xxClyde
I'm starting a photography module at school using film and a manual slr. It's going pretty good so far.
But today when I walked in to the darkroom to see how my negatives turned out after hanging them to dry, I didn't see them. I thought they might've put them in a draw or something so I started nosying around until I found my film in a pile of other negatives just tossed behind some equipment on the counter.
It made me kind of pissed. I don't really want my negatives to get scratched or get a lot of dust and I'm thinking the other students would probably think the same. You'd think they could take better care of them?
Discuss:
How do you/your school store your negatives?
Any simular stories? We have a flim drying closet in which we all hang our negatives. It's just basically wat you imagine a large, perhaps eight foot tall, closet looks like. Inside there are three wires running across up the top. Once our negatives are developed we clip them onto the wires and add a clothespin to the bottom so they don't curl when drying. The fact we have a specially designated out-of-the-way area for negatives pretty much prevents people from tossing them to the side when they get in their way. I mean, people at my school generally don't have a tendency to purposefully mess up other people's negatives, but I have seen somebody who've been careless enough to knock other people's negatives down when putting their own in, and not bothering to at least hang them up.
I left a negative in the negative carrier once, forgetting to take it out and put it away. Normally when this happens we take it out and tack it up on top of the whiteboard. The person who came in next period just took it out and tossed it into the lost and found box like it was nothing. Kinda pissed me off, everybody forgets their negatives at one point or another. The least they could've done is what they'd want others to do and tack it up.
And then there are the bums that don't drip over the trays for the full fifteen seconds we try to advertise so much, thus polluting the chemicals. Not fun having to change them every other day; it's both a large waste of time and money.
Can't forget those people who put their prints on the drying rack not even bothering to squeegee the rest of the water on it, ending up in water dripping down onto the prints on the bottom racks. Way to ruin what could've been a final print - hence the reason why I use a blotter book now. It's rather sad one can't trust people in cases like that. Oh and there's also the people that make room in the dryer by putting wet prints into the dry box, which makes them attach like glue to the dry prints already below them and any later prints put in on top of them while they're already wet.
Hmm... anything else I get sick of... Darkroom chatter! Dear god, it gets so noisy at times in there. Also people that don't wash the equipment they use for development - IE the contains, lids, dry reels, etc. Nothing like having to rinse out dry reels because their dirty since the guy before you was lazy. After that, you have to wait five minutes or so to dry.
There are also those enlargers whose timers don't work well and so you end up exposing your paper more than you wanted to, simply because the control box you got is crappy. I guess enlargers don't count as humans though. Still, the thing that bugs me most out of everything there are those who don't bother dripping. Nothing like spending every other day switching out chemicals because people don't bother following the fifteen second rule.
End rant. =D