Simple Tips for Developing Color Film At Home
A number of film shooters know that the best way to develop black and white film is to do it yourself at home. You save so much money, you’re in full control of your development, and you (hopefully) have a bit more fun than you would otherwise. I’ve developed tons of rolls of my own film and I still get a bit giddy whenever I’m pulling the reel out of the tank and getting my first glimpse at the negatives. Honestly, why would you ever want to let someone at a lab develop your film for you?
Color film is quite different. The processes are all standardized, so it doesn’t matter where you take it, and labs offer color film development very inexpensively. While black and white film development costs mere pennies at home, sometimes the cost and longevity of C-41 and E-6 kits can leave you wondering whether you’d be better off sending the film out. After all, a place like Sharp Photo and Portrait will charge you less than two dollars to develop a roll of film, and if you want, you can even pay them to scan the roll, which can save you time and effort at home.
But in the end, you can end up saving money (especially on E-6) if you’re willing to get the color chemistry yourself and change your methods of developing slightly. You’ll also have mastered a new aspect of your craft, and you might even enjoy the process. Rather than walk you through every step to get you started, though, I will offer some simple tips to keep in mind when developing either C-41 or E-6 film so you’ll be less likely to screw up, and ultimately more likely to stick with it if you make a mistake.
1. Save that chemistry!
You might be used to dealing with as little as one storage bottle for your black and white fixer. If you use the Unicolor C-41 kit or the Arista E-6 kit, then be prepared to store three different chemicals for each chemical process. Opaque plastic bottles work well, but you don’t need to invest in the fancy accordion-style bottles. The 1-liter kits, for example, fit quite well in Delta Datatainer quart-size bottles, which you can squeeze lightly on the sides to get all the air out. All the chemicals in these processes are able to be reused for quite a few rolls—maybe 20 or even more—to the point where the investment in the kit will have paid for itself.
And since you’ll be keeping the chemicals for quite some time, go ahead and pay the extra 89 cents to get some distilled water for mixing. You don’t want any tap water impurities to end up ruining your chemicals prematurely.
2. Get ready to warm things up.
As you may know, C-41 and E-6 take place at elevated temperatures. My C-41 kit needs a developer temperature of 102ºF, and E-6 needs 105ºF (That’s about 39 and 40.5 on the Celsius scale, respectively.) The temperatures don’t have to be spot on but drift more than a few degrees in either direction during the development stages, and you might get color shifts.
So, I would recommend that you get a soda cooler that will hold up to all three chemical storage bottles. As long as you have access to tap water that’s hotter than the temperature you’ll need, you can use it to warm up the chemicals. The soda cooler (such as a Coleman) will keep the hot water insulated and make sure most of the heat transfers to your chemicals and not the air in the room.
On that note, you’ll ideally want two thermometers: one for the hot water bath, and one for the first developer bottle. Make sure that the hot water stays above the target temperature. If it doesn’t dump the water and replace it with warmer water. Once the developer thermometer reads the target temperature, you’re ready to start developing.
Personally, I try to get the water coming from my sink faucet to right around the target developer, then I fill my sink with a water bath. When I’m not agitating my tank, I’ll put it in this warm water bath to ensure that heat isn’t lost too quickly. And I’ll use my plastic tanks, not my steel ones, because plastics are a bit better at keeping the developer insulated.
As you can see, though, you don’t need a high-tech setup with a bunch of heating elements and super-tight control of your temperature. A simple, cost-effective approach will work just fine.
Developed in Unicolor C-41 Kit
3. Read the instructions.
Sounds elementary, but the instructions that come with these kits are really helpful when it comes to developing. Once you read through the process, you may want to write down the whole process on a “cheat sheet” that you keep handy while developing. Maybe even laminate it to protect it against water damage. Nothing is worse than forgetting, for example, that you were supposed to wash the film in between the two developer steps of the E-6 process, or that the Blix is the second chemical step in C-41, not the third.
