garygruber

I realize this is an old thread but here goes. I just disassembled my Medalist II and am having problems with the prism also. After a thorough cleaning I see that one side of the prism has lost its mirror silver. What I thought was dirt is actually a loss of the reflective material. I just purchased a parts only medalist II in hope of being able to retrieve the prism and use it in an otherwise fully functional camera. If anyone has any thoughts I'm all ears...

I am 40 and I've been processing film since last February. Having developed only about 30 rolls I can clearly see that frequency of agitation has very similar effect (to image contrast) than the development time. In fact, one doesn't need 40 years to notice that. Just 1 hour and 2 rolls is enough to follow Kodak-recommended agitation (every 30 seconds) and Ilford's (every minute) to see the difference. That difference is clearly visible in their data sheets too, i.e. Kodak's development times are usually shorter for the same developer+film combination.

 

Perhaps your point was that people exaggerate the importance of agitation, and maybe that's true, but it reads almost as agitation hardly matters. Apologies if I misunderstood.

Fluid dynamics is very important in film development. Under agitation causes the film adjacent to edge to develop slower. If that edge is a sky value, it will exhaust the developer at a slower rate than the rest of the film. This is not just my observation but the observation of every pro I went to school with and had to put their butt on the line when they saw poor results from using the manufacturer's recommendations with regard to proper agitation

Shadow areas exhaust the development more quickly. I have been using 6 inversions in 10 seconds once a minute ever since I began to understood the concept of fluid dynamics and flow. It is most important to stop the vertical movement of the reels inside the can, as I detailed previously using a small length of PVC pipe.

I conferred with many photographers before the internet and we compared notes and found out the same thing. You can eliminate the small tank (30 sec) vs. large tank (60 sec) intervals, by adjusting the processing times for smaller tanks down slightly.

Consistency is everything. It is the only way to eliminate variables. It is also crucial to mix developers using distilled water. Either too hard or too soft water will wreak havoc with your film. Too soft can cause the emulsion to lift right off the base, too hard can cause mineral deposits to form during development, creating spots that print black on the film. I had film ruined that was used during research for a Guggenheim Fellowship I was awarded back in 1972 due to soft water.

I banged my head on the wall for quite some time understanding all of this. I hope this helps. I've had nothing but consistent results since 1976, when me and my photographer buddies met to discuss all of this and figure out both the source of the problem and an approach to remedy it.

I have seen several threads on the difficulty of putting filters on both lenses of a 180 due to the close tolerances. I solved the problem today by turning down the diameter of two new B+H filters on my lathe. I used the thread protector ring that comes stock with the 180 as the filter holder. I then simply threaded the filter on and turned it down. My initial measurements indicated I had .050 thou of rim thickness to work with (and leave a 0.010 thickness for stability). I ended up taking off 0.042 thou from each filter in multiple steps until I achieved a good fit with about 0.002 clearance between the two filters:

#1. Lens protector chucked on lathe:

#2. Filter threaded on:

...with age, film loses speed and contrast. It gains fog. Of course film is 'on' all the time - unlike digital.

Sage advice. A densitometer to read base fog usually tells the story -- as long as the film has not been push processed.

I'm an old fart and don't fully trust cloud solutions. I keep a multi-TB drive of backups in a fire box at home, along with multi-TB USB-C drive attached to my computer. I should keep another off-site, but this isn't my livelihood, so the risk is not so great. If you want cloud, take your pick. Upload speeds can be very slow with a large number of very large image files. Like others, I advise you cull deeply before saving. I once heard an instructor at the Nikon School note he was lucky to get one keeper from a roll of 36 exposures. I've found that's a very optimistic ratio, particularly in the age of digital and when shooting wildlife. I now do an initial, deep cull as a part of importing via LightRoom. This takes the number down to a manageable amount, and I then cull even deeper as I evaluate images for processing and printing. This was a hard lesson learned, and I have a couple of TB of older, poorly-culled image sets to get through before I'm where I want to be. (This is what I've been working on while locked-down at home the past few months.) That same instructor made the point that bad photographs don't get better with storage in a shoebox. The same applies, I'm quite sure, to digital images on a hard drive. But, for counterpoint, I've found a few less-than-perfect images my improving eye and PP skills have allowed me to make into something desirable that was not initially obvious. Still, this is by far the exception rather than the rule.

I used to keep local backups. I now have both a Microsoft OneDrive and GoogleDrive accounts to store nearly 2TB of photos. I have scanned some of my 54 years of negatives and transparencies -- well over 100,000 images. I find cloud storage to be optimal, but Microsoft's software is much better than Googles.

All of that can't possibly correct. Youtubers say that I need to do gymnastics while agitating!

 

I've been catching up a bit on backlog the past few weeks and have developed about two dozen rolls. Every single one has been in HC-110b(I need to make up fresh D76).

 

I have used what I often call two reel, 4 reel, and 6 reel tanks(even though the big tanks usually get 2 or 3 of 120 rather than 4 or 6 of 35mm).

