Over the Christmas break from University I had the opportunity to develop a couple of films using the knowledge that I have learned over the last three and a half years. With no access to teh uni darkrooms I would dev it myself and then scan it in using a DSLR camera. I had a couple of films from my Street Photography Workshop in London where I had used a roll of Kodak T-Max P3200 the evening before on a wander around the capital city and took in some of the sights such as the Southbank area and the skate park there.
I shot that roll in my Leica M6 with an Elmarit 28mm lens on the front of it, and then the next day I was walking around Oxford Circus and surrounding areas of the West End, with a roll of Ilford HP5 Plus running at ISO 400 in the same camera. I used mainly digital for this day of shooting as we needed to share it with the group the following day so I had a few frames of HP5 Plus for the Sunday too, which were filled with images of Columbia Road Flower Market in the East End of London.
Developing Time
A few weeks later I looked into the development of the films at home using my current stock of chemistry including the develope I normally use for B&W films. Ilford PQ Universal is what I generally use for HP5+ and also for making prints on resin coated photograph paper. Checking on the Massive Dev Chart though I could see no recommended settings for the development of TMax P3200 with PQ Universal. A google search and research about the topic further highlighted that it is not recommended to dev this film in PQ Universal so I set about trying to source another more suitable developer that I could use for other film stocks in the future.
After a bit of controversial advice from some websites I settled on Rodinal developer which would work on this film, even if it wasn’t considered the best for the job. Others mentioned were ddifficult to come by on the websites of where I’d normally buy my chemistry. AG Photolab, Analogue Wonderland and Nik and Trick are the usual places I would frequent online for the chemistry.
I chose Rodinal and ordered some ready for it to arrive whilst I was on a Christmas break from work. One evening after I’d received the Rodinal I set about prepping for the development. Tools were collected and then chemistry mixed and prepped in the bathroom.
Massive Dev Chart app on my phone was setup for doing the two films with Rodinal and I set about the exercise. First up it was time to use my film leader extraction tool to remove the end of the films from the 35mm cassettes but for some reason it jsut was not playing the game. Usually I’ll rewind the films in the camera and hear the noise of it clearing the take up spool with a little click but I’m still getting used to this camera and had missed the point on both films.
In The Dark
I grabbed the Paterson tank and associated parts such as the reel etc. a bottle opener and a pair of scissors then headed into the windowless downstairs bathroom. A towel across the gap by the door and I was in a dark place. First film was the TMax P3200 and I prised the cap of the cassette and then managed to cut the leader off before feeding the roll into the paterson reel completely in the darkness of a haunted bathroom. Once the film was fully wound onto the reel, I cut off the join to the cassette spool and then put the paterson reel in the tank , carefully sealing the top to ensure that there was a reduced risk of any light fogging the film once I was out of the darkness.
With the reel secured in the dark confines of the paterson tank it was time to head to the bathroom where the Rodinal developer was waiting. I had mixed the Rodinal 1+25 at 20°C and had around 300ml of pre-mixed fluid. On the window sill stood some measuring beakers, each 300ml, of Ilford Ilfostop and Ilford Rapid Fixer, these would be used 8 minutes after the dev went into the paterson tank.
The dev got underway and the tank turned and rotated to keep the dev fluid covering and coating the film, reducing the areas of Silver Halide that had been exposed to the light in a way that gets turned into metallic silver during the fixing part of the process. The ilfostop process done betwixt the develop and fixing neutralises the developer and prevents more chemical reaction taking place ont he film emulsion.
Once out of the stop and fixer phases it was into a ten minute wash with the film in the tank, now opened to the atmosphere and running water being washed over the film to remove any traces of the chemistry used. Another chemical I bought last year is Photoflo which is mixed in a 1+200 ratio, 1ml of photoflo to 200ml of water and this helps with the removal of the water from the film during the drying process. This is a similar process to the Rinse Aid in the dishwasher helping the run-off of water from your dishes.
Once washed and dunked into the photoflo for 30 seconds it was a quick shake off and then affix the clips with hooks so it can be hung up in the drying cabinet, or the shower as we call it at home. Here it would be left overnight for the film to completely dry out before cutting into strips of six frames and storing in the glassine photography sleeves in my negative storage folders.
