Shooting film is slower and more deliberate than shooting digital. The "shoot-chimp-shoot" style of digital photography is not possible. As such, immediate feedback regarding exposure is not available and patience is required to see final results and learn if you got it right.
A few of my film cameras have built-in and working light meters but most do not. That led me to re-familiarize myself with the Sunny 16 guidelines I learned back in the 1970s and used for years. Fortunately, with digital, the guidelines can be put into practice with immediate affect. Look at a scene, apply the Sunny 16 guidelines, shoot the image, then look at the image. Is it correctly exposed? If not, why not? Think it through, convince yourself you understand why the image was not exposed as you believed it would be, make necessary adjustment then reshoot. Rinse and repeat. After a few digital outings using that process I felt comfortable enough to put it to the test with film. However, I still had the issue of delayed gratification in seeing the images. That issue led me to home development of 35mm black and white film.
After much research I settled on Cinestill's Df96 Monobath process. Rather than the standard three part process of developer -> stop bath -> fixer, Df96 develops and fixes in one chemical solution. A solution that can be reused to develop up to 24 rolls of film. With each roll developed there is a slight increase in the time required for the process but it is on the order of seconds and not at all time-consuming. At a solution temperature of 80F film development times run from about three and a half minutes to six minutes depending on how many times the solution has been used. Following developing and fixing the solution is poured back into its container and the film is rinsed with water (I use distilled water). It is then hung up and left to dry. All-in-all a very straight forward and fairly easy process.
To date I have developed four rolls of black and white film. For the first two I utilized a Paterson tank with its easy-to-load film reels. No issues with those rolls and the film developed very nicely. For the second two rolls I utilized a Nikor stainless steel tank and its stainless steel reels. Unfortunately I didn't roll the film properly onto the reels. Most of the images developed nicely, however there were areas in the reeling process where the film layers touched. Those areas did not develop properly and the images were lost. Additionally, the steel tank leaked quite a bit during the agitation cycles. Based on this one experience I plan to move forward with Paterson system.
Steel film reels aside, the four rolls developed properly. Following development they were scanned into the computer using a CanoScan 9000F Mk2 (with supplied Canon software) and edited as normal with Capture One. Home development and scanning provides much faster feedback on exposure settings and should, hopefully, cause me to output better images.
The image shown here was shot on Ilford HP5+
The next step is color processing. More on that later...
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