First Time Out

[gnomus]

Hi
I've had my first time out with the new Intrepid. It was mostly successful, but I made some sily mistakes - the worst of which was developing the negatives in Ilford HC that I was trying to re-use and which had clearly expired (I should have read the leaflet more carefully, I didn't allow any increase in development time). So there was very little image on the negative and I had to do more than I would have liked in the scanning/PS stage! This may have exacerbated the issues I found.

I just popped round to a local churchyard for the first trip, and the day was pretty ghastly, so I wasn't expecting anything very much. It was more of a test to see that everything was working. (So, apologies in advance, for the image!)

I did have a couple of potential issues. The first of these is that there seemed to be a small patch of 'over-exposure'. I only shot two negatives, using the one film-holder and without moving the camera. And the light-patch appears in the same spot on both images. See the area in the yellow ellipse below (note the tree):



Does this look like light-leakage? If so, what would be the best place to start lookingfor it? It doesn't go all the way up the side of the negative. Could it be a film-holder issue? But then would I expect to get this in the same place on both negatives. Does that point to a camera (maybe bellows) issue?

The second issue is some dark streaking in the sky (red ellipse). These are quite faint. They only appeared in this negative. Do they suggest a development issue. I've already mentioned the used-up developer. But is it possible that I wasn't agitating enough? I used a Stearman 445 with the Mk IV film-holders. The negatives seemed properly seated when I took them out of the tank after development. I did two slow inversions (taking up ~10 secs) of the tank every 60 seconds. This is what I usually do with the Paterson tank for my other films. I did find that it took a bit longer to pour the chemicals into the Stearman through its relatively small filler cap.

Thanks again, in anticipation of your assistance.

Steve

 

[David M]

Firstly, That's not a bad effort at all, for the first time out. Well done.
I'm afraid I can't see the problem on the left hand side, at least on this screen. You'd need to have different scenes to be sure that it wasn't simply what Kodak called, in a moment of inspiration, Subject Failure.
Are you replacing the dark slide properly?
As for the marks in the sky, as you say, they are very faint. Could they be natural?
The Stearman tank, despite its convenience, can sometimes fail to remove the film backing entirely in a normal fixing time. You might try a extending the time.
You can easily check your bellows with a small bright light inside in a darkened room. It's an unlikely fault in a new camera, but these things do happen.
Fresh developer would probably have helped, as rescue missions in Photoshop do exaggerate otherwise invisible defects. It's not a mistake you'll make again and it's good to get your mistakes over at the beginning of your LF career. Be thankful.