I am having problems with gritty negatives. The water that I use to mix my chemicals and wash my negatives is of poor quality. It is quite dirty and increases in colour with heavy rainfall. I'm just thinking about any cheap, fast, effective methods of filtering my water for the darkroom. On a low budget, I'd like to find the easy way out before expensive filtration renovations. Thanks in advance for any help justin mcmaster

-- Justin McMaster (justinmcm@hotmail.com), August 11, 1998

Answers

Filtering water supplies

Justin, There are a number of good faucet mounted filters which should work for you and don't cost a lot (under $50.), but if you use a lot of water, replacement elements can get expensive. They are readily available. I don't know where you are, or whether you are on well water or a city system, but if you are getting color changes after a rainfall, you may have some basic problems with your supply. If you use the same water for drinking and cooking, it might be worthwhile to have the system and water checked out. If there is a problem and it can be corrected, you may not need a filter. RNewman

-- Richard Newman (rnewman@snip.net), August 11, 1998.

Clean water

Living in a temperate rain forest we commonly have dirty water at certain times of the year. I have found that the grit is only of importance during the final rinse and the most inexpensive way to solve this is to buy a large jug of filtered or reverse osmosis water from any large supermarket. In Canada, Safeway provides filtered water refills for about 55 cents US for 4 liters. After washing the film just rinse two or more times with the filtered water. I get perfectly clean negatives without having to mess them up with junk like PhotoFlo and this amount will do about 5 35mm films - pretty cheap.

-- Andy Laycock (agl@intergate.bc.ca), August 13, 1998.