Developing film/photos

Film canisters and film cameras

Black and white, anyway. Home darkroom process, at least as of many years ago when I mucked around with it as a kid:

Producing an image on a photographic emulsion (either the film or the printing paper) is a three step chemical process:

1. The developer, which brings out the image by darkening the emulsion in proportion to the amount of light it was exposed to. There are several developers on the market using different formulations, both for film and paper. People have varying opinions about which one is best.

2. The stop bath, usually acetic acid, which halts the action of the developer.

3. The fixer, sometimes called "hypo", which makes the image permanent. The chemical used is sodium thiosulfate.

The basic routine is to go through this process with the film, rinse it off and dry it. You then have negatives, which you can project onto printing paper (usually using an enlarger), and go through the same process with the print paper to wind up with a B&W photograph. The mechanics:

Most people do the film in a "film tank", which is a small tank with a removable cover. It has holes which allow filling and draining the tank without exposing the contents to light, and a steel spiral reel inside it that you wind the film onto. You open the 35mm canister, or unroll the film roll and load the tank by touch in complete darkness. If you can't get a completely blacked out room for this, they used to sell little bags with sealed hand holes that you could put the film canister and tank in to accomplish this. Once the film is in the tank, you pour in the developer, soak it and agitate as per directions. Then pour it out, and pour in the stop bath, which only takes a brief amount of time. Then the fixer. After this, you have a strip of wet negatives to wash off and dry.

To print them, you set up three trays with the developer, stop bath and fixer. The printing process can be done using a dim red "safe light", since the paper emulsion is far less sensitive than film. You project the negative onto the print paper, then run it through the three baths in your trays. You can watch the image appear in the developer tray, rather than simply having to time it as you did the film. Wash it off, dry it, and you have a photograph.

There are many embellishments to this basic process - extra conditioner or toner baths, "dodging" and "burning" areas of the print or other enlargement tricks, special finishes imparted by drying techniques (you could squeegee them out on a polished stainless steel plate to get that shiny finish), and so on.

• list other references about this skill here

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