The Dark Room
Developing a film is lovely work to do. I remember the first time I developed a film, I thought it was almost magic. It's great to suddenly see what you've made. However, it's a very nasty job because it comes very accurate.
Your exposed film goes into a develop tank. This tank consists of a few parts:
A 'pot', where all your stuff goes in.
A large 'bar', this is where your diagrid goes in. Most tanks have place for two diagrids.
The film must be put on the diagrid in the dark. Absolutely no light must come to your film. This is difficult and it it is a matter of lots of practise to get this right. You put the diagrid on the bar and all goes in the pot. Put the lid on it and go on with the next step.
The developing proces now can be divided in six parts:
Developing , the time is dependant from the film and the developer.
Stop and rinse , ca 30 secs, or 3x rinsing with water.
Fix dependant from the film type 5 to 10 minutes.
Rinse 15 minutes to half an hour
Wetting Agent Bath 1 minute and move the film up and down.
Dry dry your film for at least an hour.
Developer
Before you start, make sure you have all your gear ready to go. That way you can immedeately continue with the next step. You put a concentrate of 300 ml water mixed with 20 ml developer (I always use AM 74) in the funnel. The temperature of the developer always has to be like 20 degrees Celsius. Lower temperatures will slow down the process and higher ones will speed it up. Lock the tank properly and shake the tank lightly from one hand to another. Put it down with a little bump and repeat for 6,5 minutes. This is what we call agitate and it's very important that it happens well. This prevents little bells of air to get onto your film and ruin it.
When you're done with AM 74, remove it from the tank
without removing the lid. If you do so, all will be lost.
Stop and Rinse
The water that you had ready will now be poured into the tank. Move the tank around for one minute constantly. Lose the water and pour water into it again. We do this because we need to remove all the restst of AM 74. Again you move the tank constantly for one minute.
Fix
Fixate is about the same temperature as AM 74. Fixate is a concentrate of 60 ml mixed with 240 ml of water. Fixate is useable multiple times, therefore you won't have to throw it out afterwards. If you use the fixate for the first time, you must take 6 minutes for it to work. again you move the tank around.
Rinse
The last rinse is to make sure that all the films are clean from chemical residue. The films go in a warm water bath (about 20 degrees celsius) This for about 15 to 20 minutes.
Wetting Agent Bath
After the final rinse, the films go into a wetting agent bath for one minute. The wetting agent prevents lime rings to form on the film. After the wetting agent, you carefully stroke off the water with two fingers.
Dry
After all of this, the films go into a dryer. Both ends will be clipped with a little weight so the film can't curl up. After twenty minutes they are ready and you can cut your negatives into parts of 6.
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