Developing the First Roll
The first roll I ever developed was a 400-speed black-and-white film shot on a 1970s mechanical SLR that cost less than the film inside it. I had a steel tank with one steel reel, a changing bag, a thermometer, three brown bottles and a kitchen timer, and I had watched the loading process perhaps a dozen times. None of that prepared me for doing it blind with my hands inside a bag in June with the sweat starting.
Loading the reel took twenty-five minutes. The film has to be fed onto a spiral from the centre outwards by feel, and twice I felt it buckle and had to unwind and start again. When I finally got the reel into the tank and the lid on, my hands were damp enough that I was worried about fingerprints, and in fact two frames near the end have faint marks that I think are exactly that.
The chemistry was simpler. A standard fine-grain developer diluted 1+1 at 20 °C for nine minutes forty-five seconds, with ten seconds of agitation at the start of every minute; the tank sits in a washing-up bowl of water at the same temperature to keep it steady. Then a water stop for a minute, then fixer for five minutes with agitation every minute, then a wash using the fill-and-dump method: ten inversions, dump, twenty inversions, dump, thirty inversions, dump. A few drops of wetting agent in the final rinse, and the film hung in the shower with a clothes peg on the bottom to weigh it down.
Unrolling the wet film and seeing images on it was absurdly satisfying. Thirty-four frames out of thirty-six had something on them. The two blank ones were at the start, where I had not advanced far enough after loading the camera. The negatives were a little thin overall, which I later worked out was my thermometer reading two degrees high so the developer was actually at about 18 °C.
The mistakes I want to remember from the first roll: practise loading the reel with a sacrificed film in daylight until it takes under five minutes, which I have since done; check the thermometer against a known one; and do not touch the emulsion side of a wet film, however curious you are about whether there is anything on it.