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Ah, epistemology. The study of knowledge—what we know and how we know it—can always be counted on to be fascinating. Especially, I think, when it’s out there on the dance floor with psychology, doing the foxtrot.
One thing I’ve been aware of for a long time now is that certain bits of knowledge just “seem reasonable” to the human brain. In some cases, these bits of knowledge might be true. But sometimes they’re just completely wrong. And most people go right on believing them anyway.
In photography, there is a whole class of assumptions that fall into this category. They’re just not true, but they seem reasonable to people.
An early example I encountered was a claim by a man named Fred Picker, who owned and ran a darkroom products company in Newfane, Vermont, for a number of years (Mr. Picker died a few years back, and his company, Zone VI, got sold to Calumet a few years prior to that.) Picker wrote that fixer is heavier than water, therefore fixer sinks to the bottom of a print washer, therefore print washers that drain from the bottom are best.
Sounds perfectly reasonable. People believed it. In fact, people believed it so strongly that it became an article of faith…despite the fact that it’s wrong.
Fixer is heavier than water, all right, but fixer being washed out of a print goes into solution with the water and doesn’t separate back out again. Especially in the turbulence of a typical print washer, this happens nearly instantly. And irreversibly. If you take a pint of water and a pint of fixer, mix them together, put them in a bottle, stand the bottle on an out-of-the-way shelf, and come back again after six months, do you have water on the top and fixer on the bottom? No. Fixer doesn’t separate out of solution with water and “sink to the bottom” of a quiescent bottle over the course of six months, and it certainly doesn’t do so over the course of an hour or two in a turbulent print washer.
In fact, almost all of the fixer carried over by a fiber-based print into the wash is rinsed away in the first few moments. Only minuscule amounts remain, mostly trapped in the fibers of the paper. It turns out that letting a print sit perfectly still in a water bath will usefully leach fixer out of the print and into the water. David Vestal demonstrated that you can wash a fiber print perfectly well in only a few milliliters of water simply by letting the print soak in successive water baths. Try it yourself: with a fiber print fresh out of the fixer, rinse it for a minute or two. Then put it in a tray barely covered by distilled water for ten minutes. Agitate a bit at the end of the ten minutes, drain the water, and repeat the process twice more. Then test the print for residual fixer. You’ll find you’ve gotten a very good wash.
Still, that old idea—that fixer “sinks to the bottom”—persists to this day. I can’t tell you how much time and energy I’ve expended trying to disabuse people of the notion over the years. And when you finally think you’ve settled the matter once and for all, you’ll find that people go right on believing it anyway. Why? Because it seems reasonable—and that’s that. One guy actually told me that he understood and appreciated my arguments, but that he had “heard” so many times from so many sources that fixer sinks to the bottom of his print washer that he was simply unwilling to disbelieve it!
There are several dozen of these persistent myths in photography. The same thing is happening with the newer field of digital—seemingly-reasonable misapprehensions that people can’t be talked out of. One of the ones that annoys me is that 4/3 sensors are “too small.” There’s a vocal minority online who are utterly convinced that the comparative size of APS-C and 4/3 are very far apart and that 4/3 is at a crippling disadvantage in comparison, always, no matter what. Heck, the focal length factors are 1.5X and 2X, and that’s a big difference. It’s true that, as a rough rule of thumb, 4/3 does cost you some fraction of a stop in high-ISO noise. But so what? There are lots of things that determine the speeds at which you can shoot. In fact, 4/3 and APS-C are very close in size. People can’t tell which is which from looking at prints, except when the prints are pushed to extremes and the viewers are told what they’re looking at and know what telltales to look for. And of course many people defend digicams, the sensors of which generally really are much smaller, as being very usable under many conditions and very high quality if used within their limitations. If you think of 4/3 and APS-C as being functionally the same, or at least lump them together in the same general category, you’ll be closer to right than all the people who wail about how small 4/3 is. It just seems so reasonable to them…they must be right.
That’s just one. I could list more, and discuss each one in turn. But it wouldn’t really do any good in the long run, of course.
I have a SaltHill Archival Print Washer—a beautiful thing crafted of smoked Lexan, long unavailable now and rare on the used market. For current products, I’d recommend Robin Whetton’s Nova washers if you live in England (www.novadarkroom.com) or John Bicht’s Versalab washers (www.versalab.com) if you’re in the USA. The Versalab units are the opposite of the SaltHills in that they’re plain and utilitarian, but alike in that they are expertly engineered and work well.
There are still a few Zone VI products in the Calumet Photographic catalog. One is a circulating washing tray called “The Zone VI Studios Washing Machine.” Sure enough, the description touts the fact that water enters from the top and drains from the bottom—although the bit about fixer sinking because it’s heavier than water, mercifully, is gone now.
Washes are very expensive. I suppose they're handy, but I use the bathtub. Filled a third of the way, prints dropped in and shuffled two / three times. Then left for a half hour when I shuffle them again and leave them yet another half hour. After that they're washed!! I've got 25 year old prints that haven't spoiled a bit using this method. There's so much water in the bath compared to the little amount of fixer that when the chemistry mixes with the water it's as good as gone — its so dilute. Cheers!
