Developing Film Photos Is a Lost Art (404media.co) 93
An amateur photographer has documented his experience with at-home color film development and digitization. The process, initially undertaken for cost savings, involves a complex setup including a changing bag, developing tank, chemicals, and a DSLR scanning system, the author argues. Key challenges reported include film loading in darkness and achieving consistent image quality. Despite mixed results, the hobbyist -- Jason Koebler, an editor of 404 Media, a new publication that we have linked to quite a few times in recent months -- nonetheless cites satisfaction with the artistic and analog aspects of the process. He concludes: I have obviously (obviously!) not saved any money yet by doing this myself at home. I have spent many hundreds of dollars to develop about 20 rolls of film at home, and have achieved results that I am both amazed by and also frustrated with. The amazement comes from the fact that any of this actually works at all, and the knowledge that I am trying my best and having fun. The frustration comes from the blurry photos. It's all part of the process, I guess.
I don't miss it (Score:3)
Re: I don't miss it (Score:3)
As a former practitioner of this lost art, I don't miss the mess, the stink, the eternal battle against dust (I am a particularly dusty guy, it seems), but MOST of all, I love the clean, neutral whites digital produces, that are so rare with film.
Mind you, I still love the look of Ilford grain and tone, but that can be simulated well enough.
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As a former practitioner of this lost art, I don't miss the mess, the stink, the eternal battle against dust (I am a particularly dusty guy, it seems), but MOST of all, I love the clean, neutral whites digital produces, that are so rare with film.
Mind you, I still love the look of Ilford grain and tone, but that can be simulated well enough.
I only ever developed and printed B+W. Even the smell of the stop bath wasn't a stink for me - it mostly smelled like vinegar. I hear you regarding the dust though.
As for neutral whites, I'm just the opposite. I almost always wanted warm white to go with the warm blacks I favoured. IIRC, Agfa Portriga matte print paper was my favourite.
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I like shooting film, but for me...anything in the 35mm aspect ratio, I do pretty much all digital.
I like film for aspect ratios I can't do with digital.
I mostly sh
Re: I don't miss it (Score:2)
Oh, I miss my old Sinar, and the slow discipline of 4x5 studio work.
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But I miss nothing about working with a 4x5
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Well, different strokes.
I liked the quality of images I got, and the very slow process of setting up a still-life-type shot and getting everything just right, polaroiding it to death before getting off a few frames of real film.
Nice if you've got a well-equipped studio where it lives, vs. having to drag it around with you - I can see that would be a literal drag.
Re: I don't miss it (Score:2)
I also shot a fair amount of film from 400-foot rolls, but on a Maron 1600 rostrum camera for Multi-Image production.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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the look of Ilford grain and tone ... can be simulated well enough.
No it can't. Silver based photographic images (what I guess you mean by "Ilford") are composed of minute randomly distributed, randomly sized clumps of silver. Digital images are composed of dye deposited in a rigidly defined 2D grid. The two look as distinctively different from each other as an oil painting looks from the lithographed reproduction of it, or a poem looks from an AI's response to a prompt to write a sonnet.
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Well enough to suit me, with modern resolutions.
Whats more, someone with better color vision than mine can do a great job of grading color into B&W and into pseudo-B&W with subtle coloration in the blacks.
You like what you like, and I like what I like. Fine by me.
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And while I'm at it, I guess if you don't recognize the name "Ilford", you don't know what I was looking at.
How do you base a cogent thought about how something looks which you've apparently never seen?
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> the stink
I like it.
I apparently have my dads nose. He works as a printer and when I was little mum, my sister and I went to visit him at work. My mum and sister could barely handle the smells of the inks etc. I couldnt smell a thing, like my dad. The smell of flux on solder, the smell of polycement when building model kits etc, all smell great to me.
Dont think I sniff them though lol, I was never that stupid. I like the ambience of the smell, like insense.
However there are two things that make me r
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Re:I don't miss it (Score:4, Informative)
Anybody who wants to do film at home is a masochist.
Digital is, by far, the way to go. And if you want a print, there are a lot of labs around that do incredible work at reasonable prices.
Hell, if you insist on shooting on film, you're still far better off having it developed at a lab. There's still quite a few around that do that, and most of them will cheerfully do mail order.
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Totally the opposite.
