Still making silly mistakes in my darkroom …
Whilst developing a roll of Ilford XP2 in a Jobo developing water bath, I got to the stage where you pour the developer out and pour the BLIX in. On tipping the Jobo tank, no developer came out! I realised that the tank’s top had become loose and that the developer had escaped into the water bath.
What to do? I did not know whether the developer had worked, (although I doubted that it had) and was therefore reluctant to pour the BLIX in.
As it happened near at hand I had the two parts of Barry Thornton Two Bath (BT2B) developer. This was the only real option that I had to try to rescue the negatives. The negatives had been in a bath at 38.5C and not only that, but they presumably had been partially and unevenly developed. I knew that BT2B was forgiving about the temperature and fairly lenient as to timings.
Here is the result after split grade printing onto Ilford Portfolio pearl paper and a large amount of burning at grade 00 to bring out the skyscrapers, which had also been partially bleached:
The sky is bleached out, but actually I quite like the picture.
I really rate BT2B as a developer. I’m not sure I could have used any other developer other than BT2B (or similar) to part-rescue this picture.
Great save, a compensating developer was definitely the way to go !