I saw a great shot of a Covered bridge in square format which felt very constrained and wanted to go shoot it in 5×12. So I picked a cloudy day and head out for another Sunday Morning Adventure. I get lost on the way there and of course it is in the middle of nowhere so no GPS/Phone reception. I finally found it and went to the spot where I am sure the other photographer likely stood on another bridge about 50 yards away. However since the first image was made several trees had grown out over the creek blocking the view of the covered bridge. So I found a spot a little closer and one side of the creek and leaned out a bit to get a more centered view.

I really needed to be standing mid creek to get the best image but its cold out now and the water looks 3-4 feet deep near the bank. I take my time composing the shot, even using a bit of front shift, and get everything just the way I think it should work and set the shutter time to 1 sec, pulled the dark slide, and fire the shutter. I hear the pleasing sound of the mechanical shutter opening and closing so thought I had captured what I was after. Then I packed everything up so I could go to the next location. But when I got about 1/2 way down the trail, I realized I did not stop down the shutter so its exposed at f5.6-f8 instead of f45. I pulled the lens out to confirm as expected it was not stopped down. So I headed back to retake the shot. I was careful to set everything back up the same way and triple checked my shutter settings before re-taking the shot and packing up again.

When I decided to process the image a few days later I started with the good one. Set up all the chemistry and had everything ready to go and went to pour in my pre-wash. I opened the top of the tank to do so. About 3 seconds later realized I had removed the entire top of the tank, not just the funnel cover. Processed it anyway and of course it came out fully fogged with no image whatsoever.

I decided to see if I could salvage the overexposed image. Fortunately I had stopped it down a little to check focus at f8 . So its somewhere in the 5-6 stops over exposed range and the scene was about 5 stops with the dark details planned for around zone 4. I did a rough calculation in my head for my normal 12:30 time minus 40% to 7:30. Then I diluted my trusty Pyrocat-M down to 15:12:1800 (0.83A :0.67B: 100) At 70*. I agitated for the first two minutes as usual, then on the 4 and 2 minute points (counting down from 7:30). Stop and fixed as usual then washed for a good 10 minutes. Upon opening the tank, I was pleasantly surprised to see a developed image that was near normal density and color but probably a bit more flat than I would usually get. Part of the foreground is not in focus due to the shallow depth of field but it is good to know I can recover some images when things go wrong. It may get cropped to 5×8 or maybe even 4×5 in the key area of the image until I can reshoot it. I am letting it dry and won’t know if I truly salvaged it until I print it.

Then as I was reloading my holders, I pulled the dark slide and noticed that the holder had another sheet already in the holder so I likely loaded two sheets on the same side, so now that piece of film is dead and set aside to use as Fixer tester strips. 5×12 film runs about $5 per sheet so can not afford to make too many mistakes like these.

My second shot of that day had no issues other than me nearly falling in the creek. I’ll post the good and bad images when I get a chance.