I prefer a DSLR for playing with the art, but when it comes to actually enjoying the whole process nothing beats film, mechanical cameras, reflex or twin lens systems and development and projection.
Alas I cut out the darkroom mostly and scan my negatives.
Digital is great but it triggers my hoarding nature. Film creates barriers that contain it.
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Agree. It wasn't all that hard, it was just tedious, and an endless struggle against dust.
A lost art?!? (Score:5, Informative)
The process is incredibly well documented, and modern tools such as sous vide circulators make achieving the proper temperature trivial. If you're getting blurry photos, that's the fault of the photographer, not the process.
Film photography is experiencing a bit of a resurgence. I don't think it's ever been easier to digitize negatives, so I'm a bit baffled at the author's difficulties.
Re: A lost art?!? (Score:2)
You don't have to be good enough to make money doing something if you can write about how hard it is for you and project that onto the rest of the world.
Re:A lost art?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but dark room technique is an art/craft. It is like every thing else done largely by hand though; doing it well takes practice. Recognizing issues, and being able to correct takes experience.
Most of his issues seem to come down to - I tried a craft and it wasn't as easy as I expected.
The other things is printing is the 'fun' part really. He's cheating himself, just developing film
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True, but dark room technique is an art/craft
IIRC, even in the heyday of home darkrooms (70s-90s), relatively few people developed color film at home. Black and white was substantially easier and cheaper. For example, for B&W you could have a red light in the darkroom--the B&W film and/or paper wasn't sensitive to red wavelengths. No such luck for color film. You have to work in total darkness.
(Disclosure: I've never worked in a darkroom, not even once. I don't even know anyone who had a darkroom.)
The other things is printing is the 'fun' part really. He's cheating himself, just developing film
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. He's missing half t
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Making color prints (at least a C-41 process) without trying to do anything specifically artsy, is a bit more time consuming but on the whole not really more difficult.
There is a little 'guess' work if you are using the traditional diffuser based approach to balancing color. You will likely need to make few test prints to determine if they are to blue/green/red based on what the meter told you, for each group of negatives shot under the same conditions. Unlike black and white its a little more subjective a
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It's actually not hard making colour ptrints, in fact the process is standard *across all film emulsions*.
There are just a few extra steps involved, and unlike with B&W, you MUST develop at a certain temprature, thats it.
A colour development kit is all you need and such kits simplyfy the process even further by combining the bleach and fix stages into one! The new "blix" stage as it is called removes a whole step and so most of the work in developing colour (I too havnt tried it) is mostly in getting t
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Printing does add a significant layer of complexity. I wouldn't mind having a darkroom to do prints in, but it's a low priority, given modern digitizing, editing and printing options.
Darkroom printing is incredibly expensive, tedious, and resource intensive.
Re:A lost art?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
The other things is printing is the 'fun' part really. He's cheating himself, just developing film
Definitely. I only shot black-and-white so developing the film wasn't onerous, but it was a chore. Printing was the best though - cropping the shot, estimating the exposure because I didn't have a meter, dodging-and-burning to increase detail in dark areas without blowing out light areas, experimenting with different developer mixes, rubbing the emulsion with my fingers to speed up development in some spots, playing chicken with the process by purposely under-developing and hoping the print didn't fade or darken... Good times.
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I develop both B&W and C-41 in my kitchen. No dark room required. I do have a dark tent for loading the film tanks, but that I use on my coffee table. Digitizing, I either use a flatbed scanner for 2400 DPI, or a DSLR for ludicrous resolution.
As for developing itself, since you're not developing to print, you follow the recipe-- because that's all it is. If you can bake a cake, you can develop film.
Re: A lost art?!? (Score:2)
re: blurry - that depends. Film can look soft to one accustomed mainly to digital.
There's also the arbitrary quality of his DSLR scan setup. Wet drum scanning back in the day was a very expensive craft all it's own.
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The process is incredibly well documented, and modern tools such as sous vide circulators make achieving the proper temperature trivial. If you're getting blurry photos, that's the fault of the photographer, not the process.
I expect, as with many bloggers, this person isn't bothering to lean on the expertise that's widely available. He's making is harder for himself just because otherwise he wouldn't have much to write about.
Sheesh, for that matter I bet it'd be pretty easy to find a retired film photographer who'd be happy to show him the ropes in person.
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He wouldnt need aretired photographer at all. There are plenty of us film users ho never stopped.
