michaelha

"I have always squeegeed my film and never had a problem . . ."

 

- Then you've been very lucky!

You might get away with it for a while with a brand new squeegee and extreme care with its cleanliness. But one day, one day.... that unseen bit of grit is going to draw a lovely black line right through the middle of the best negative on the roll. Almost guaranteed.

 

To the OP: It's clearly a drying mark, and caused by hard water. Re-wash and use distilled or calgon-treated water, plus a tiny drop of wetting agent for the last bath.

 

I suspect the OP must be new to film if they've not encountered a drying mark before. Welcome to the aggravating and luck-reliant world of film photography!

A quick follow up on this issue- I re-soaked the negative in distilled water with photo flo and upon re-drying, the line appears to be gone! So that is fixed. Unfortunately, somehow there appears to be a small pin-sized hole in the sky now (an actual fleck of emulsion somehow is gone even though I was as careful as possible handling the negatives) that I will need to figure out how to prevent from manifesting in darkroom prints. Right now I'm thinking of getting some spotting dye and putting a tiny dot on the non emulsion side of the film, but if anybody has any better recommendations please let me know. Thanks again!

Nice image.

 

Looks like a drying mark. The mark impinges highlight and shadow areas on the negative and presents itself as density on the negative. To me this rules out processing errors such as agitation and chemical strength. Squeegeeing the negatives leads to fewer or no defects like this.

I suspect you're right. Do you think that re-soaking the negative and re-drying it carefully could address the issue, or is it set in stone at this point?

Not sure but other members I'd say, could help you out with it

 

It's a strange composition, is it a double exposure ? there's mist throughout the image, what was the mist? Oh ok, can make it out now, something floating with land and fog in the background. It's hard to say what caused the line but did you hang a weight on the bottom of the film while it was drying ? PhotoFlo would normally run to the bottom edge of the film with a weight, but without a weight and the tail end of the film curled up, the PhotoFlo could have accumulated on the image

Thanks for the quick response. It’s not a double exposure- you figured it out. It’s a swim dock floating in calm waters with fog rising off the water in the background.

I did put a weight onto the bottom of the film when it was drying, so the water should have collected at the bottom, below the emulsion of this last frame I think. The film was definitely perfectly straight and didn’t curl when it dried.

Hello,

I'm a new member that joined explicitly with the hope that someone in this awesome community might be able to help me out with an issue that I ran into last night. I developed a roll of Delta 400 from my Pentax 67 last night, and was disappointed to see a weird band/line on the left hand side of the frame in the best shot from the roll.

Does anybody here have idea what this is, and if there is any way to fix it? For what it's worth, the band appears to be on the emulsion side, and not on the glossy side of the film (I already tried wiping it off on the glossy side to see if it was a mineral deposit and no luck).

I suspect the issue isn't uneven development or insufficient agitation as I used rotary processing for this for both the development and fixing stages. I also don't think it's a mineral deposit because I use photo flo and a lot of distilled water for the final rinses before hanging (I rinse twice with distilled water before the photo flo step, when I again use distilled water).

My best guess is that this is maybe the result of the negative drying unevenly and in such a way that that band appeared? I hang my negatives up to dry, and I think this negative was at the bottom of the roll, so any leftover water could have accumulated in this general area as the water droplets gradually moved down due to gravity.

Will soaking and or re-washing the negative in the hope that re-softening then drying the emulsion again remove the line? I want to use this negative for darkroom prints, hence my desire to fix the negative if possible...

Thanks in advance for anybody's help!