*Sigh* Spots on Negatives

Bayliss said:

I use Ilford Ilfotol Wetting Agent with distilled water and still get water spots (only on 35mm film though for some reason). Haven't been able to solve the problem yet.

I live in London so possibly the issue is very hard tap water.

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Consensus seems to be that these aren't water spots. Thankfully that's an issue I don't seem to have.

I'm going to try presoaking my next roll of film to see if that helps eliminate air bells.

logan2z said:

Consensus seems to be that these aren't water spots. Thankfully that's an issue I don't seem to have.

I'm going to try presoaking my next roll of film to see if that helps eliminate air bells.

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Not water spots? Interesting. I might try hanging the film sideways next, seems to wok for some people.

Bayliss said:

Not water spots? Interesting.

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Apparently air bells, in my case.

Just a quick follow-up on this:

I started to pre-soak my film for 3 minutes prior to development and haven't seen any dark spots on my negatives since. Granted I've only developed a few rolls of film since adding a pre-soak so it's possible I've just been lucky, but so far so good.

logan2z said:

Just a quick follow-up on this:

I started to pre-soak my film for 3 minutes prior to development and haven't seen any dark spots on my negatives since. Granted I've only developed a few rolls of film since adding a pre-soak so it's possible I've just been lucky, but so far so good.

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Presoaking or prewetting eliminated some problems forever for me.

Sirius Glass said:

Presoaking or prewetting eliminated some problems forever for me.

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Good to know - fingers crossed

MattKing said:

In my case, I pre-rinse with continuous rotary agitation for two minutes.
I then discard the rinse water, add the developer and agitate for the first 30 seconds using continuous rotary agitation. The rest of the development step involves standard Kodak scheme inversion agitation.
Do you, by chance, load the reels in a very dusty environment?

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Same here, except I pre-rinse for 10 min with continuous rotary agitation (at dev. temp.).
If there would be dust during the loading of the reels, that pre-rinse will take care of it (I hope)...

To Logan2z,

Now I recall something else:

Many, many years ago (while before 2005), I had the same streaks issue with AGFAPAN 400/120 (sorry for it is AGFA again...).
Processed in Rodinal or Refinal, it didn't matter.

I send the film to AGFA Leverkussen for support, and the answer was rather surprising.
This banding was caused by the way a handled the film just BEFORE the processing, after detaching it from the backing paper.
I unrolled the film and let it slip between my fingers while loading it on the developing reels (I used plastic reels then).
The film slid beween my thumb and index finger, which cause the streaking that only came up in the more developed areas, that's why it isn't there between the frames.
They, AGFA, called it (and now I try to translate "mechanischer Schleier") something like "mechanical fog".

When I changed the handling of the film, the streaks went away! As simply as that...

Philippe-Georges said:

They, AGFA, called it (and now I try to translate "mechanischer Schleier") something like "mechanical fog".

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Ok, pressure fog, basically. You get this a lot when using plastic reels on the edge of the film strip that touches the reels, especially if a little more force is needed to load them than usual, and it's also the source of the moon/crescent-shaped artifacts you get when sharply bending a roll of film, again when loading onto a reel doesn't go as planned. It's also very common along the edges of sheet film where it catches in the slots to the side of the holder when sliding the film in/out of the holder.

I'm skeptical that this is the cause here, but on the other hand, I wouldn't consider it impossible. It's certainly worth a thought.