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A History of Bad Men (Tmax 100; developed in Ilfosol 3 [1:9]). |
For the past year, I have been fascinated by film photography, having been introduced to it from my late grandfather. Shortly after starting to shoot 35mm film, I began to scan my negatives using my Nikon Zf with a 105mm f2.8 MC lens and a Valoi Easy35. This allowed me to pay a lab to develop the film for me, but digitize and edit the negatives myself, rather than paying for the lab to scan them (and often give low quality jpegs unless you pay over $20 per roll). This reduced cost while also affording me more control over the process. Despite this, I could not escape the feeling that I should also be doing the development myself too. My grandfather would often talk about how he used to develop his own black and white film and even had a darkroom for a short while. After doing some research, I discovered that the process is relatively straightforward, only requiring a single developer that can be used at room temperature (20oC/68oF) and a fixer. To my delight, I was given a Paterson Film Processing Starter Kit as an early birthday gift, and wanted to share some of my initial results!