Reddit has several subreddits for film photography and there are many other resources and opinions as to the DSLR vs film scanner debate
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I studied photography in college in the late 80s. While we spent a lot of time in the dark room working on black and white, the professor at RIT (huge photography dept) said he only knew one colleague who developed his own color film.
While many would work on color prints on their own, because the color film was so sensitive to both temperature and time in processing through multiple color processes, and there was only one chance to get it right, it was better left to machines.
Wikipedia (of course) has a n
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'Film photography is experiencing a bit of a resurgence. I don't think it's ever been easier to digitize negatives, so I'm a bit baffled at the author's difficulties.'
I guess he watched Antonioni's 'Blow up'.
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Yes plus today there are more and more tools to allow even casual hobbyists to develop their own film. You don't even need a darkroom. You can get special light-proof capsules and black bags in which you can load the film into them. They even include a practice strip so you can practice doing it. You then pull in your chemicals and drain them in the right order and time and you are done.
If anything, the hobby of developing your own (monochrome) film is now much more accessible than it ever was.
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What you described is a changing bag and a standard developing tank. Standard equipment for developing film since, well way before I was born in 1980.
> If anything, the hobby of developing your own (monochrome) film is now much more accessible than it ever was.
I don’t see how, the stuff you described is what I was using in the 90's and what my dad was using in the 70's and what my granddad used before him.
None of this is new really, and if the guy simply doesn’t know about these things then
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The biggest difference between then and now, are 1) There are endless tutorials on YouTube (and others) for developing. 2) Sous Vide circulators make achieving a set temperature easy. Fill a tub with water, set the chemical bottles in the tub, and set the circulator to 103F / 39C. Sit back and wait.
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The only thing that seems to be lost is getting a photo enlarger and making prints. There is a notable difference between a print made directly from shining light onto paper made from a negative and developing the print, versus scanning negatives and having a photo printer do the outcome.
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Agreed, although I was very happy to discover that many photo labs print professionally onto the very same paper that the enarger uses.
You do need to check the paper type you are asking for, but as long as you get the right paper you get an opically made silver halide print, from your jpg.
Fuji make the papers.
The labs just use laser printers (no, not an office type) to print onto the light sensitive paper. And they have been doing that since the late 90's and 00's, where they develop your film, then scan i
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> If you're getting blurry photos, that's the fault of the photographer, not the process.
Incorrect. The developer affects the sharpness as much as the lens does. There are developers designed specifically for sharpness and more. These usually get discussed more when developing B&W as for colour the process is largely the same.
I develop my old colour films using B&W developers as I CBA to get a colour processing kit (never done colour processing before) so I just process with B&W developers
Technology Connections has some good videos (Score:4, Informative)
I've really enjoyed the YouTube videos from Technology Connections on film processing: playlist [youtube.com]
Meh (Score:1)
Film is stinky. Processing it is even more stinky. It's expensive. And it's been lower quality than digital for a long time now.
It can stay lost.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
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> but physical film fakery can be detected with a good degree of reliability
In the 90's there was a programme on the BBC hosted by Carol Vorderman that looked at stange happenings, ghost sightings and the like. It was actually pretty interesting and one of the early episodes was concerned with an apparent analogue photo of a ghost photographed in the window of a burning house.
They showed that the image had been manipulated, digitally and then simply copied ot on a colour photocopier.
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The tech's still good, sensors are just hitting in the past like year or two the equivalent of 400 iso with 20 megapixel. Also IR film's cool you have to do cursed things with a commercial digital camera to do that for legal reasons, because that used to be the digital photography see through cloths trick.
Issue is without it being the go to everyone does it for things like disposable cameras standard it's just way too complicated and expensive.
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Digital has a way to go before it can match film. 35mm digital sensors may have managed to achieve parity with 35mm film (as far as human eyes are concerned) but nothing can touch 120 yet, forget 70mm!
You haven’t lived if you haven’t seen a projected 120 slide.
To match the quality of 35mm film you need at least 40MP. An ASP-C sensor can’t do it, so you need a full frame 35mm sensor, so you are looking at a wad of cash and hardly anyone besides a pro would consider that.
The inherent qualit
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And it's been lower quality than digital for a long time now.