While we’re on that note, I would suggest labelling your chemical bottles thoroughly. For example, don’t just put “Developer” on the first bottle of your C-41 kit. Also label it “C-41 #1.” Put the appropriate time the chemical will be in the tank, and what temperature it’s supposed to be. Sometimes the individual steps can be over before you know it, so take as many steps as you can to prevent thoughtless errors. My first batch of chemistry was ruined, for example, after I started pouring stabilizer into the blix bottle.
If all this sounds too complicated, remember…
4. Don’t be intimidated.
Apart from having to warm up the chemicals beforehand, there’s nothing more difficult about C-41 development, or even E-6. The basic skills of pouring chemicals and agitating the tank are all the same. Many people are needlessly intimidated for a variety of reasons. Maybe they think the temperatures have to be accurate within a single degree, or that the times have to be accurate to within two seconds. In fact, in my experiences, color developing is pretty forgiving if you treat everything with the same careful deliberation that you give your black and white development.
For whatever reason, E-6 seems to have more of a stigma of intimidation than C-41, despite being just as easy to do. Maybe it’s because the cost of the film stock and chemistry are slightly higher, or that you have to gradually add additional time to your first developer. But either one should be easy enough to do. If you feel the need for a confidence-builder, some cheap drugstore film makes for a nice way to get used to C-41 development.
5. Know what you will get in the end.
Be aware that when color film comes out of the tank, it won’t look quite right. When color negative film is hung to dry, it may look a little “milky,” like black and white film that has been improperly fixed. Similarly, color transparency film that I’ve developed has appeared milky blue on one side and milky yellow on the other side. Let the film dry overnight (or at least a few hours) before passing judgement on the success of your development session.
Developed in Arista E-6 Kit
In closing, let me know via comments if you found this encouraging, or if you have more questions about developing your color film at home. I could end up editing this post if need be.
Pinholing, Episode 2: Construction
In this post, I’m going to go over how I built my 8×10 wooden box pinhole camera. It’s really simple, but there were a bunch of small hurdles to jump over once I actually got going. It’s a really simple design, just enough to get the job done while not giving me any nightmares that my camera will disintegrate in the environment (I’m looking at you, foam core…)
First off, I had to make the box. I had six pieces of 12″x12″x1/4″ craft plywood to work with, and I knew that I wanted my “focal length” to be 8 inches (I trust my international listeners to be able to do some conversions, but for reference, I had 254 mm square wood panels and a desired focal length of 203 mm. Those are your freebies.) Again, I’m putting “focal length” in quotes since it’s the distance from the aperture (i.e., pinhole) to the film plane; there’s not really a focus method. I wanted to get the distance as close as possible to 8 inches, so I cut all the sides of my box to be a hair under 8 inches – there is a tiny bit more distance to cover thanks to the structure of the film holder.
It’s important to make a few notes here… When working with wood, you have to take the thickness of the wood into account. For example, my camera is 8.5 inches thick, but the internal distance (pinhole to film plane) is pretty close to 8 inches. Also, I started off with having an 8×10 film holder that I could use as a guide. The front and back of the camera were cut to fit the film holder exactly; I didn’t even make measurements with a ruler.
Anyway, with all the pieces cut to size I started gluing them together to make a wooden box. I used one of the most awesome adhesives around, Gorilla Glue. It’s an expanding polyurethane glue, and it’s strong as hell. Of course, it’s got some special instructions to make it work the way you want to, so make sure you read them carefully. I used some scrap wood to thin out the glue that I had squeezed out, and I used some 90-degree clamps to hold things in place while the glue cured.
Before you knew it, I had a complete box with one side left free where the film holder would go. In the front, I drilled a relatively wide hole so that the pinhole had access to a very wide-angle cone of view. That is, if the wood is too thick or the hole is too small, the pinhole would suffer from “tunnel vision.” I’m guessing that my hole offers 90 degrees or more for the pinhole, which is plenty for my fairly long (for pinhole, anyway) 8 inch focal length. Finally, I spray-painted the entire interior of the camera a non-glossy black. You really want to kill the light as much as you can.
