Writing... With Photons!

This is my first roll of hand-developed black and white film.
The emulsion is Ilford Delta 100; I developed using T-Max at 1+4 for ~7 minutes (Ilford's recommendation.) I'm not 100% sure about the temperature of the developer, but I'd say it was pretty close to 20. Hehe... Good thing B&W films are forgiving about that sort of thing...
Anyway, the negatives look great! I might get some prints of a few of them, but there's nothing super-interesting on this roll; it was mostly a test to see if I liked B&W photography enough to start going hardcore. The darkroom supplies were the only real investment, and not a very expensive investment at that. (It'd be nice if labs give me one-use samples of developing chemicals to try out, but I'm pretty sure I'll shoot enough this year to make a $10 bottle of T-Max worthwhile.)
Here's my ghetto-rigged negative scanner: the Brother MFC440CN copy/fax/print/scan machine, with a household lamp and ~20 pieces of paper for a backlight.
The result isn't anything spectacular (unfocused, noisy, poor contrast control...) but it'll serve for this humble purpose. It's also a lot cheaper than paying for an entire roll of scans when you only want one or two...


I'm very happy with the composition in this shot, and the range of tones is better than I could have hoped for. (It was the third exposure on my first roll of B&W...)

Here's my friend's dog, on an outing at the Legislature grounds on Saturday. (The other nice thing about home B&W processing is that you can develop the negatives whenever you want! No more waiting for the lab!)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Those pictars are pretty great dan for 1st time developing. Glad to hear school isn't the only thing eating up your time ;)

Jack said...

Some days it feels like school is the only thing that isn't taking up any of my time...
I should probably try to fix that.