Finally, B&W Darkroom Success!
This past Wednesday I finally developed a roll of film that came out correct, and I successfully made a good print off of it! I spent last weekend shooting pictures near Skyline Lake where highway 280 and highway 92 intersect. I shot mostly Velvia 100 and focused on getting the sunset, but I found a deserted highway that was fairly interesting, and I thought it would look good in B&W so I shot it on HP5+.
I went into the lab with a fair amount of trepidation, since I still had not gotten everything to work right. I had bought all new developer and fixer earlier, and then on Monday I mixed the developer (Kodak D76) so that it would be at room temperature by Wednesday. But I went into the lab and everything went off without a hitch! The temperatures were correct, I read the correct developing time off of the HP5+ data sheet, and I had no issues getting the chemicals on and off the film reel in the proper order. I was in and out of the developing room in just under 30 minutes. The reel looked good as I put it into the water tank for its final rinse, but you never know until you get it fully dried.
That took another 20 minutes, during which time I checked out all the equipment I needed to make a contact sheet and setup everything at the enlarger. After all that work developing the film I wanted to see what it would finally look like, on a print! When I pulled it out of the dryer, the negatives looked fantastic, with consistently good contrast throughout the entire strip and the edges between the frames clearly delineated. It looked nothing like the mess I had the last time I developed film, that's for sure!
I put the negatives under the enlarger to make a proof sheet, and was pleasantly surprised when the test strip showed that even 8 seconds of exposure was too much for the contact sheet! I did another test strip at 1 second increments, then printed the contact sheet at 5 seconds, everything looked great! I ended up having enough time in the lab left over to make a few prints, so I chose my favorite frame and made about five prints. It looks gorgeous! I haven't had time to scan in the negatives to attach to this post so that everyone can see, but I'm quite happy! It's not a terribly interesting set of pictures anyway, just something I knew would be a good for me to practice developing pictures on.
Now I feel much more confident in developing my film for the next assignment. Yay! :-)
I went into the lab with a fair amount of trepidation, since I still had not gotten everything to work right. I had bought all new developer and fixer earlier, and then on Monday I mixed the developer (Kodak D76) so that it would be at room temperature by Wednesday. But I went into the lab and everything went off without a hitch! The temperatures were correct, I read the correct developing time off of the HP5+ data sheet, and I had no issues getting the chemicals on and off the film reel in the proper order. I was in and out of the developing room in just under 30 minutes. The reel looked good as I put it into the water tank for its final rinse, but you never know until you get it fully dried.
That took another 20 minutes, during which time I checked out all the equipment I needed to make a contact sheet and setup everything at the enlarger. After all that work developing the film I wanted to see what it would finally look like, on a print! When I pulled it out of the dryer, the negatives looked fantastic, with consistently good contrast throughout the entire strip and the edges between the frames clearly delineated. It looked nothing like the mess I had the last time I developed film, that's for sure!
I put the negatives under the enlarger to make a proof sheet, and was pleasantly surprised when the test strip showed that even 8 seconds of exposure was too much for the contact sheet! I did another test strip at 1 second increments, then printed the contact sheet at 5 seconds, everything looked great! I ended up having enough time in the lab left over to make a few prints, so I chose my favorite frame and made about five prints. It looks gorgeous! I haven't had time to scan in the negatives to attach to this post so that everyone can see, but I'm quite happy! It's not a terribly interesting set of pictures anyway, just something I knew would be a good for me to practice developing pictures on.
Now I feel much more confident in developing my film for the next assignment. Yay! :-)
posted by Chris at 1:03 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home