm spell, my tapwater was coming out at 21 C. I usually use a mixer-tap to get the temperature to 20 C but this time I just stuck the rinse hose in the tank and stuck the cold on. Fifteen minutes later I went back and found the darkroom full of steam, I'd turned the HOT tap on instead and rinsed the roll at 60 C. I feared the worst but the roll was absolutely fine.

Next time take it from the 60 C water and dunk it directly into a container of ice water. I bet that would give you some results

Sirius Glass · Jul 30, 2018

It can happen with newer films but one has to really work on it.

grahamp · Jul 30, 2018

I've only done it by accident. It is surprisingly hard to do deliberately, let alone in a controlled manner.

pentaxuser · Jul 30, 2018

xtolsniffer said:
but this time I just stuck the rinse hose in the tank and stuck the cold on. Fifteen minutes later I went back and found the darkroom full of steam, I'd turned the HOT tap on instead and rinsed the roll at 60 C. I feared the worst but the roll was absolutely fine.

I had thought I had seen posts claiming that even the emulsion will slide off at 60C. Maybe it depends on who made the film. Clearly it didn't slide off in your case. Maybe it was on one of those threads which deteriorate into the Monty Python sketch of four self-made Yorkshire business men who have to outdo each other's version of "Hard Times" whereby the first one got by on only 3 hours sleep a night and by the time you get to the fourth man, he was getting up for work before he had gone to bed

pentaxuser

aleckurgan · Jul 30, 2018

Too Many Cameras said:
Is it possible to get reticulation on modern film stocks? I used very hot water for the pre-rinse, room temperature developer, very cold water for the wash, hot fixer, and then cold water again for the rinse. All I got was slightly more pronounced grain.

How hot was your hot water? You definitely need to go above 40C to get reticulation with modern emulsions.
Anyway my book on Special photo techniques from 1980 recommends the chemical way of achieving reticulation. After the last wash put your film in 5% NaOH solution (time and temperature must be determined experimentally for each emulsion). Another 5 min wash followed by 1 minute in 2% acetic acid, then final wash. Reticulation will happen at drying stage.
To get reticulation through temperature variation, the book says, one needs to determine gelatin melting point of a particular emulsion. Then the hot bath temperature will be 2-3C below that.

glbeas · Jul 30, 2018

aleckurgan said:
How hot was your hot water? You definitely need to go above 40C to get reticulation with modern emulsions.
Anyway my book on Special photo techniques from 1980 recommends the chemical way of achieving reticulation. After the last wash put your film in 5% NaOH solution (time and temperature must be determined experimentally for each emulsion). Another 5 min wash followed by 1 minute in 2% acetic acid, then final wash. Reticulation will happen at drying stage.
To get reticulation through temperature variation, the book says, one needs to determine gelatin melting point of a particular emulsion. Then the hot bath temperature will be 2-3C below that.

That sounds an awful lot like what happens when you process with Rodinal then use an acid stop bath. Maybe thats how I got my incident, might have used 1:25 and an acid stop.

Photo Engineer · Jul 30, 2018

It is hard to do with 1st tier manufacturers, Kodak - Fuji and Ilford. It can be done with some others.

It can also be done with some odd processing chemistry that can force it.

PE

Too Many Cameras · Jul 31, 2018

Thank you, everyone! your replies have been very reassuring that film is just made too well.

devb said:
Next time take it from the 60 C water and dunk it directly into a container of ice water. I bet that would give you some results

I do have some water sitting in the fridge if I decide to do another go.

aleckurgan said:
How hot was your hot water?

Hot. I keep my water heater at 150F (about 66C). When it hits the tap, there's condensate vapor along with it if the bathroom isn't humid. So pretty hot. I can't put my hand under the water at the spigot when the faucet is cranked to hot.

aleckurgan said:
After the last wash put your film in 5% NaOH solution

I will give that a shot next, and will probably try it with some ShangHai stock I have sitting around. My experience with GP3 is that is isn't as robust a film as most others.

Photo Engineer said:
It is hard to do with 1st tier manufacturers, Kodak - Fuji and Ilford. It can be done with some others.

