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E-6 Processing Faults (1)
Red faced... but not embarrassed!
When we lived in west Wales, before my wife's MS had taken it's irreversible grip on her limbs, we often used to play a round of putting (or mini-golf) after dinner. Usually we jumped into our Mini and sped off towards the coast. The putting green was in Aberdovey about 12 miles away and the trip never took more than twenty minutes... sometimes only fifteen. This doesn't appear a fast average... but the first mile was a single track lane, three stretches were through town or village and the remaining nine were full of bends, dips, sheer drops down hillsides or into the sea. The Cambrian Coast road was, in a way, our Welsh equivalent of the Corniche between Cannes and St.Raphaël... and maybe I've been drinking too much St.Raphaël red to start this way!
Our Mini wasn't a "hot car"... but when you knew the road well and judged your approaching speed and distance correctly as one of the few overtaking places loomed into view you could pass anything and arrive in one piece without touching the brakes for the whole trip... I was a gearbox thrasher and loved every sound it made.
Of course Graham Hill's words used to ring in my memory... he was the only driver to win the World Driving Championship, Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans. After his 1972 Le Mans win in a Matra-Simca he argued that whilst other drivers used to change down through the gears on the Mulsanne Straight to slow from 200mph for the sharp right-hand Mulsanne Corner, he only used the brakes... because brake pads were quicker to replace than a gearbox during a 24-hour endurance race!
After a round of putting by the seaside, and maybe a bag of chips on the promenade after, we'd head back home at a gentle pace enjoying the changing colors from the setting sun cast onto the wide and winding Dyfi Estuary. At one point there was a panoramic view towards the Irish Sea which usually caught the reflections of sky and clouds in the intertwining channels of tidal water which raced in and out at quite a speed along this part of the coast.
The main image is typical of the view we would stop to enjoy for a while... and I would usually take a few shots with whatever camera and lens I'd tossed onto the back seat before we raced off. This time it was a Pentax 67 loaded with Fuji transparency film and a medium telephoto 165mm lens on the front.
So what happened next?
Question : How do you usually process color transparency films?
Answer : It's obvious isn't it... First Developer, Color Developer then Bleach-Fix with several washes of water in between.
It's a simple matter of following the instructions to the letter... every photographer does it that way. And so did I until that night when, with tiredness approaching fast and over familiarity with the simple three-bath Chrome-6 process making me lax, the color developer was poured into the developing tank first. It took me only one second to realize my mistake... and it would have taken only one second for the rolls of Fuji Velvia to be ruined as well. Or would it?
part 2...
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