February 12 2009

I developed my first roll of film today! Very exciting. Although it did not go smoothly -- I learned a lot. I need a new bottle opener - I ended up actually giving up with the one I had and taking my hand out of the changing back to get a new one, since the canister was not even cracked open. I really need a better pair of scissors. The pair I have are nice small safety scissors with blunt tips but they cannot cut cleanly, and I ended up losing the first two frames because the sprocket holes got badly mangled after some unsuccessful feeding attempts and I had to cut off several inches of the front:



Basically I need to practice loading and try try again. Fortunately this was actually a roll for an assignment which I had messed up on, so it was a very good learning experience.

The developing itself seemed to go fine, besides the damage I inflicted from the abortive attempts of getting the film on the reel. You can see the film got bent and creased in a few spots (the crescent shaped mark), and the sprocket hole areas are scratched and maybe dirty?



Don't worry about the exposure. I just showed this frame to demonstrate the damage. This assignment involved just checking the camera by trying lots of exposures as well as different aperture and shutter speed combinations. The development itself looks to be spot on, which is a little surprising since I had to interpolate from a development time of 7 minutes at 68 degrees to the working temperature of 72 degrees. (Film was Kodak Plus X and we use D76 diluted 1:1. I developed for 6 minutes).

Anyway, my other pictures :

I like the way this light looks at night. When I look at it my eyes just see a ring around it of the tree branches. This picture does not quite capture it, but it's close.


Stained glass.


I drew I cute lil' heart on a board and came back later to find it edited to this :


Good night kiss.