PhotoFlow and Busted Film

Last week, half of my Photo II / Advanced Photo class processed film. One of my students was doing it for the first time. And everyone's film turned out!

I mixed a fresh batch of PhotoFlo, and I love/hate how it's so "soapy" that the printing has been rubbing off the bottle:

Sorry for the quick and out-of-focus pic... trying to get it before my students came back in.


Text smearing off the bottle.


Rinsed tanks and reels after successful processing!

Oh, and I had a "first" in the Concordia darkroom - this has happened before, but the last I recall it happening was back in my CVA days over a decade ago.

A student used a fully manual 35mm camera for the first time (Canon AE-1), whereas in the past, she had a newer / more automatic 35mm camera (like a Canon Rebel 2000). She was unsure how to start rewinding it, so we did it together. Only I IMMEDIATELY felt no resistance while rewinding - there was no film being rewound. Usually, that means the film was never fully loaded and it just "sat there" not being fed through the camera. But I didn't believe that happened in this situation, because we loaded the film together the week before, and we noted that the rewind knob was turning as we advanced the film, so the film appeared to be loaded properly and moving through the camera.

I asked if she really tried to force the advance lever when she was near the end of the film, and she wasn't sure. I HOPED that she just tore the film off the spool as she finished shooting the roll. So we waited to open the camera until the lights were off and everyone else was loading their film onto reels. SURE ENOUGH, she had just muscled her film right off her film spool! I cut it clean and handed her the film in the dark and had her load it up for processing. When we turned the lights back on, we saw how it tore off a few inches from the spool:

Quite the way it tore! (Scissors just holding the film flat.)

I figured it would have pulled off from where it was mechanically attached to the spool, and not just randomly near the end. But irregardless, her film ended up turning out, and she was super happy that I predicted what had happened before she just opened the back of her camera in the light and ruined her film. It was a good day in the darkroom!

Professional Camera Settings