No, digital has been easier to get high resolution out of. Medium format film easily produces 50 megapixel images. 4x5 can produce truly insane resolution. 35mm is limited to about 16 megapixel under most conditions, but you can hit 30 megapixel if you're willing to do wet-mount scanning.
I know how to doge and burn (Score:2)
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Unless you've held the tools PhotoShop's tool icons are based on, are you really a Photographer?
I can't remember what the dodge and burn icons look like in Photoshop. Do they look like the physical tools? And I wonder if the documentation makes reference to what the tools did back in the day.
Someone needs to keep a reference page of icons which look like physical items which we no longer use and the youngun's wouldn't recognize if the found one. Start with a floppy disk and a telephone handset.
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It's tough to make a good icon out of a piece of cardboard.
Not at all a "lost art" (Score:2)
You can find how to guides and videos all over the internet. You can find countless books about it. You can still get the chemicals for it, and if you can't, we'll you can always piss in the tank (takes the place of fixer), and then pour a cold brew into your development tank (coffee actually makes for a fun black and white developer). You can still buy the tools for it online. And above all, it's not difficult. Literally aced my second roll of film. Sure colour is a bit harder, but all you need is a water
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One of the most important components to ensuring repeatability in colour processing is making sure that the colour developers are consistent in temperature and in time, otherwise colour shifts occur. Beyond the things you already need and have above the black and white process it's really not more complicated than controlling time (stopwatch) and temperature (water bath), beyond which it's basically a repeat of the black and white process over and over again with different chemicals.
So everything else you n
A niche hobby (Score:4, Interesting)
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Digital promotes lazyness and de-skills the photographer.
I switched to using my DSLR fully manual save for autofocus long ago. I only use the light meter to make corrections or to check certain parts of the image otherwise I shoot just be using the exposure triangle.
I learned all of that when I was 10, in the 90's where there were no screens. It was easy.
Film is espensive, digital is good enough and the screen on a camera is great for saving money while actually learning the skill, but the kicker is, MOST
This brings back memories (Score:3)
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That was back in 1955 ( yes I'm Biden's age).
Well they wouldn't want you at the head of the ticket, but I hear they're looking for a VP candidate now... and I bet there's a great darkroom somewhere in the White House.
Film? (Score:2)
What's that?
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What's that?
It's that clingy plastic food wrap that comes in long rolls.
Major advantage of film (Score:2)
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When I shot film, I had a Pentax K-1000. It was auto-nothing, except it did have a built-in light meter - which did require a battery.
I've shot without a light meter before, but I'd much rather use one and end up wasting fewer frames.
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> I've shot without a light meter before, but I'd much rather use one and end up wasting fewer frames.
I only occasionally use the light meter, on everything up to my DSLR.
Once I discovered sunny 16 I never looked back.
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Negative scanning misadventure (Score:2)
I particularly like the part where the author decides that one post on reddit will send them down the road of spending $400 on a rube-goldberg-like negative scanning adventure (not counting the cost of the DSLR and mount that they already owned), to get at most 4000x6000 pixels (the max single-shot of the a6000), while for the same price you can purchase an almost-certainly-better-quality-and-certainly-less-fiddly negative scanner that would give you 7200dpi (roughly 6800x10000 pixels on a full 135 frame).
A
What film? (Score:1)
Alive and Well over at http://forum.mflenses.com (Score:1)
I did it in the 70s (Score:2)
I had a darkroom and did black and white and color, slides and prints
Things are better now
I would never go back to film
It was lost decades ago (Score:4, Informative)
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That doesn't make it a lost art. A lost art is something that is difficult to replicate as the exact process by which it was done is lost knowledge or too difficult to trivially replicate. Developing a colour photograph can be learnt in a weekend or two. It's not a lost art, just a niche hobby.
nonsensical (Score:4, Informative)
The only creative control developing your own negatives gives you is being able to correct for ISO settings when shooting the pictures with a given film sensitivity. This affects the entire frame of every image on the entire roll of film. Developing film is not the creative part of the process.
Analogue photo printing is where the artist can inject their creativity by leveraging a huge swath of variables. This guy isn't doing that and is squandering any rationale for messing about with analog processing and film. Might as well be shooting digital on the front end if he's going to futz with his images on a computer after shooting pictures of his negatives with a DSLR.
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I'm no expert, but people used to use all sorts of different chemicals to get different looks, especially with colour film.
