Hi All,

I just learned a hard lesson about mounting today. I was preparing to
remount a requested slide for the NSA display, my own entry "The
Ghost". It was mounted in the cardboard mounts some years ago. To my
horror, when I went to separate the original image from the mylar
tape, the emulsion ripped right off the film base!!!!!!

The top of the image is gone. The good news is that it is still
salvageable, as I can crop the top off and make up by showing more of
the bottom. But the lessons are pretty clear:

1. Don't let mylar tape adhere to the emulsion side of the image,
especially if you think you might remount later on.

2. Make a copy as soon as you can!!!

This was specifically a monochrome image made from Technical Pan film.
I don't know if it is more frail than other slide films over the
years, but in any case I'm definately going to be more careful. I'm
certainly going to add this to my mounting guide though. It now seems
obvious, but I don't recall reading anywhere about which side of the
film should be secured to the mount. Did I miss something after all
these years?

Sam

Sam Smith writes:

> This was specifically a monochrome image made from Technical Pan film. I
> don't know if it is more frail than other slide films over the years, but
> in any case I'm definately going to be more careful. I'm certainly going
> to add this to my mounting guide though. It now seems obvious, but I don't
> recall reading anywhere about which side of the film should be secured to
> the mount. Did I miss something after all these years?

The exact same thing happened to me. It was even Tech Pan film.
Unfartunaely in my case I was pulling so quickly that before I could stop
I had lifted off 1/3 of the emulison and the image was not salvagable.

The problem is that with the cardboard mounts the smaller aperture is to
the front so you must mount your images upside down to this side to get
the exact window placement you desire. Doing this places the emulsion
side towards you and this is the side that gets the mylar (or other)
tape. I don't see any way around this except to mount to the larger back
aperture and hope the smaller front aperture doesn't cutoff anything you
wanted.

The plastic 3D World mounts have equal apertures so you can mount to the
back half with the film correct and emulsion side down and the tape on
that side.

This is the same scenario with 35mm cardboard mounts vs. RBT mounts.

Back to the film for a moment. In the beginning I was having a friend,
Fritz Brown, doing my reverse developing on Tech Pan in his home lab. He
had mentioned that during the process the emulsion becomes very fragile
and if you are too aggressive the entire thing can become detached from
the film base. I believe that dr5 also has some warnings about "fragile"
B&W film when reversed processed.

Thanks,

David W. Kesner