Weirdisms with the new Petzval

[jimgalli]

I thought others might enjoy my learning fiasco's. Plus I've never seen this phenomenon before.

OK so I've got the Petzval and it's the most gorgeous hunk of brass and glass I've ever seen. It's a 16" Eastman f4 mfg by Bausch & Lomb. A Dallmeyer Patent Petzval. Last evening after a couple of marguerita's I prevailed on my visiting daughter #3 to pose for a portrait. 8X10 head and shoulders with bellows at about 22". Century 10a to hold the beast up. Stopped down to f5.6 and about 1/2 second exposure with a dark slide. Dusk light. film is APHS Ortho ASA3. All is well. I do a 2nd, then I show Meggie what to do and she likewise does 2 of me. Well, the Jobo holds 5 sheets and the APHS is cheap so I pestered my poor bride who is sufferiing with the flu to pose for the final shot.

Then I guess the 2 marguerita's kicked in because I mixed the PyrocatHD up full strength and developed for 9 minutes! Normal would be between 1/3 and 1/4 strength and 6 minutes 30 seconds. Kapow. These things are almost black. Oh well. Chalk it up to experience which I will need a lot of.

Then today I'm looking at the poor toasted negs and I see a positive looking back at me. True enough it's a positive looking out of an oil pit but a positive none the less. Enter the computer. APUG forgive me.

So what you're seeing in the 2 pics of me and the one of my bride is a complete solarization that resulted in a positive. Scanned and tweaked in photo-shop to expand to some kind of a normal perspective. The 2 of Megan weren't cooked enough and they were inverted like a normal neg.

This kind of stuff doesn't bother me in the least and I chalk all my failures up to learning that will eventually tie into some fine prints.

So has anyone else ever cooked your negs until they solarized into positives. Very weird.

Next time for sure Rocky.

 

[smieglitz]

...So has anyone else ever cooked your negs until they solarized into positives. Very weird...

I once had about 3 rolls of 35mm film (Plus-X IIRC) solarize in some Diafine. The developer soon exhausted and I thought I had traced the effect to chemical contamination by E-6 reversal bath which I used a few days before processing slides. I experimented a bit with adding reversal bath to diafine but never quite got the same results, just a bunch of fog as I recall.

Joe

 

[MenacingTourist]

Jim,

I really like the shot of your wife. There's just enough oddness to be really appealing to me. What a wonderful accident.

Alan.

 

[MarkS]

Somewhere in here there's a (sensitrometric) connection with the "Black Sun" photograph Ansel Adams made, where the image of the sun solarized on the neg. Could make for some interesting experiments...

 

[dmax]

Happened to me once years ago. I shot a roll of TXP 320 with a 120 folder in available darkness, and wanted to find out just how far the film would go if pushed to the extreme. I recall that at that time I had just read Bob Schwalberg's article in Pop Photo (or was it Modern Photography?) on pushing Tri X to unbelievably high EIs.

Straight D-76, warm, test roll, and an empty 120 reel in a 1 liter tank. I figured I needed a whole lot of developer volume to compensate for potential exhaustion. Processed it for over an hour. I ended up with what Jim describes. I figure that the exposed areas did develop to the maximum density possible, and since the developer had nothing left to work on, the developer (and byproducts) began to work on the unexposed silver halides. After the failed experiment, I never went that route again. Interesting results though.

 

[MattCarey]

Only 2 drinks, eh?

So....I can see it now. Matt's visit to Tonopah:

"Hey Jim, let's go get some Mexican Food"

later...

"Go ahead, have another drink...it's on me"

later...

"Now, about that Petzval. Shall we say, $100?"

A man can dream, can't he?

Matt

 

[Charles Webb]

Very interesting Jim, You mention using a Jobo Processor, did you use it? Or did you use the well known "Old Photographers" agitation trick of wading in the developer tray with your golf shoes on? I have gotten exactly the same number of scratches by wiping down my negatives with an Antic Static Porcupine brush. ;-) Keep us posted!

Charlie...........................

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

Jim I was thinking about you this December when we were trying to make B&W slides from TechPan, me and my dad. We had setup a flash unit behind a diffusing plastic screen, and so used it as a uniform light source to shoot the original negatives. However, we forgot to take into account the fact that TP has an EI of about 200 in a paper developer to get the right contrast index (we had assumed something like EI 25). So when the fix is done, I open the tank and give a quick look at the neg to make sure there's something on it before wasting water on the wash, and from a casual glance I see something indeed.

Problem is I did not look at the neg by transparency, but by reflection, and it looked like a normal negative. I was heedless enough not to realize that I should have seen a POSITIVE image, this being a copy from a neg. Once we hanged the TP we saw immediately the error, but it was cool to make a direct negative copy on another negative through solarization. Maybe that could be a new way to copy negs without losing more than one generation...

Sadly, we never managed to make those damn slides, and called it quits after three hours of bracketing, fussing, and trying to reduce the intensity of the flash.

 

[jimgalli]

"Go ahead, have another drink...it's on me"

"Go ahead, have another drink...it's on me"

"Go ahead, have another drink...it's on me"

"Go ahead, have another drink...it's on me"

Matt

You've got the idea. jg

 

[John Kasaian]

I toasted a shot of a snowy landscape in straight HC-110 once. Really wierd to see white snow on a negative. A couple of margaritas would make anything more fun!