Developing film

I had my make-up elective Intro to Black and White Photography as the lesson last week was postponed to today.

Today's session was on developing films and we all had already taken a roll of film on our SLRs. I had taken some shots of the historic buildings around City Hall and the rest are mainly around my house and NTU as we only had 3 days to finish taking 1 roll.

Each of us have a small covered tent for us to uncap the negative film cover, cut the starting portion of the unused film, transfer the film to a roll winder, wind up the film on the roll winder, fix the roll winder stem and hook to secure the winder in place, transfer the roll into a container, and lastly screw on the container cover and cap it. ALL THESE STEPS ARE DONE BY FEELING ONLY! The covered small tent has 2 tight hand pockets to place our hands inside and we can only feel everything with our hands without seeing anything inside the tent after we placed all the equipment inside and zipped it up. It is because the film cannot be exposed to any form of light after we have taken it out from the film cover.

I started at around the same time as everyone but more and more people finished the 'tent' work while i'm still struggling with the film and the roll winder. I winded the film and it became very tight soon after and the winder seemed to jam up everytime. I would push my limits by winding more and more until i can feel the negative crumpling. I tried to release it a bit to no avail and i had to start all over again by separating the roll winder.

Stress and impatience got to me soon after and i cannot seem to join up the 2 portions of the roll winder. I pulled my hands out from the pockets and got a new roll winder inside the tent by pushing it into the hand pockets. The same thing happened while my hands were inside the tent and i guess my frustration had overcome my concentration.

Ys tried helping me after he finished rolling his film to no avail as well. The roller grew tighter and tighter and eventually crumpled the reel as a result. I returned to try and roll the darn reel while getting more and more demoralised seeing that i'm one of the last few people who still haven't got the job done yet.

We were not supposed to touch the middle of the film but i got tons of fingerprints and some sweat from my hands all over it due to my many attempts. After heeding some advice from the people who had completed the task, i decided to start from the other side of the film.

After cutting off the small plastic roll at the other end of the film, i proceeded to roll the film with much more ease and less restrictions of movements of the winder. Finally after close to an hour, i had completed the first stage of developing the film.

Next, we followed the professor to the lab area while she introduced us to the numerous steps and stages of the developing process. First, we have to mix 120 ml of developer into 480 ml of 20 degrees celcius of water. We also have to prepare the soft bath and the fixer in beakers as well. We then went into the enclosed darkroom via a black turning dial and it was bright inside. I guess i have figure out what type of light they use inside. With the instructions and help of the lab assistant, we poured the mixture into our containers containing our films for 6 minutes while 'agitating' the film every 30 seconds by shaking the container gently. After pouring away the mixture, our next step is adding the stop bath for 30 seconds. The adding of the fixer for 4 minutes is the final step to fix colours and prevent the remaining light sensitive material to react with light.

We then put the roll of film in running water for 30 minutes and repeatedly dipped the roll of film in a solution for 30 seconds before squelching the wet film between our fingers. We then clipped the ends of the films before hooking them in a hot cabinet to dry the films. We took our dry films out of the cabinet after 30 minutes and cut the films carefully into several strips to put them into the negative plastic sleeves.

Voila! The entire developing film process is done. We wrapped up at 9 pm and examined our films with a magnifying glass on a light emitting machine. Sadly, my film is in a terrible state with scratch marks, fingerprints, and a portion of film (7 photos) which is all black. I guess the overexposure must be due to the repeated taking of hands in and out of the covered tent which caused some light to accidentally shine into the tent.

Hope that my next developing process will be much smoother and the negatives turn out blemish-free.