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Water marks on negs
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I took the plunge the other night and developed my first roll of 35mm B&W film.
Everything seemed to go fine and I have to say got a great buzz from it.
The neg’s were beautiful and my pride was huge (fall coming up), however when they dried there appeared to be what looked like water droplet marks on them, now I washed the film for 20 Min’s and put in the few drops of wetting agent 5 Min’s before the end, where did I go wrong ?Buy a water sprayer bottle and a 5L bottle of distilled water.
Add a few drops of wetting agent to the water sprayer bottle and then fill it up with distilled water
Hang the negs up. Then spray each frame of the film back and front 2 times starting at the top working down. Make sure you hang the negs in a dust free room. Close the door on the room and dont go back in till then negs are dry….
Do the above for all future films you developer and you will have clean negs. For the role that has water marks it might be hard getting them off at this stage but you could try re washing….
Wetting Agent (or Rinse Aid as it’s sometimes called) will definitely help.
I bought some from Paddy Barkers a while back (FotoSpeed RA50). It’s cheap and lasts forever as you only add a few drops.You can also buy a film squeegee but you need to be gentle so that you don’t damage the emulsion. I think Barkers might sell them as well. I have one but hardly use it. The rinse aid is usually enough.
You can pick up de-ionised water in Tescos in the auto section (only a couple of Euros for 2.5l). Not as pure as distilled water but much better than tap water especially for the final rinse. I also use it for mixing the other chemicals.
If rewashing fails, then I’d suggest getting cotton gloves used for handling negs, breathing on the neg (shiny side only)
which will make them wet enough and then gently rubbing the watermark off with the glove.I had to do this once and it worked without damaging the neg. It was that or the negs were useless…
Thanks guys,
I thought as soon as the negs came out of the tank, all I had to do was hang them up and that was it.
Martin, If I use the water spray and wetting agent, is a one shot application or can I keep the solution for another time.
Tony, the de-ionised water sound good, thanks.
Irmantas, the film was washed in running water at 20 deg’s.
Mark, I’m gonna try the glove thing (and some heavy breathing) because the marks seem to be on the shiny side so I guess I’ll find out if it works when I do the first print.Once again, thanks guys I really appreciate your input
Dedalus wrote:
Martin, If I use the water spray and wetting agent, is a one shot application or can I keep the solution for another time.
Just buy a 5L bottle from a motor factors, costs around 5.50euro, cheap as chips, you get around 40 roles out of a 5L bottle
Add a few drops of photo flo to the sprayer and fill it up with the the distilled water.
Just stray the negs top to bottom soaking them. The water that drips off the bottom of the negs just dump it, what ever is left in the sprayer keep it till next time you have negs developed. When the sprayer is empty just refill it again from the 5L bottle adding a bit of the photo flo
M
Just got through a batch of processing yesterday, with no apparent water marks on negatives.
Stopped doing a wash of photoflo in the tank, instead sparying the negs when hanging with a spray bottle with some photoflo in it. Had a problem with water marks before, and very happy with the results.
Didn’t use distilled/ de-ionised water, but I am quickly appreciated the effects of a consistent, low-risk method of processing, and definitely not ruling out the possibility of doing so in future.
Damien
Think that is the way to go alright.
Unfortunately when I took a closer look at my dry negs last night, I noticed faint water marks on several of the rolls. I guess that confirms the tap water I used is too hard, and must pick up some distilled/ de-ionised water at the next opportunity.
What is the best soution for removing water marks from negs that have them ? Of the cut negative strips only some of them have water marks. Strongly considering the cotton glove treatment, but when online have also seen film cleaning products – has anyone used these ?
Damien
Damien
Your water marks are probably caused because you are in a hard water area. Using wetting agent will help considerably but you should consider the following which has been used by many pros for years, get a piece of natural shammy (four times the size of the film you will be using) soak in wetting agent, fold in half and in half again and wring out completely, wipe film from top to bottom, wring out shammy and wipe reverse side of film.
The shammy removes almost all the surface water from the film surface and considerably reduces the effect of water marks.Martin Devlin
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