I finished up a roll of B&W film this weekend and spent some time developing my first roll of home-developed film. I'm not a stranger to developing B&W as I did it quite a bit in a photography class I took at NDSU, but this is the first roll I developed at home, with my very own setup. At school the chemicals were all pre-mixed, they had a sink with water at just the right temperature, and they had a light-tight closet for loading the negatives into the developing tank.
I picked up a changing bag at San Jose Camera for $19.99, a developing tank for $24.95, developer, stop bath, and fixer for $6.95 each, 2 one-gallon and 1 one-quart brown plastic bottles for storing the chemicals in after they were dissovled/diluted, and other miscellaneous kitchen items like a digital thermometor, egg timer, bottle opener etc.
Sun. morning I mixed up all of the chemicals into the brown bottles. The developer and fixer were powdered and needed to be dissolved. I think I had the water a bit too cold for the fixer because the powder ended up clumping. You could hear bit chunks of it when gently shaking the bottle. I set it out in the sun to warm up the water so that it could dissolve more. The stop bath had a very strong vinegar smell. My hands smelled like vinegar all day long afterwards. Once I got everything mixed, I set the bottles aside to reach room temperature while we ran errands around town.
When we got back, I threw the developing tank, the roll of film, a scissors and a bottle opener into the changing bag. The changing bag is a double-layered black bag with zippers on the bottom. One zipper for the outer bag and another zipper on the inner bag going the opposite direction. At the top are 2 arm holes with elastic bands to fit to your arm. I went into our far-from-light-tight-but-the-darkest-room-in-the-house bathroom and turned out the lights. It got hot in there. It took me about 10-15 minutes of fumbling around to open the film with the can opener, cut the end with a scissors, thread the film onto the reel of the developing tank, then finally put the real into the tank and close it all up. I was dripping sweat by the time I was done.
Once I had the tank all sealed up I turned the lights back on and moved my operation to the kitchen sink where I had more room to work. I started up the faucet and tried to adjust the water temperature to somewhere around 76 degrees. I then poured 16oz of developer into the tank and gently agitated it for 8 min. I later read that you only needed 10oz, but it didn't really hurt any to add more. Next time I think I'll do a 1:1 mixture of 5oz water 5oz developer, and develop it for 10 min. It uses less developer and adding the right temperature of water would bring the whole mixter closer to the appropriate temperature.
After the developer I ran some tap water through the tank to rinse any excess developer out, then added stop bath for about 30 sec. After the stop bath it was another rinse and fixer for another 10 min. After the fixer and a final rinse the film was ready to be hung to dry. The film clips I got fit perfectly onto a towel rack, with clip hanging from the towel rack, and the other weighted clip at the end of the film to keep it from curling up.
A few weeks ago when looking at scanner/printers at Fry's we had come across a refurbished epson that we liked. It was originally a $299 printer, but they were selling the refurbished ones for $76. It's got a negative/slide holder with a light on the lid for scanning negatives and slides. I'm sure it's not as good as a dedicated film scanner, but it does well enough. The negative scans do seem to have a lot of noise, but since I don't plan on making prints from the scans I can live with that. Good dedicated film scanners run anywhere from $500-$1000, which is a bit more than I'm willing to spend right now.
Anyway, it took some time trying to tweak it to get the most out of the scanner, and time to scan all the negatives in, but I got them all scanned in and put into an album on my linux box. Some of the pictures turned out pretty bad, most of them are pretty noisy, and I think a couple of the end negatives got some stray light on the end during the scan creating an odd effect, but I did get some that were not too bad.
The second is a good example of how noisy the scans can be. The film was ISO 400, which can result in more grain, but it shouldn't make it as noisy as some of these turned out.
I picked up a changing bag at San Jose Camera for $19.99, a developing tank for $24.95, developer, stop bath, and fixer for $6.95 each, 2 one-gallon and 1 one-quart brown plastic bottles for storing the chemicals in after they were dissovled/diluted, and other miscellaneous kitchen items like a digital thermometor, egg timer, bottle opener etc.
Sun. morning I mixed up all of the chemicals into the brown bottles. The developer and fixer were powdered and needed to be dissolved. I think I had the water a bit too cold for the fixer because the powder ended up clumping. You could hear bit chunks of it when gently shaking the bottle. I set it out in the sun to warm up the water so that it could dissolve more. The stop bath had a very strong vinegar smell. My hands smelled like vinegar all day long afterwards. Once I got everything mixed, I set the bottles aside to reach room temperature while we ran errands around town.
When we got back, I threw the developing tank, the roll of film, a scissors and a bottle opener into the changing bag. The changing bag is a double-layered black bag with zippers on the bottom. One zipper for the outer bag and another zipper on the inner bag going the opposite direction. At the top are 2 arm holes with elastic bands to fit to your arm. I went into our far-from-light-tight-but-the-darkest-room-in-the-house bathroom and turned out the lights. It got hot in there. It took me about 10-15 minutes of fumbling around to open the film with the can opener, cut the end with a scissors, thread the film onto the reel of the developing tank, then finally put the real into the tank and close it all up. I was dripping sweat by the time I was done.
Once I had the tank all sealed up I turned the lights back on and moved my operation to the kitchen sink where I had more room to work. I started up the faucet and tried to adjust the water temperature to somewhere around 76 degrees. I then poured 16oz of developer into the tank and gently agitated it for 8 min. I later read that you only needed 10oz, but it didn't really hurt any to add more. Next time I think I'll do a 1:1 mixture of 5oz water 5oz developer, and develop it for 10 min. It uses less developer and adding the right temperature of water would bring the whole mixter closer to the appropriate temperature.
After the developer I ran some tap water through the tank to rinse any excess developer out, then added stop bath for about 30 sec. After the stop bath it was another rinse and fixer for another 10 min. After the fixer and a final rinse the film was ready to be hung to dry. The film clips I got fit perfectly onto a towel rack, with clip hanging from the towel rack, and the other weighted clip at the end of the film to keep it from curling up.
A few weeks ago when looking at scanner/printers at Fry's we had come across a refurbished epson that we liked. It was originally a $299 printer, but they were selling the refurbished ones for $76. It's got a negative/slide holder with a light on the lid for scanning negatives and slides. I'm sure it's not as good as a dedicated film scanner, but it does well enough. The negative scans do seem to have a lot of noise, but since I don't plan on making prints from the scans I can live with that. Good dedicated film scanners run anywhere from $500-$1000, which is a bit more than I'm willing to spend right now.
Anyway, it took some time trying to tweak it to get the most out of the scanner, and time to scan all the negatives in, but I got them all scanned in and put into an album on my linux box. Some of the pictures turned out pretty bad, most of them are pretty noisy, and I think a couple of the end negatives got some stray light on the end during the scan creating an odd effect, but I did get some that were not too bad.
The second is a good example of how noisy the scans can be. The film was ISO 400, which can result in more grain, but it shouldn't make it as noisy as some of these turned out.