The fine folks at Lenox Laser shipped the pinhole in a very neat, well-sealed plastic square holder. Rather than try to tape the fragile pinhole to the inside of the camera, I just drilled a hole in one half of this plastic holder and used it as a mount. I was therefore able to tape the whole thing to the inside of the camera with gaffers tape without even touching the pinhole (not counting removing it so I could drill that hole). I also (after my first test with the camera) put some gaffer’s tape around all the seams to cut down on light leaks from the edge of the box.
With the interior all prepared, the trickiest thing was to actually get the film holders to stay in place. For my first test, I was way too giddy and anxious, so I held the holder and back (a simple piece of wood) on with painter’s tape. Definitely not a long-term solution, even if the tape wasn’t the primary cause of my light leaks. I wanted some sort of “spring” back, so I got the ingenious idea of getting some black waistband elastic and making some loops that I could just strap around the camera to hold everything together. Of course, what I failed to remember was that I’d be setting the camera up on its side, and gravity would make the back sag, to the point of letting light in.
Fortunately, there was some scrap wood laying around (wood that had even been used to test a router, so it was rounded on one edge), so I cut three stop blocks. Thus, the back couldn’t slide around in any of the three directions I didn’t want it to. It can still move towards the “top” of the camera (the side where you pull darkslides out) and it can also fall out, but the elastic prevents that from happening. The downside is that now I can’t set the camera easily on the ground or a table, but I imagine that wouldn’t make for very good photographs.
The last thing to include was a pair of tripod mounts (one for landscape orientation, one for portrait), which simply involved putting 1/4″ x 20 nuts in a pre-drilled hole and securing the edge with Gorilla Glue.
After a simple staining and polyurethaning (yes, it’s apparently a word), I considered the camera complete. But how would it fare out in the field?
(That’s my poor attempt at a cliffhanger ending, btw)
Pinholing, Episode 1: Design
I’ve wanted to build a pinhole camera for a while now. And I know what you’re thinking. Oatmeal boxes, Altiods tins, and blurry images. But I have fallen in love with pinhole cameras like those produced by Zero Image, Lensless, and Leonardo. These are quality wooden boxes capable of producing really sharp images. And they can also be really expensive if you want to do large format. $300+ for a Leonardo 8×10, $200+ for a Lensless 8×10 camera, and $120-$270 for Zero Image 4×5′s, and all at fairly wide angles. Then, there’s the new Harman Titan camera, a 72mm 4×5 pinhole camera that should retail for around $200 soon. The images I’ve seen from it (thanks to Filmwasters’ Leon Taylor) are truly remarkable.
I’ve been thinking, what’s the big deal? All I want is a sturdy wooden box that will take an 8×10 film holder on one side and hold a pinhole at the other side. So, I decided that maybe building my own quality pinhole camera could be an option. But then, there’s that word: “quality.” Everything that I like about these cameras I’ve listed is their wonderful sharp (relatively speaking) quality. You can get a fantastic image from the cameras I’ve mentioned, while all the DIY cameras I’ve seen have left a lot to be desired. It frequently turns into a competition of who can build a pinhole camera out of the wackiest materials, rather than taking a look at how to perfect a design. So, this is my goal:
Design and fabricate a wooden pinhole camera that will make as perfect an image as possible on 8×10 film in an appropriate film holder.
