Getting there

Four rolls of film in the bag as far as contact sheets and getting some usable images printed out and although they have not turned out exactly as I had hoped, they have helped get the technical side of things to a manageable level. I feel quite confident now I can produce a good Image if i have done the business when the shot was taken.

Contact sheet 1 and the only Image I managed to get after all but destroying the film in processing..

Tolley

Contact sheet 2 and the double exposed images 

BOB

Keepi it  unreal

Contact sheet 3 and the image from it

Ladder art

Contact sheet 4 and the images from it

Really

RR10

Space invader

Second attempt at developing film

Ok,so lesson learnt from the first attempt at developing I went in Monday with 2 films and set about getting them done. No mistakes this time and as far as the development went they were as good as I had hoped.

However,There was something a little strange looking on them as I hung them to dry,the images looked very busy..then it dawned on me i could see 2 images on each frame. I remembered I had tried to take the film out of the camera thinking it was finished, when i was ill last week and have somehow managed to shoot both films twice..

Brilliant , I have shot 3 films worth of images and potentially have nothing  usable towards this street photography assignment. I'll happily make these mistakes now if it means i don't make them again(soon)

 From Paul Graham's archive he used in a paper to Yale MFA Photography Graduation, February 2009.

"Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can admit to in a lifetime, and stay sane"
- Thomas Pynchon, V

First film development

So,having missed the lesson where everyone got to put their first rolls of black and white film through the development process I luckily managed to get one done last Friday. well kind of.

I was looking to get a straight forward development done textbook style to use as a bench mark,no point trying to get ahead of yourself with crazy high or low contrasting negatives and being clever if you cant get the basics right on demand.

This video from YouTube is the best i could find to show how it should be done from start to finish and what you need. By best,i mean it has no talking on it and who ever filmed it hasn't kept in any mistakes they made whilst filming. For this i am extremely grateful and can nearly excuse the music choice. The 9 people who disliked the video must have broken mute buttons.

B & W 35mm Film Development Tutorial


And here is the info we used lovingly prepared by Antony and left to hang in the developing room.

As you can see if you watched the video,some of the measurements are slightly different and that is to be expected. Each brand will have its own instructions and should be changed accordingly.

So that's how it should be done and IF i had followed the instructions i would have had a decent set of negatives to show for it after about an hour and a half. What I did and wont be doing again is after developing the film for 20 minutes picked up the wrong bottle and put fixer in next instead of stop.

Idiot.

I realised and emptied it out, used the stop and carried out the rest of the process in the hope it wouldn't be ruined. Hanging it up to dry i could see some of the images. Some had more than others in what is best described as a cloud of fog running up and down the entire strip.