First C-41 development

Today was the day! I'd been putting it off for a bit. I finally mixed and poured.

But let me rewind a bit. For colour film I love Kodak Gold 200. It's bright and vibrant, and suits a lot of what I like to take photos of. Some of you will remember the Yukon photos, here, if you'd like to revisit them. I got my film processed by Paul Stack, who did a fabulous job. Except he retired and moved, alas.

I started developing black and white film myself. Nervous at first, following the instruction, twitchy about anything going wrong. Here, if you'd like to revisit. I've done a bunch of it now, and I'm comfortable doing it. I now know that the good water I get at the grocery store will be about 18.5 C just sitting in the basement, and rather than warm it up, I put in a correction factor and develop a little longer.

Except for colour film, temperature is critical. Plus the chemicals go off if you wait too long between batches. I was exposing film, putting a number on a piece of gaffer tape and using that to hold the roll closed, then putting the roll in a heavy cloth bag, in a drawer, in a dim basement. I accumulated a bunch of rolls over the last couple of months, telling myself I'd expose a bunch more rolls, get the chemicals and do it pretty well all in one go. I got the chemicals, and they sat in a drawer. In the mean time I was taking a darkroom course and starting to print in my own darkroom. Here. Which is lots of fun.

I read the instructions carefully. I watched some videos on the process. Today I finally mixed the chemicals. This kit. I don't know if I'll get 16 rolls through before the chemicals expire, but I've got 6 in progress now, with plans for a couple more rolls over the season. Even if I just do 8 rolls, that's still half the cost of sending it out to be developed. I'll probably buy the 8 roll kit next time.

Warming things up, though they were still warm from mixing, which was quite straightforward. The heater thingie is quick.

Some of you were expecting to see those black accordion bottles, weren't you? I don't care for them. I find they tend to expand up again, which sucks in air, which is bad for the chemicals. I tried putting a weight on them, but that was a pain. I'm told that oxygen can migrate through the plastic as the bottles are flexed in use and with age. I'm told the real pros use brown glass bottles.

Then Jim Sollows turned me on to these stop loss bags. They're made for woodworking glues and such, but they work great for photo chemicals as well. You can get them at Lee Valley Tools, but you need to source the funnel else where. I just swiped one of the silicone kitchen ones. Shhhh! Don't tell Linda.

I must admit there's a bit of a knack pouring things into the bags via the funnel. It's not as quick as pouring into the accordion bottles. I spilled a bit, but that's why I was doing it in the sink. It's really easy to squeeze the bag a bit to drive out all the air then seal it up.

The black and white development is three steps, develop, stop, fix, and the wetting agent is optional. The actual development process is 5 steps; develop, stop, bleach, fix, stabilize. There's also a couple rinse steps in there and I add a rinse with a wetting agent at the end. The reason for the extra steps is that it uses two separate chemicals rather than the blix mixture of bleach and fix that other kits use. Using the chemicals separately, with a rinse between prolongs the life of the chemicals. I don't mind taking an extra few minutes for the extra step.

The two processes are really similar, add chemicals for specific times, do some inversions, hang to dry. I love Delta 100 for several reasons, but one is that it dries flat. Kodak Gold 200 tends to curl a bit. Quite a bit, actually. Which is fine. Or maybe I just needed to let it dry a little longer. Maybe I'll try that next time. I take each pair of images, squish it between two sheets of gallery glass, and take a photo of it.  Run it through Negative Lab Pro to invert it. Only very minor tweaking needed.

The photos are from a a Sept 1 wander along 17 Ave with my GW690.

1. I chatted a bit with Elena as she was working. I hope she likes the photos. I asked her to keep working, and not pose, so you'll see a bit of motion blur, given the strong shade in that area.

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9. I love playing with long exposures. These are all 1 second exposures, with the camera propped on a coat, so the still part of the images are not razor sharp. I was a little surprised that nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to me. This is 17th Ave and 8th St SW.

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12. And just for fun, our cat of denialism. She loves to deny the love. Just as I clicked the shutter she closed her eyes. A digital photo, not film.

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