[pure-silver] Re: Mistakes Galore

Many many many years ago (1955-56,) at college, I belonged to the camera 
club. The club had a darkroom in the student union building. There were 
shelves along one wall so we had space to store our mixed chemicals. I had 
a Rolleiflex and was using Clayton P60 as my developer back then. I noticed 
that my developer was prematurely turning brown and my increased 
development times weren't doing the trick. I suspected someone was using my 
developer. So I mixed up a fresh gallon, put it in a jug and labeled it 
fixer. I then labeled my fixer Clayton P60.

I was in the darkroom roughly every other day as I was the official school 
magazine (The Beaver Dam) photographer. Every day that I went in, I checked 
the garbage for clear film. And then, there it was... a 120 roll of 
completely clear film.

Which said something else to me, the poor sod had no sense of smell and 
didn't realize that developer has that slimy feeling.

Anyway... problem solved - it was someone else that made the mistake of 
stealing my chemistry!

Sometime in the early 60's I was working freelance in Fresno CA and was 
doing high school photos for Hood Studio. We shot a lot of pack film and I 
got very good at developing a complete film pack in a deep tray of D76. 
With my hands in the soup, I moved the film from the bottom of the stack to 
the top constantly during the development. Everything always turned out great.

A few years later, I was working, freelance, out of a commercial studio in 
Palo Alto CA and they got a job in to develop a dozen sheets of 8x10. I had 
developed a lot of 8x10 film using hangers and hard rubber tanks, but this 
studio didn't have the equipment. So I developed them in a tray, just like 
I had developed pack film previously. Pack film is very thin and limber. 
8x10 sheet film is very stiff and rigid. All of the 8x10 film came out 
scratched to kingdom come! The customer WAS NOT happy. I learned the tray 
developing lesson the hard way.

:-)

Jim

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