Don't do it again! Try another developer that is. But I did. Tried out Acurol-N that shouted at me through the good offices of Bruce Robbins. Acurol-N is a special stuff to be really technical. Comes in a bottle that looks like it's come out some ancient chemists stock but feels like it's come out of the soft-drinks cabinet. Not sure how it does that. Having said that, it is the contents that's the important bit.
Now, lets just make this clear; I'm not expert at this testing game. If it works at all it's a miracle. If it works well, I've made a mistake. Bearing that in mind, my first attempt at utilising the stuff having consulted the bits of imformatory writing on paper that came with it was not even up to miracle standards. Sure the images were there - somewhere. But you needed to hold the neg about an inch from the sun so it melted a bit of the emulsion off before you could see through it. I think perhaps it might have been a tad over developed. Not use what went wrong to be honest as I used a clock and everything. Perhaps it was the instructions to downrate the film I was using - 400s - to 40asa. Besides being a pig to use up here where the sunny f16 rule is really sunny f4.5, it just didn't seem right.
I decided to try the same film at 400asa - as I usually do and slosh it in the Acurol-N @ 1:100 for an hour. That worked. Only thing was I took the snaps with a Konica P&S camera - so not the very best quality one expects from me.
HHHCB
1 comment:
Hi Andrea,
I've had good results using Firstcall 400S at 40 ISO and developing in Acurol-N so it definitely works. I'm wondering if the overdevelopment might be down to your agitation technique. Acurol-N is sensitive to this. My first roll was overdeveloped and it seemed that might have been caused by my usual practice of banging the tank down at the end of each agitation. So I stick rigidly to Spur's recommended agitation cycle with gentle inversions and no banging! Hope that helps.
Bruce
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