Using a DSLR as a scanner is an interesting choice. You can still get flatbeds with film scanner adapters, or really high end dedicated negative/slide scanners that are very expensive. Just pointing a camera at it isn't a bad budget option, and used to be the main way people made prints from slides.
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> Just pointing a camera at it isn't a bad budget option
Ah but thats the myth, which is confirmed in his own article.
Scanning the film (it isnt even scannning) using a DSLR setup is far from the budget option.
The budget option is the flatbed scanner with the transparency unit. You dont even need a new one, ebay has loads. I bought my Canon 8800f film scanner off ebay for all of £40 and it has a native resolution so high it trashes anything his camera can pick up, in fact I reduce the scanned resol
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That's true. I got an Epson flatbed film/slide scanner for a tenner from someone local, scanned all our family stuff, and gave it away.
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The only creative control developing your own negatives gives you is being able to correct for ISO settings when shooting the pictures with a given film sensitivity. This affects the entire frame of every image on the entire roll of film. Developing film is not the creative part of the process.
Sorry but that's a load of crap. Developing controls for more than just ISO, you control grain, and contrast as well in black and white. For colour your choice of film and development process controls a world of additional variables the most obvious being colour balance. Beyond that though the choice of film you use is a creative choice as well. Heck you can even choose to dissolve the anti-halation layer on the film before you load it in your camera for some nice effects as well. The fact that all of this
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Look closer and you'll see that it isnt even a 35mm DSLR but a Sony a6000, an APS-C mirrorless.
It will never be able to fully capture the detail of a 35mm film with a smaller sensor. Those who try using this sort of set up to scan 120 film also have to divide the film into areas and take multiple phots and stitch them together if they want something that approaches what the see on the 120 negative.
DSLR scanning helps in several scenarios:
- Scanning books quickly
- Scanning prints quickly
- Scanning negatives
It's an obsolete technology (Score:2)
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House numbers/adresses are also obsolete but I dont see anyone getting rid of those.
Dont believe me?
When was the last time someone actually, I mean REALLY needed to know what house in the road you live in?
Mail? Nobody gets mail anymore. Parcels? Nobody has those delivered to the door anymore, we all get them from the locker.
Food deliveries? No, they deliver to the road and text you then you appear and collect, very few deliver to the door and thinking about it, why should they?
Basically all you need is
Dad used to process black and white (Score:2)
When I was little my Dad was super into photography. He had part of the garage setup as a dark room for black and white film. I think it was fun for Dad and he liked to experiment with the parameters. I could never get into it. Unless you were Ansel Adams, it seemed like more of a skill than an art to me, maybe I just wasn't very skilled.
best use of chemical bottles... (Score:2)
Black and White isn't that hard (Score:2)
Color on the other hand is much, much more complicated, and results in pretty ugly colors if you don't get it right. AFAIK most hobbyist photographers back in the day did not bother to develop/print their
used to do that in school as a hobby (Score:1)
the development process doesn't make them "blurry" in the traditional sense normally. It makes them grainy if your film gets hot from hot chemicals. if you don't like the grain long and cold.
However I'd blame the blur on the digitization process, I don't think anyone ever set up a good way to do that at high precision. Used to be some cheap 35mm scanners, but those where more for memory photos you don't care as much about being a bit fucked up.
High school. (Score:2)
When I was a boy, every high school hard a dark room!
Indie Film Lab (Score:2)
There are still places that do an excellent job with C41. Indie Film Lab ( https://www.indiefilmlab.com/ [indiefilmlab.com] ) is one of them, as reviewed in-depth by Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day fame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
B&W is still a great process to master (Score:2)
Looking through a viewfinder and knowing you have only 24 or 36 shots on a roll concentrates your eye. Woodworking and painting are complicated but also worth it. Itâ(TM)s a good problem solving environment. In a pinch a sturdy dark coat laid on a table with the bottom folded over and your hands the wrong way through the sleeves can be your changing bag. Paterson tanks and auto reels are your friend. Just resurrected an old darkroom and did a week of BW film and print. Mistake was using dektol for pap
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Agreed.
People shave wood off other wood with sharp things: nobody bats an eyelid.
People push coloured dye around paper with a stick that has some horse hair or other fibres sticking out one end. They spend ages doing it outdoors even, at strange times of the day: everyone thinks it’s cool to paint.
