[Leica] There's no glory in failure

[freakscene at weirdness.com (Marty Deveney)]

Last week we went to Womadelaide, the huge world music festival held yearly 
here in Adelaide.  I went with a particular desire to photograph the 
installations by La Compagnie Carabosse http://www.ciecarabosse.fr/ an 
excellent bunch of extrovert pyromaniac artists.  I shot three rolls of 
Neopan 1600 with Noctilux and was fairly sure I got some good stuff.

Adelaide has been having a heatwave.  It's been over 35C each day for over 
two weeks, with several days topping 40C and some nights failing to dip 
under 30.  It's the hottest continuous patch on record for an Australian 
capital city (of course there are places that are hotter, it's just that 
no-one was dumb enough to put a large city there).

I have often made comments about how great Xtol is, particularly at 1+3 and 
how to avoid Xtol failure: 
http://leica-users.org/v36/msg00344.html
http://leica-users.org/v35/msg07982.html
http://leica-users.org/leica-users/v24/msg09022.html and others . . . 
and we can now add another risk factor; do not let your Xtol simmer at 35C+ 
for a couple of weeks on end.  I've just had my first Xtol failure.

It does something odd when this happens: it had failed enough to make images 
that were barely there (definitely unusable) at 1+3, but developed almost 
fine at 1+1 or straight, maybe 10-15% less dense than I would expect 
(definitely salvageable).  I may go to 1+1, or mix up some ascorbate brew in 
propylene glycol.

Marty


Gallery (FULL of images developed using Xtol 1+3 and no problems):
http://gallery.leica-users.org/main.php?g2_itemId=7617

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