Got it. I was hoping you'd weigh in with something along those lines. That makes sense and it's good to know that the quality film stocks are largely, or totally, resilient to this. I've been collecting problem images I've taken for about four years to make this video series I'm working on. One thing that I've taken from it is that film is really tough stuff and I've come out of this whole process with even more respect for the engineering that goes into film.

Ces1um · Jul 31, 2018

@Too Many Cameras If you consider Tri-X a modern film stock I can guarantee you can reticulate it. Check out the water in the photo... This was one of my early (maybe my second) attempt at developing black and white film.

MattKing · Jul 31, 2018

Ces1um said:
@Too Many Cameras If you consider Tri-X a modern film stock I can guarantee you can reticulate it. Check out the water in the photo... This was one of my early (maybe my second) attempt at developing black and white film.

How old was the Tri-X.
The Tri-X I used in the 1970s was a lot different than the current product.

Ces1um · Jul 31, 2018

MattKing said:
How old was the Tri-X.
The Tri-X I used in the 1970s was a lot different than the current product.

I started shooting film about 4-5 years ago so I would have bought that film new at that time.

Photo Engineer · Jul 31, 2018

You can reticulate modern films by treating them badly, you cannot do it by normal processing. This refers to Kodak, Fuji and Ilford films. I would like to know how one reticulates
Tri-X. That would probably require processing at high temperature and then plunging it into an ice bath.

Threads on this abound here on "APUG"

PE

mshchem · Jul 31, 2018

Modern film is crazy good. I remember how amazingly soft the old Ektachrome E3, E4, films were. I bet those could be shocked into wrinkling.

Ces1um · Aug 1, 2018

Photo Engineer said:
I would like to know how one reticulates
Tri-X. That would probably require processing at high temperature and then plunging it into an ice bath.
PE

IF I remember correctly (and you're asking a lot of me here) NSCAD had a setup where they had premixed developer, stop bath, fixer, all ready to go and premixed for you. Obviously it was all at room temperature. One would fill the sink with water at a certain temperature depending on what temperature and dilution you were using for your developer. I don't remember what the minimum dilution or temperature I used for tri-x is, but I used whatever one required the least amount of time as per a chart they had on the wall. I think where it all went to hell was at the very end of it all. They had two taps for the sink. One had a thermometer attached to the hose and you could adjust the mix of hot/cold to obtain a desired temp. The other tap was straight city water, cold. They also had this ingenious water bath which you hooked up to the tap. It would slowly fill with water until it got to a certain point and then the entire thing would drain completely all at once, and then begin to refill again. I hooked this up to the wrong tap and got straight cold city water during the month of February. It wasn't an ice bath, but it would have been quite cool. It would have gone from just above room temperature to whatever this tap water temp was within seconds and would have bathed in this water for 5 minutes constantly being refreshed with new cold water.

There's also another, less likely possibility. I likely would have left my film to be developed sitting in my car that day while I was at work and it would have gotten quite cold. February temps where I live would be around -12C. I would have taken it from the car, brought it into NSCAD and started developing it within 10 minutes. Is it possible the cold film hitting the warm developer might have done it too?

Either way, my photo above comes from the only roll I ever managed to reticulate.

Photo Engineer · Aug 1, 2018

It is usually a hot process followed by a cold bath or wash.

PE

Daire Quinlan · Aug 7, 2018

I bought a few rolls of Konica 750nm from someone on a local classifieds, all of them were reticulated. I figured I'd screwed up dev on the first one, couldn't remember if I was particularly paying attention during the rinse, so I was meticulous during the second roll. End result was exactly the same, so I'm assuming it's however they were stored before I got them.

full version

Photo Engineer · Aug 7, 2018

It is unusual for storage to cause reticulation. It is usually the result of wet film undergoing and abrupt change in temperature, and does not really take place in dry film.

PE

Daire Quinlan · Aug 7, 2018

Photo Engineer said:
It is unusual for storage to cause reticulation. It is usually the result of wet film undergoing and abrupt change in temperature, and does not really take place in dry film.

That was my understanding as well. The second roll though I did at 20c +/- 1c throughout the process and it still came out as above so I dunno, maybe there was some weird set of circumstances in which it could happen under storage as well.

Reticulation

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