Now, you need to understand a tiny bit of optics to get pinhole design. By restricting the aperture of a hole down so far, you’re only using light rays that are bouncing straight off the subject and onto the film plane in a direct path. (see Wikipedia for example) However, if the hole is too small, you start getting too much diffraction due to the way light bends. I feel unqualified to explain further, but suffice to say that we need an optimum pinhole diameter. Lord Rayleigh, acoustics genius, came up with an awesomely simple formula,
pinhole diameter = 1.9 * square root(focal length * light wavelength)
which will give an optimum pinhole diameter. Also, there are a number of simple online calculators such as this one which will just spit out a number, using both inches and mm. So, it’s decision time. How far away is the pinhole going to be? I decided to start by looking at view angle
As far as view angle is concerned, I love my Nikon 24mm lens. A 24mm lens on a 35mm camera gives you a diagonal angle of view of 84 degrees. 28mm, another great focal length, gives you 75 degrees. So, by my thinking, if I can keep the angle of view around this size, I should have a nice image without too much distortion of perspective. I made a spreadsheet and found that, for 8×10 film, a “focal length” of 8 inches (I use quotes, because no focusing is going on in pinhole photography) gives a diagonal angle of view of 77.35 degrees. Equivalent to 26mm on a 35mm camera. Perfect – gives me a wide angle without going into “weirdness” territory.
Having settled on a third dimension for the camera, I got two calculations of the optimal pinhole size. Rayleigh’s formula says I should have a pinhole of 635 microns (or 10^-6 meters) at 8 inches away, while the “Mr. Pinhole” calculator at the earlier link suggests 601 microns. I erred on the slightly smaller side and ordered a 600-micron pinhole from Lenox Laser in Maryland. Apparently the tolerances are smaller than 5%, so I should be getting something worlds better than if I tried punching my own hole through a thin bit of brass. As an added bonus, I know that my camera will be permanently set to f/339.
So, having ordered a pinhole, I’ve started cutting up six pieces of wood I bought at the local craft store. I’ve decided to just glue some tabs on the back piece (the film holder side) as well as the two side pieces, then use elastic on these tabs to hold the back in place. It’s a poor man’s spring back, essentially. I’ll also try things like putting two 1/4×20 nuts in two sides, so that I’ll have a tripod mount for both a horizontal and landscape orientation. If preliminary tests go well, I’ll try my hand at installing a rotating shutter, much like you can find on the Lensless cameras.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Once I get home, I’ll take some snapshots to show you the woodwork before I start using Gorilla Glue (honestly some of the best adhesive around) to put the box together. Unfortunately, the glue requires a lot of clamping force and a long time to dry, so I’ll probably be gluing one edge at a time for a few days. I might even get my pinhole in the mail before I’m ready to install it.
Anyway, I’m hoping that this whole project will generate plenty of content for a blog that I feel has been neglected for far too long.
Fixing the Olympus Trip 35
After hearing about the awesomeness of the Olympus Trip 35, I wanted to get my hands on one. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it was mostly sold in the UK. There, you can apparently still pick up one at a thrift shop or a car boot sale for a pittance. I remain truly jealous of the Brits, since I paid $25 for mine on eBay.
Photos © Michael Raso
And when I got it, it didn’t work. Not like it should have.
The diagnosis: The ASA ring didn’t seem to be functioning (aperture stayed consistent), and it was definitely loose at the faster-speed settings. I’m not sure the aperture blades even opened up fully. Also, you could stick your hand in front of the lens, blocking the solar-powered light meter, and it would still take a picture. The Trip 35 has a built in red plastic flag that will—when it works—rise into your viewfinder and warn you that there is not enough light, and also physically prevent the shutter from firing.
After literally ten seconds on the Google, I found the following guide to Trip 35 disassembly, which is focused on unsticking the aperture blades, which was one of my problems. I read it through before getting to work, which helped me get familiar with the camera before even loosening a single screw:
http://www.thermojetstove.com/Trip35/
However, I have a few things to add after going through three separate repair sessions.
1. If you have a magnet, it’s a good idea to have it handy to pick up dropped pieces. Also, put down a white terrycloth or big sheet of felt material down, so that if you drop, say, a ball bearing, you aren’t going to waste 20 minutes crawling on your hands and knees in the lab looking for the little sucker.
2. Super important! When first disassembling the camera, you should also make note of the orientation of the inner ring that attaches to the outer lens element before you lift off that ring. For example, on mine, the ‘D’ of ‘D. Zuiko’ is at the 12-o’clock position when focused at infinity. If you reattach the inner ring in the wrong position, the focusing ring inside the lens assembly will not grab on to it, and turning the focusing ring will change nothing.