The Second Film
The second film, the Ilford HP5+, was up next, I had some more dev mixed ready and it was in the fluid for six minutes before a repeat of the other steps mentioned above.
The next day once both films were sufficiently dried out and no longer tacky on the emulsion side I took them into my office/studio to scan in. At Uni they have some great Epson scanners but I always find the scans contain lots of hairs and dust so I was unsure how my home scans would turn out.
DSLR Scanning
I set up my tripod with my Canon 5D Mk IV and a 105mm Macro lens over the top of a cheapish light table and my Essential Film Holder kit. Feeding a negative into the film holder is easy and a quick puff with a blower removes any dust. Then it was time to set up the frame of the shot with the frame of the film holder to maximise the quality of the image and cropping as little from each digital photo as possible later on.
I connect my 5D to my Mac Studio using a tether cable and use Adobe Lightroom Classic to control the tethering operation. I can see the live view on the screen so can control focus easily. I have my macro lens set to f/8 so that I get the whole of the film plane in focus and capture the whole frame of the negative. I turn off the room lights and pull the blind down over the window to prevent weird reflections on the film surface and then begin. I also have a Hot Shoe mounted spirit level that has two bubbles, one for each axis and this helps me keep the camera levell to the film plane.
Line up the negative, take a photo, slide the film through, take the next shot and repeat. This saw me capture both films in around 15 minutes with som echanges and corrections to the process as a I went along.
Once the frames are in Lightroom and on my PC securely, I make sure the negs are back safely in the folders and stored away, I’d retrieve them after to put in the folder a digital contact sheet ot easily allow me to see the contents of a film in the future.
Once the negatives are photographed, in Lightroom and ready for editing, I line up the frame using the Crop tool and rotate tool, using my Loupedeck CT to reduce the mouse movements.
Negative Lab Pro
Once the image of the negative is centred, squared and prepared for conversion I select a single frame and then press the shortcut key CTRL + N to activate the Negative Lab Pro add in that I recently bought to convert negatives into positives.
I recently bought Negative Lab Pro as I had been doing the inversion using manual methods previously. It was time consuming and often tricky to get the settings right when reversing the curves. NLP makes it much easier to do a bulk change especially when it comes to colour negatives.
The tone curve needs to be altered to drag the bottom left point up to the top and the right hand point lowered. You’ll notice that the image in the picture of the stairwell changes from the first to the second and alterations to the blue bar on the top my monitor which changes to a yellow colour.
The above two images are captured on my iPhone of the monitor of my Mac, just so I can capture the difference in the change of tone curve.
NLP gives me an option to change the settings to better align to the
The settings are quite comprehensive and allow us to change the basics and some of the other more advanced settings.
Once I selected all of the negatives that I’d scanned/photographed and ran NLP it pushed through the whole batch and inverted all of the photos successfully.
Beneath you can see the negative versions and below that the inverted versions that sit in the lightroom catalogue.
It’s not very easy to see the contents of the images so I’ll include a gallery of the converted images below.
Results
Below are a few photos from the two films, my fave of the two films is the Oxford Circus steps. Each of these images has been scanned by the Canon 5D and then edited in Adobe Lightroom before being exported as a small file ready for publishing on this blog.
The TMAX P3200 film shows up a tremendous amount of grain in the images that I made at night with very low levels of light available. The HP5+ that I used on the Sunday in Columbia Road suffered from minor underexposure on some of the frames but there were also a few that I was happy with too.
Oxford Circus was on the Saturday which I shot on HP5+ using my Leica M6 and then used it again on the Sunday in the East End, but the lighting was a little better even though the rain was just as bad.
It was a grey day indeed and with the rain keeping a total blanket over the area whilst we walked around doing street photography.
To finish the roll of film off I had walked around my local area on an exceptionally foggy area capturing the Christmas lights that people had adorned their houses with. I mounted the camera on a tripod for these photos using a cable shutter release to run the shutter for around two seconds.
Overall Reflection
The scans came out pretty well with fewer pieces of dust and hair featuring on the individual images than when I scan them as usual in the university Epson scanners. With the Essential Film Holder holding the negatives over the light table and the camera all levelled up it worked really well.
I was surprised that the films came out as well as they did using the Rodinal developer, especially as they had been used in very low light conditions. The camera I was using had its own light meter which I didn’t really trust and was using a Sekonic light meter to capture some of the images.
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