Developing My First Roll of Film (Ilford HP5+)
I’ve been shooting film for a while now and often when I spoke to people about it, they asked me the same question ‘do you develop the film yourself? To which I always gave the same reply: ‘no’. However ever since I started it had been an aspiration of mine to self-process, it’s just that initially I wanted to get started and have a baseline from the lab as to how properly developed film looked like. Having shot my final rolls of Fuji Acros that you can see in my most recent blogs, I decided that from now on I’d take the plunge and develop all of my black and white film myself. It’s much cheaper and more efficient as I wouldn’t be waiting weeks to see my results back from the lab and it would make it easier to test out any new gear I purchased to see if it was working.
So, what better way to start than by testing my newly purchased 250mm PS 5.6 lens for my Bronica SQ-A, making sure it was all fully functioning. Along with the lens I picked up a roll of the ever-popular Ilford HP5+, loaded it up straight away and walked around London taking the first twelve frames that I would self-process. Starting at Brick Lane near where the shop was, I carried on into the city trying different set-ups and ideas. Having never used a lens like this for a medium format camera before, I wanted to see what the bokeh was like wide open as well as the depth of field I could still achieve as I closed the aperture. I’ll leave a full review of the lens for another day, but I can safely say I was happy with how it performed on its initial outing.
Now for the tricky part, the actual development. Thankfully someone from my local camera club had done a demonstration for me on the whole process, as well as shown me a very useful app, Massive Dev Chart (more on that later), which takes away a lot of the thinking and guessing. Everything seemed straightforward but there’s always a sense of nervousness from doing something yourself for the very first time. The equipment I needed I picked up from various places. I’d been given a couple of things, bought the universal Paterson development tank at the camera club charity auction, and the rest along with my chemicals came from a local photography shop. Based on what was in stock I had FD10 as a developer, Ilford Rapid Fixer as my fixer and Tetenal Indicet as my stop bath.
The most difficult aspect, especially with 120 film, is getting the film onto the reel that goes into the tank. Due to its larger size, there is more flex than in 35mm and it can be incredibly frustrating getting it to feed flat through the initial opening. All the more difficult when you haven’t done it before, and you can’t see what you are doing as it’s in a changing bag. Unfortunately, I messed it up this first time around and loaded the film incorrectly which resulted in a slightly botched process of development. Though I wasn’t to know that until I’d finished fixing the film.
The Massive Dev Chart app is a real godsend as it compiles data from thousands of development cycles across just about every film you can get your hands on and more. Select which film, film size, ISO and developer you use, and it will automatically calculate the temperatures, ratios and times you need. The timing functions that tell you when each step is finished and when to agitate are all super helpful as it makes it an easy-to-follow step-by-step process, making this part almost impossible to get wrong.
Then came the moment of truth, having finished I opened the tank to see what I got. Initially what greeted me was not good. Undeveloped film. Thankfully this only affected the last two and a half images, and the rest were largely ok, although there were chemical spots, scratches, and creases on the others. Having loaded it incorrectly, there wasn’t enough space between parts of the film for the chemicals to work, hence why the process failed. It also meant it took a lot more washing to get the film clean. I then tried to re-insert the fixed film in the daylight now that I could see everything and that did help me understand where I went wrong and how not to do that next time. It is all a learning curve and at least I didn’t load the backing paper as some do on their first attempt! As usual I scanned the negatives with my digital camera and processed them in Lightroom.
All in all, I was pleased to have just done it once, even if it wasn’t perfect, and after that I’ve not had any developing problems since. Once you know what you are doing it becomes as easy as riding a bike. For now, I’ll stick to just developing black and white, but I do want to develop colour negative film in the future as well. Ultimately the more I develop myself the more control I have and the cheaper and more sustainable my hobby will be.
Do you develop any of your own film? Or do you prefer to send it off to the lab? Let me know in the comments down below.
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