 

On every single one, all agitation has been by inverting long enough for everything to "settle"(1-2 seconds depending on tank size), flipping back over, and setting down firmly to dislodge bubbles.

 

I do the 2-reel tanks one handed as I can hold the lid with my index finger while grabbing the rest of the tank. The bigger tanks, especially the 6 reels, get one hand fully on the lid and one on the body to keep the lid from falling off.

 

Every single one has been perfect(aside from the time I inadvertently mixed Plus-X and Tri-X in the same tank and ended up with super dense Plus-X).

To avoid the reels moving in the tank I cut a piece of one inch PVC tube to permit no more than 1/8 inch clearance between th top of the reel and the bottom of the tank cover. This will prevent over agitation when the tanks are inverted.

Why would anyone choose to use 'twizzle-stick' agitation anyway? It's rubbish, and can even unwind the film from the spiral.

 

Also, you don't use an SS tank like a cocktail shaker. You invert the tank and right it again, twice per minute.

If you shoot with a lot of sky or high zones in your photo, twice per minute will cause under agitation and under development of the high density areas. I have used 6 inversions in 10 seconds once a minute for about 50 years now. Pre-soak for one minute prior to development. This will prevent uneven development. Been there too many times early in my career

Mamiya RZ67, 50mm, Ilford Delta 100

[ATTACH=full]1343566[/ATTACH]

I set up to develop a roll of 120 the other day, and somehow lost focus badly enough that I loaded the backing paper on to the reel rather than the film. Thankfully the paper is enough longer than the film that it wouldn't load all the way - otherwise it would have been a very unhappy moment when I pulled everything out of the changing bag!

 

I have no idea how I separated the film and backing, removed the paper from the spindle, and then 'decided' to load the paper instead of the film - that actually tool extra work compared to doing it right. All of which has me wondering - did I (almost) find a novel way to mess up developing, or have others done this before?

I checked with the ghost of Beaumont Newhall and no one else in the history of photography has ever done this.

I used Polaroid when I was learning 4x5 to verify my camera settings, and I loved P/N film for several reasons, including the apparent lack of any base tone and the funky borders. And yes, Ansel loved it. I also used Readyloads and Quickloads as space and labor-saving alternatives to loading and carrying film holders. When all that went away I lost interest in 4x5 as being too labor intensive for me. Sold all that gear.

Polaroid was instrumental in large format. I did tons of architectural photography, including ads for Architectural Digest. It was the best way to ensure that your verticals were straight. It wasn't unusual to spend up to 4 hours prepping for a single shot, especially an indoor / outdoor photo where you had a seven minute window to get the right light balance. In product photography, the polaroid let us adjust the spacing between objects to yield smooth visual transitions.

Don't bother arguing with q.g.

 

He is always irrefutably correct about anything related to photography no matter how much voluminous experience you or anyone else may have to the contrary.

Thanks for the advice! Maybe me and my friends (several award winning commercial photographers from Boston, L.A., and NYC) have had it wrong for 50 years. And there is my buddy Michael who was a Nat Geo photog for 20 years after a successful stint doing advertising in NY.. Let me contact them immediately and let them know they've been doing it wrong for all these years. /SARC OFF.

I think I've run into his cousins on other forums I've been on...

To underline what was said above: instant film for professional cameras was a bit of silliness. Land invented the stuff so that consumers did not have to wait for their films to be processed and printed. Not for what these backs were supposedly used for.

 

And that supposed use was to check whether a photographer actually knew what he or she was doing, before he recorded a scene on a frame or two of film. But the thing is: the viewfinder told you (still does) what you are recording. A light meter told you (still does) how it is recorded, tonally. Instant film was particularly bad at doing the latter, had poor (very harsh) contrast and bad colour. And it and was blurry. There were variants that did make quite good pictures, but only if you used the negative that type also supplied (and then you again had to wait for the print, if you were not able to read a negative). And it was quite expensive too.

So people who could use a light meter, knew how to pay attention to focus and framing (and who could read a negative), i.e professional photographers, really had no use for expensive but poor instant prints.

So why?

 

Things haven't changed much: today also, you can often find people at photo shoots who can't do anything of the above (don't have to, to be fair) but insist on seeing every capture (as it is called today) on an instant-viewin-device, nowadays a monitor. Art directors and such. It was for them that tons of Polaroid of Fuji instant film was exposed, at considerable expense of both time and money.

Monitors, digital capture, meant the end of instant film. Unless you want one to complete a collection, these backs are not worth anything. The instant film still available today is overly expensive, and very, very bad (unpredictably so: you can't know in advance how it will turn out).

100% wrong. As a professional for over 50 years now, Polaroid film was an indispensable tool used by almost all studio photographers to verify light balance under studio strobes, as well strobes used for fill outdoors.

Polaroid film was also used 100% of the time on advertising shoots to show to art directors to verify product placement and lighting.

And, as with every other photographer I have known, it was used 100% of the time during portrait sessions to provide feedback to the subjects.