Finally over the weekend, after years of using Labs to develop films for me, I got round to developing my first roll of film. Lots of years of reading books, websites here, there and everywhere, reading threads, watching videos and making notes, all proved really useful.
I had a Kodachrome PMK 25 ISO film, expired but kept in my fridge for the last 5 years, which I decided to treat as a 25 ISO b/w film. I used my Pentax MX, with an SMC 28mm lens, mainly f16 and f22, for 1-2 seconds on a tripod and remote trigger.
For development I used guidance from the Massive Dev Chart website, seeing that a few of the 25 ISO films (Adox Pan 25, Efke 25) had development suggestions of 11-20 minutes using 1:100 Rodinal at 20C. So I decided on a development time of 15 minutes at 20C using the Tetenal Paranol S I'd bought, 5 minutes in the Indicet Stop, and 10 minutes in Superfix, washing off the remjet backing under running water from my hot tap, and a final rinse in mild washing up liquid.
And I was really pleased to see I had images
Some rookie errors for me to learn from:
1) Accidentally rewinding the whole film into the cannister, then being unable to use the film-retriever tool to capture the end/beginning of the film, and resorting to using pliers in the dark to open the can (learned from the School of Brute Force and Ignorance) - so to learn how to use that tool properly - doh!
2) Though I'd practiced rolling a film onto the developing reel in the light a couple of times to check my method, I re-assembled it wrongly, and struggled in the dark to get the film to spiral round the reel, and then had to poke the film out at the end as I couldn't disassemble the reel, resulting in marked scratching on some frames - so I need to check I reassemble the reel correctly - doh!
3) I threw away (poured into my disposal bottle along with the used 1:100 Paranol S) my solution of Superfix, and I think it can be reused a few times, I used 50ml out of my 250ml bottle
- so to reuse at least a few times - doh!
4) Learn how to scan for a sharp image using my Canoscan 9000f when considering a 200kb maximum jpeg...the images I have are sharper than these, and I've probably not resized the images in the best way. I scanned 'as colour' hoping it would compensate for the orange/sepia film base, and the images came out sepia toned, so then removed the colour profile and set it to 'grey scale' - more reading and tutorials for me I think - doh!
But I'm so pleased the magical processes I've been reading about for so long worked for me. I recognise that these are not the usual top-notch images I see here, but they're my first attempt, and it's certainly been an encouraging experience for me.