3. Like I said, the red flag didn’t work at all when I first got it, and then after the first repair, it only worked intermittently. I’m pretty sure the problem was that the three wires running from the top of the camera to the bottom were getting caught up on the lever that activates the flag. Some tightening of the wires by relocating the slack to the bottom cavity and fixing those wires in place with some well-placed electrical tape should ensure that those wires don’t get caught up and interfere with the red flag anymore.
The wires I’m talking about. They should be restricted to the right side of this photo. If they get too close to the lens, the red flag may get caught. Image © www.thermojetstove.com
4. I disassembled the rewind crank and rearranged the tiny leaf springs to make the lever “snap” more. Now it is not as loose as it was when I got it. An added perk to the fact that I didn’t know you were just supposed to “unwind” the crank while holding the winding key in place in order to unscrew it.
5. Make sure the viewfinder and the lens elements are extra-clean before putting everything back together again. I had to do a third “repair” just to get a bit of graphite dust off the middle lens element.
Anyway, thanks to the original instructions’ advice about the red mark (I used a dot of White-Out, which shows up better on black), I was fairly sure that by the final assembly stage, I was going to have good focus. But based on the amount that the focus ring turns as you adjust focus, you’ve got to be spot-on with the position of that lens when you reassemble it. So, I shot one more test roll.
Obviously, I wanted a shallow depth of field, so I shot a roll of FP4+ at ASA 100. I guess I could have gone slower, but I could pick up a 12-exposure roll cheaply at my local shop. I basically measured out the distances (1m, 1.5m, and 3m) from a brick wall, and made sure that I could pick up the bricks’ texture. I placed the camera on the ground and used a cable release. I also used up some shots of various things in the distance to see if they were in focus when I was focused on infinity. Results are below:
Focus @ 1m
Focus @ 1.5m
Focus @ 3m
Those seem pretty good, though it would be nice to know what my aperture was. Now for the “infinity” shots, which may be compromised due to the fact that I didn’t have a tripod on me:
A full 35mm frame
A 1:1 crop from a scan at 3200 dpi.
Another 1:1 crop from a scan at 3200 dpi.
Hopefully I’ve got it right! Looking forward to taking some real pictures with this camera now.
Caffenol – Developing Film in Coffee
Want to develop film in common household items? well, here’s a good recipe for a developer:
Caffenol C-M
1. Measure out 500mL water.
2. Dissolve in 27g of washing soda (NOT baking soda)
3. Dissolve in 8g of Vitamin C powder (check a health food store)
4. Dissolve in 20g instant coffee (the cheaper the better)
Let sit for a few minutes to let the bubbles settle, but use the developer within the hour. Generally, 15 minutes of development with 10 seconds agitation per minute is a recommended starting point. For more details, you can check out Reinhold’s Caffenol Blog (caffenol.blogspot.com) but it’s so simple, I just wanted to post the recipe so you can try it out.
Also, of course, some results of my own on Ilford Delta 100:
How I Screwed Up and How I Fixed It
I screwed up my first roll of B&W film since I started developing. And that’s been almost a year, so at least I had a good streak going.
So what happened? I bought some new Rokunar reels. I felt like more plastic reels were in order, since they need to dry completely before you can reuse them, and you never can tell when I’m going to want to do a marathon developing day. OK, so that’s unlikely, given how much I love developing. Odds are that sensitized but unprocessed film rolls aren’t going to stay around for very long. But maybe someone will want me to shoot an event or wedding someday, and I’ll have to plow through several rolls of film. Anyway… for whatever reason, I wanted more reels. Well, just my luck that my camera shop had some Rokunar reels in stock. These are different than the Patersons that I have, but they have the distinct advantage of having big thumb rests or tabs on one part of the reel, meaning it’s easier to find out the point where you start loading the reel by touch.