Mike,
Yes, print washers are a luxury. I've used just about every kind in existence, plus trays set in the bottom of the shower. [g] I've never used your method but it sounds like it would work.
The big selling point of dedicated washers is convenience, not necessarily efficacy.
Joe Saltzer of SaltHill told me that in a series of exhaustive tests his company did, the fastest, best wash they were able to achieve was a single print in a rinsing tray (a low tray with jets of water coming in from the sides).
Just think for a minute about your proposition applied to far more important things, like politics, health, or nutrition. Scary. I never understood why people just choose not to think by themselves and accept any absurd notion as long as it's validated by years of use or some sort of guru or another. Old ideas die hard. Even when they are obviously wrong.
I wash my prints in a deep pan, changing water two or three times over half an hour. Never had any problems. Must confess also that I never was too scientific or precise with time/temperature combinations (how would an amateur control a shift of one degree while developing?) and did quite well. Imagine my disregard for those purists of sensor size, etc. Considering what a Bayer grid does to colour, contrast etc. it's a miracle that you end up with something. I just look for something I like/need in the camera and and work from there. It's not a matter of differences between two cameras or lenses or processes, IMHO, but rather about finding the right tool for what you do.
"I never understood why people just choose not to think by themselves and accept any absurd notion as long as it's validated by years of use or some sort of guru or another. Old ideas die hard. Even when they are obviously wrong."
Good question, but perhaps a bit misguided. It's because we have limited time, limited patience and limited areas of interest. We can't build our entire lives from first principles, deriving everything on our own. We have to assume that normally trustworthy people tend to be right, that our first impressions are correct, that we can always back up and do over if we do get something wrong. Life is too short for anything else.
We do tend to be more vigilant and suspicious when something very important is at stake, or when a claim goes against our own previous experiences or preconceptions. But in a case like this we just don't have much of a reason to believe it must be wrong, and even if it is wrong, the harm is small to none. It's just easier to go with the flow as it were.
You have a similar thing with development, where people use stop bath and do it for five minutes or more; or rinse the negative in running water for ten minutes after fixing. That is no less absurd than this idea of sinking fixer. In those cases, though, I'm beginning to suspect it's our disgust-mechanism that gets involved by mistake, and creates this compulsive need for visibly excessive washing.
It was completed on time. It is however not linked on the Photo.net home page and it is not properly dated on my bio page so it's hard to find there, too.
Those aren't things that I have any control over. Needless to say I'm not very happy about the situation.
I always thought Fred Picker's claim about fixer being heavier than water was nonsense but I knew Fred well enough to know that he had some very strange ideas. Some people who knew him liked to joke, "According to Fred, there are two ways of doing things... his way and the wrong way." Until very late in life, he almost refused to even admit the existence of variable contrast papers but he embraced them near the end when, coincidentally, he came out with a VC head for his enlargers. :-) He then became so excited about VC's potential that he sounded like a kid who had just discovered a new toy.
My own tests over the years confirm everything said in this article. I understood it intuitively but tested it to confirm my thoughts. That said, I do have a print washer but it's only real advantage, as suggested here, is the convenience it offers. But that's a significant factor when you make a lot of prints. Before I had one, I washed prints in bathtubs, trays, etc. Yes, you can wash prints very effectively without a print washer but I wouldn't want to go without one. It greatly simplifies my post printing sessions. I generally print to the wee hours and, when done, I load up my print washer, run it for ten minutes or until I am done cleaning up, then shut off the water and go to bed, letting the prints soak. You definitely DO NOT need the high flow rates suggested by many sources including Kodak. (They should know better!). Fixer diffuses into the water. High rates of water flow merely wastes water. As others have pointed out here, you can wash prints beautifully in standing water with several changes. The problem is that is keeping them separated if you made a lot of prints and that's where a print washer really shines. THis is especially important with fiber-based prints which are the onlty type of paper I use except for proofs.
I may be misunderstanding Janne's comments but I have never heard of anyone using a five minute stop. Even Fred Picker wouldn't have suggested that. Perhaps Janne meant to say a "five minute pre-soak.." Also, a ten minute film rinse is not overdoing it at all. My tests have confirmed that as well and that's after using a hypo clear. In fact, I wash my film for about 20 minutes in a automatic fill & dump film washer. That is a bit long but it gives me a comfortable safety margin as judged by my testing. Remember, water quality (hardness, etc.) has an effect on film and print washing so there is no set amount of time for everyone. How long would Jan suggest rinsing film? 2 minutes? (Again, maybe I'm misunderstanding Janne's comment.) That said, the same principles apply to film that apply to paper except that film washes faster than fiber-based paper, of course. I do use a film washer but, in this case, it really is only a convenience and a luxury. I generally have many sheets of film and my film washer keeps them nicely separated. However, using film hangers in a tank is just as efficient and, in fact, that's how I wash 8x10" film. I see almost no advantage to washing roll film in a film washer but I do simply because I have one.
