3 ms·
if fix is supposed to keep the paper from discoloring over time, which is not immediately aparent, how do you know when your fix needs to be replaced?
by totetsu 5y ago
if fix is supposed to keep the paper from discoloring over time, which is not immediately aparent, how do you know when your fix needs to be replaced?
- jrockway 5y agoI am not sure about discoloration -- I don't develop paper very often, and I don't use fixer for any reason other than to remove unexposed silver halide. (Without a fixing step, you could expose the film to light and run it through the developer again, and have another image. Or most likely, just completely ruin the negative. Fixers claim to do a lot of things, but washing away silver halide is the reason it's a mandatory step.) For measuring exhaustion, I look at the datasheet to estimate the area of film that it can fix before exhaustion, and keep track with tick marks on my bottle. I typically use Ilford Rapid Fixer diluted 1+9 (100mL fixer -> 1L of working solution). 5L of fixer develops 2000 8x10 sheets, so 100mL does 40 sheets. I mostly shoot 4x5, so that's 160 sheets. When there are 160 tick marks on the bottle, I discard it and make a new batch. (Honestly, expiration dates are really my limiting factor. 6 months in a tightly capped bottle.) Film photography is 99.9% bookkeeping and 0.1% art ;)
- totetsu 5y agoI have recently been using my room as a pinhole camera. I have wasted so much paper and money to also come to that conclusion. Next on my to buy list is that Ilford darkroom paper light meter. But it's hard to take notes in the dark.