Improvement Plan

Although I was happy that I had images, after developing two more rolls on Friday (Kentmere 100 and Delta 100), after scanning them, I was disappointed to see that the highlights were universally blown out. For some photos, I was into photocopy-of-a-photocopy territory – if that photocopier’s toner were low.

At first, I thought it might be a scanning issue¹, but after re-scanning a known-good lab negative using the setup, it was down to my processing. It turns out that I was agitating the tank for too long and probably with a little too much vigour. It makes sense that I would: I’m new to this and going about it with some …tension.

I went out to expose two more rolls and hurried home to process with a gentler hand. It turns out that it was accurate! I followed that advice and while there were still blown highlights in some frames (it was clear and sunny, so very constrasty light abounds), the problem had largely been put under control.

1. As part of my switch to Linux, the one piece of the puzzle I am falling back onto a virtual machine for is scanning. Although my scanner (like all scanners) is compatible with VueScan, I don’t quite have it pencilled into the budget. So SilverFast 9 in a Windows 11 VM it is. ↩︎