I close the squeegee on the film leader, being sure not to clamp it tight.
If you stop or change speed, the blades may stick to the surface of film and drag for a moment. I want to make one, good, clean, single speed pass over the film without stopping or slowing down for any reason. I hold the strip of film well above my head, making sure there’s no curls in it, that it’s nowhere near touching anything, etc. The blades need to be wet but not dripping.Ĥ–Here we go. I also imagine that if there were any debris on the blades that rubbing only moved around, a second dunk in the water may knock it off.ģ–Remove the squeegee from the distilled water once more and fling the excess water from it towards my sink. I do this because rubbing the blades dries them off too much and in order for the squeegee to glide safely over the surface of the film, it needs to be a little wet. If there is a bit of ripped film or a particle of any kind on the blade and you then apply it to the film, you are going to scratch.Ģ–Next I dunk the squeegee back in the distilled, getting the blades fully wet again. What I’m doing here is removing any debris that may have gotten stuck to the blades somehow. Then, when it comes time to use the squeegee, I follow these steps religiously:ġ–Remove the squeegee from the distilled water and thoroughly rub the blades with my wet fingertips. I’ve talked to some folks who use hot or warm water for the same purpose. The idea is that you want the rubber blades to soften up, making them as pliable as possible. Before I even begin mixing my developer or even setting all my gear out on the kitchen counter, I get out a beaker, fill it with fresh, clean distilled water and drop that squeegee in there to soak. So here’s the trick to using the rubber squeegee. (When I originally wrote this, I claimed 100%, but realistically, few things in life are 100% so let’s go with 98% on both claims!) And using the squeegee completely eliminated my water-spot issue.ġ00% finished with water-spots. In practice though, I can honestly say that the ONLY times I’ve scratched my film with the squeegee, it was because I, myself, fucked up. But for those of us who scan, maybe a little, very occasional damage is OK. Obviously, if you’re a photographer who makes optical prints directly from the neg, scratching isn’t an option. Or I could risk scratching my film from time to time, which isn’t hard to clone out of a frame or two since I scan my film. The way I saw it, I could either put up with water-spots and rewash my film over and over as I chased them from all the good frames to the bad frames. I chose the Dot Line probably just because it was available at a good price. And water-spots were never a problem then. I remembered in school, we used a squeegee to dry our film. Expensive is always better, right? Well, the only difference that I saw between Kodak Photoflo and Edwal’s LFN was that the LFN, smartly, incorporates an eyedropper on its bottle so you can measure it out more precisely.įinally, I decided to get a little crazy.
A lot of people online swore at Photoflo and swore by LFN wetting agent, which is considerably more expensive. This reduced the water spots a bit but they were still occurring. To resolve, I started doing a final wash with Photoflo in distilled, rather than tap water. Healthier for people but no bueno for film processing! Apparently the water here is more fortified with minerals than in good ole Bmore. Every time I processed, I’d get water-spots drying all over my film. I didn’t use distilled water during film processing and I always dried my film by “squeegeeing” it with wet fingers prior to hanging. As the saying goes, “it’s a poor crafts-person who blames their tools.” I firmly believe that this is the case with squeegees. I followed this advice for years but then came to disagree. Many shooters will tell you that squeegees scratch negatives and to avoid them at all costs. I have a very controversial little tool to thank for the cleanliness of my negatives the Dot Line DL-6121, more commonly known as a rubber squeegee.
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