Author Topic: D76 lasts a long time!  (Read 889 times)

Indofunk

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D76 lasts a long time!
« on: March 10, 2019, 12:17:03 AM »
Miguel was kind enough to gift me a bag of D76 powder last April. I mixed a stock solution (one 109g bag in a liter of water) and used it a couple of times in the recommended 1:1 dilution. I then stored the stock solution in a normal brown plastic bottle with plenty of air on top of it (ie, not vacuumed or marbles added to raise the volume to the top) and stored it at room temperature. Since I only use D76 for Tri-X shot at 400ISO, and 99% of the time I'm shooting Tri-X I push it, I never used the D76 until tonight, when I had a roll of Tri-X that I tried out in Peter's (now my) Contax T. I wasn't sure that the stock solution would last almost an entire year(!), so I diluted it 1:1 and did a leader test and it looked fine. I went ahead and developed the roll, and the negs look great! In fact, it looks a little overdeveloped, but that's easily fixed. I still have about 200mL of the stock solution, which should be good to develop one more roll at 1:1, so we'll see how much longer it lasts!

(Photographic evidence to follow, obviously ;) )

Francois

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Re: D76 lasts a long time!
« Reply #1 on: March 10, 2019, 01:47:56 PM »
Unbelievable....
It must have looked like coca cola and smelled like, well, D76.
I haven't used the stuff in years. It just shows how inaccurate the manufacturer recommendations are. I'm still on my bottle of HC110 that expired in 2012....
Francois

Film is the vinyl record of photography.

Indofunk

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Re: D76 lasts a long time!
« Reply #2 on: March 10, 2019, 06:07:15 PM »
HC110 lasts until it gets totally congealed and dried up and then lasts even longer than that.

The D76 looked like electric yellow Gatorade  ;D

Also, I absentmindedly poured my fixer into the bottle of stop, which was already full of stop. = overflowing bottle of fixerstop!  ::)

Francois

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Re: D76 lasts a long time!
« Reply #3 on: March 10, 2019, 09:21:03 PM »
oops!
At least you didn't develop in the fixer like some guy back in college  :o
Funny thing is he was always complaining about how bad the blacks were in his prints... it was nice not to hear him complain about them this time around.
Francois

Film is the vinyl record of photography.

Indofunk

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Re: D76 lasts a long time!
« Reply #4 on: March 10, 2019, 09:37:15 PM »
On the upside, he had a whole lot of great pics of black panthers in the jungle on a new moon night!  ;D

Francois

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Re: D76 lasts a long time!
« Reply #5 on: March 11, 2019, 02:29:24 PM »
And there was also his black cat that was sleeping in the stove...
Let's not forget his classmates who were loading film on the reels in the darkroom.
Francois

Film is the vinyl record of photography.