A dive back into developing

It’s been years since I last developed a roll of film myself. Sending them off to be professionally developed and scanned has been the most convenient way to keep up film photography in the past few years, especially as I’ve been inclined towards digital photography (expired chemicals are no-one’s friend) recently.

However, the lure of faffing about in a dark bag, sloshing chemicals around and anticipating the results, has been calling to me recently. I have *so* many film cameras, a collection curated over years, and a bag full of film (mostly expired), and I kept thinking what a shame it was, that they were going unloved because of the increasing cost of getting them developed and scanned by a lab.

My previous forays into home developing were mixed, some good and some bad. I’ve generally favoured Rodinal, or one of its clones – stand developing is simple, especially for processing multiple rolls at once. I had issues in the past with bromide drag (and water spots), and disliked the Canon flatbed scanner I got to replace my trusty Nikon Coolscan (forever in our hearts).

In a fit of optimism, I recently bought a Plustec Optifilm 7200 35mm film scanner off eBay. I was given three rolls of interesting black and white film from Analogue Wonderland for my birthday, and finished the whole collection off with some fresh chemicals from Bristol Cameras (Rollei Compard R09 developer, Adox Powerfixer and a new changing bag).

A trip back to the coast with my bestie provided the ideal excuse to snap through one of the rolls of film (FPP Love 200 ISO, a panchromatic film stock used for surveillance cameras). We had glorious early autumn weather – low sunshine, warm winds and sadly, pretty disappointing waves for surfing. No matter, we had a great time bodyboarding and wandering around Newquay – it was surprisingly quiet, even for the off-season. I brought my favourite compact camera, the Olympus XA4 my parents got the year before I was born. It’s a pretty battered little camera now, with dents and scratches all over the clamshell body, and the slide-open lens cover is a bit sticky (probably from years of sandy beach holidays).

The camera performed admirably up until the end of the roll, when I didn’t realise the film had snapped – and so opened it up by accident, exposing the film inside (nooooo). It was only for a brief second, but I definitely lost a few images from the end of the roll. Ah well, the joys of film cameras, eh.

Nevertheless, I managed to wrangle the film onto the take-up spool and get it into the developing tank without too much trouble, and decided to stand develop the roll for ease. I used a 1:100 ratio, standing for one hour, with a gentle inversion at the halfway point. I rinsed, fixed and washed, adding some foto-flow to combat the hard water here in Bristol, and soon had my roll hanging up to dry in the shower. First hurdle: overcome!

After it had dried (and I’d used a microfibre cloth to get rid of the water marks still left over), I fired up the new scanner, expecting a right hassle. Happily, the Plustek was pretty simple to get working, with my old copy of Vuescan. After half an hour of playing about with settings, I set about scanning and touching up the images in Affinity Photo 2.

A few issues became immediately obvious – the dreaded bromide drag I’d experienced years ago (see below), as well as some blown highlights and pretty low-contrast negatives. There were a lot of scratches and water marks that had to be cloned out as well – but I hadn’t lost as many shots as I expected to over-exposure from opening the back.

From reading up, it seems stand developing for longer times is prone to bromide drag. Reading my past blog posts, I tried pre-washing the film to avoid it, but maybe I just need to stick to regular developing times and try to be a bit more precise.

I’ve also not used this film stock before, and there’s not all that much online about it. It could be that the chunky grain is to be expected, but the blown highlights are probably my fault. I generally prefer the look of finer grain and higher contrast, so I’ll have to keep looking for the perfect film stock and developer/technique pairing.

Any tips or recommendations happily received!