So, I loaded my Kodak Plus-X Pan in the reel, put the reel in the tank, and started developing. Well, once I was done with the processing, I got shots like this:
What caused this? My educated guess, though I’ll never be 100% certain, is that the reel wasn’t at the very bottom of the tank. Instead, it must have gotten lifted up so that one edge (the dark one) progressively got more and more elevated out of the developer. This could be caused by the rotating motion of the agitation wand that I use in the Paterson tank. The Paterson tanks have a tighter grip on the center post, so they don’t slide up and down very easily.
So, the most logical thing to do would be to always use two reels so that there’s no room to slide. This is absurd, because if I had two different films, I’d need to use all four of my reels – two for developing film, and two “spacer” reels. And then, my purchase is nullified.
So instead, I noticed that the diameter of a plastic 35mm film canister is slightly larger than the diameter of the Paterson center post, and a bit taller than the height of a plastic reel set to accept 35mm film. It makes sense, right? It’s got to be at least as tall as the film cartridge, which is of course wider than the film. So, I measured how much I would have to cut off the end, and I made a hollow cylinder. Once the reel is loaded on the center post, this spacer goes on top so that the reel stays on the bottom, in the 300 mL of chemicals. I may make a tiny ring for 120, but I think the weight should help hold it down.
Future crises averted!
Redscale!
There’s a fairly popular cult movement in film photography known as Redscale. I listen to the Film Photography Podcast religiously, and redscale film was discussed very early on – in episode one, actually – more than a year ago. (See John Milleker’s photo that sparked the discussion.) I originally thought the photos I saw were far too red, and wondered why anyone would want to shoot it. So I put it on my personal “back burner” of photography projects.
So what am I talking about? Basically, color negative film is loaded into the canister backwards – though to be fair, I suppose it could be done with 120 or sheet film too. This means that rather than sensitizing the light-sensitive emulsion directly, light must pass through the orange mask of the acetate base to reach the emuslion. This essentially gives you a severe red/orange filter for free. Theoretically, you could have a 100′ reel of color negative film that you purposefully wind backwards, but I’ve never seen any long spools for sale. Instead, there are a number of internet tutorials on how to redscale your film by transferring the film from one 35mm canister to another.
See the step-by-step tutorials I found here and here. Personally, I followed the steps in the first tutorial. Since I originally heard about the technique, I also learned that Lomography now produces pre-redscaled film for sale. But I didn’t like the idea of paying Lomography prices and not knowing what was going into the rolls.
So why did I finally visit redscale? Because as I saw more and more redscale photos, I saw some shades of green and blue. They were actually colorful! The tutorials above both recommend exposing the film one stop more than you the film’s original rating to compensate for the light lost to the acetate layer. But because negative film has such a mammoth exposure latitude, you can still get plenty of detail when you overexpose. Overexposure on correctly-loaded C-41 film is a common practice for wedding or portrait photographers to smooth skin tones. It’s difficult to do this with slide film and impossible to do with digital. I noticed that most images that I disliked had very rich blacks and fairly dense highlights. So, I thought that maybe a good solution would be to overexpose.
Then, I saw this comparison of exposure settings for redscale film. It is a test of redscaled Fuji Superia 400 rated at 100. Right off the bat, the film is given two stops of exposure compensation rather than the one stop as recommended in the tutorials above. In addition, it seemed like the more muted tonality I was going for is a result of further overexposure by a stop or two. So, I followed the tutorial with some Fuji Superia X-Tra 400 that I picked up at Wal-mart. The original film was rated at ISO 400, and I rated it at ISO 50 – a full three stops of compensation.
I shot two of my three rolls of film at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, DC this past weekend. When I came back, I took the film to CVS for a quick development ($4.35 total, I think it was). When I got my negatives back, though, I noticed that some of the felt must have come off and dirtied the film. So, my scans have a bit of white spots. Still, they look pretty awesome, I think. Note: these are straight scans from the EPSONscan software with just a little bit of color temperature adjustment in Adobe Lightroom.
