No more HP5 mottling after this post - promise. I thought I’d use it to answer a reader who asked why I kept on using the defective 120 rolls if I knew they had issues. That’s a fair question suggesting, as it does, that I might be suffering from one of the signs of madness - doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.
The problem was that the mottling wasn’t always apparent. Take the pics on this page. Two woodland shots that look sort of OK and two different frames of the same caravan which don’t.
The caravan shots are defective but to different degrees. The mottling in one is very obvious. If you click on that version with what seems to be a row of birds in the sky you’ll see that they’re actually pinholes in the emulsion (there is one bird, I think). Nice! And before you ask, they’re not caused by my processing.
The other caravan shot looks better but you can still see mottling in the sky and it would get worse if I burned it in a bit.
So this was what I was up against. Maybe I should have chucked the films in the bin straight away but that stuff isn’t cheap nowadays, as you may have noticed. And there was always the possibility of getting something usable from the HP5 if my luck was in which it seldom was, to be honest.
I’ve got a roll of Ilford’s replacement HP5 in the Mamiya Press now so I don’t expect to be moaning about materials again any time soon. Fingers crossed.
Here's hoping it has gone for good - very frustrating to say the least!
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