Both those are outdated and obsolete. Woodworking, metal working, all obsoleted by 3D printing. Painting, obsoleted by digital photography and filters in software or instead you can use an iPad pro or som
Developing Colour Film At Home Has Aways Been Hard (Score:2)
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> And the guys bitching about film bags and loading canisters, fuck off you pussy.
I dont do it often these days for a myriad of reasons but I have been developing my own B&W film since the mid 90's when I was introduced to it at school.
I agree with that humorous statement! The only thing I worry about when using a changing bag is keeping good tabs on the location of my fingers when trimming film :D
Other than always wanting to get a slightly bigger changing bag as I find it's a tad cramped, I find th
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> Old days I used light sealed rooms.
I only ever used a changing bag. When I was a kid the darkroom was my dads garage and even that was only dark at night!
I prefer to develop during the day. I wish I had a darkroom now but need to get an enlarger etc and as that is not the biggest priority I stick with scanning the negatives for now.
BUt I have my own hose and a spare room that may end up a darkroom at some point, once I find a B&W enlarger I like, and I get around to finaly clearing it out (been m
Lost art? (Score:3)
I do this all the time. Been doing it since I was a kid in the 90's.
It's not hard at all. Patterson reels make loading a film as simple as just twisting a hand back and forth, easily done in a changing bag.
The only difficult bit is carefully, minding the position of your fingers when using scissors to cut off file leaders etc. That’s it.
As for the development, I don’t know why he has had to spend so much. Actually, he is doing colour, which has more steps, even when using a kit. I only shoot B&W film, and even if I did shoot a colour film I may just develop it using the B&W method which results in B&W photos from a colour negative. A scanner is *essential* when doing that as the negatives get quite dense and a scanner sees right through them.
B&W development however is cheap as chips. To save even more money you can just use powdered developers or a developer that can store for long periods. I just use a liquid one and test it before use.
If you REALLY want to save money, use orange juice. Seriously.
I see he is using a DSLR, well that’s the biggest mistake if you want to save money. A DSLR scanning system is a maintenance and setup nightmare. You are basically pressing a DSLR into service as a scanner, you need to align it, you need a 1:1 macro lens with a flat focal plane. Now such lenses are expensive and if you don’t already have a DSLR and a macro lens or a non-flat macro lens and are willing to live with blur at the edges then ok, setting a DSLR up for scanning is an option, if you already have one. If not, it’s much better to just jet a film scanner! Already built, already calibrated and with a resolution that *exceeds* the APS-C DSLR you are likely going to use, you might as well just use a scanner.
The only reason a DSLR setup makes sense at all is volume. If you have a LOT of scanning to do, it will make it much faster than using a scanner. That is certainly a fact. Just never touch the DSLR again, you’ll never get it lined up correctly a second time so buy a second one if you like to shoot digital as well as film.
It also makes sense if you wish to re-use an old DSLR you have thanks to an upgrade. But if you haven’t got the volume if images, or a spare or cheap DSLR to hand, then yes it will cost you an arm and a leg to set one up vs just using a film scanner.
As for the blurry photos. Well, that’s where the art really is. Assuming you nailed the focus, and your camera or lens wasn’t misaligned, your choice of developer does affect the sharpness as well as the size of grain etc.
Also as he is probably using an APS-C sensor, it won’t have the resolution to fully capture the detail of a 35mm frame. You'll need at least 40MP to get that and if you were to shoot 120 film, why the hell would you "scan" it with something that has such a small sensor by comparison. Still, that’s what many like to do and there are some reasons, if you don’t need to get all the detail from a 120 negative but have a LOAD to scan then fine, a DSLR setup will speed things up quite a bit.
Personally I shoot less often. I spend my time taking the shots anyway, as I'm limited by the film length. I spend time choosing a subject and frequently just look at something or someone (I do candid/street photos too) and simply just say "nah". If I were to use my DSLR I'd probably have taken the shot, then deleted it when trying to reduce the size of the album :D
Another "lost art" may be the act of shooting manual. Besides autofocus, I shoot fully manual on all my cameras including the DSLR, if they lend themselves to it that is, I can’t be arsed with the manual settings on my phone beyond making an exposure adjustment. If I do use an exposure mode I prefer aperture priority, but most of the time I shoot fully manual (I leave AF on as DSLR's have no focus assist (don’t tell me about mirrorless, I'm years away from considering those)) a