From Film to Photos the Old Fashioned Way

This semester I’m taking Photography 1, initially for the Fine Arts credit, but a few weeks in the class has been super rewarding and fun! While at first, I cursed my choice to pick Traditional Photography over Digital, (as one is much more tedious than the other), I’ve found the experience of developing film into photographs super fascinating. (I’ve also been doing it for a month straight so I think I can provide a valid description!). 

The Process:

First, we need light-sensitive film, as well as a camera. I’ll have to talk about taking pictures with film some other time, that process also takes a bit of time to understand! 

Yet once we have our film, we can take it out of our camera in a little metal canister and place it into our changing bag (picture below). Since the film is light sensitive, we can’t just open our film canister in a bright room, because it’ll overexpose our images and we’ll end up with completely white pictures. Thus, the dark bag allows us to load our film for development. 

Ever try to walk around a hotel room at night with the lights off? That’s pretty much how it feels to use a changing bag. You have to 1) open up the film canister with a can opener, 2) pull out the film roll and trim it to size with scissors, 3) load it onto the white rolls (depicted above) 4) place all of that into the gray colored film developer tank, and 5) lock in the funnel and lid on the tank. And you have to do all of that without being able to look at what you’re doing. 

This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3h8WT9GjbM) explains it much better than I can!

Basically, it’s a lot of physical fumbling that you have to do without being able to see anything. 

It’s also super stressful to do! Since the developing process takes 30 or so minutes, and you have to do it all in one class period, you have to figure out the previous 5 steps in about 10 minutes. 

Once we have our film loaded into the gray tank, we can start developing! The process is quite a lengthy one, I’ll detail it below. 

1. We need to rinse our film to prepare it for all of the chemicals and help to remove some of the silver crystals that make the film light-sensitive. We soak the film for 30 seconds in water, then pour it out. 
2. We now need to develop our film! After taking a picture there is a latent image on the film that we need to expose. There are a bunch of chemicals that we don’t really cover, but basically, we take 10 ounces of magical mysterious Developer chemical and alternate between soaking the film in the chemical or agitating it by shaking the container. 
3. Now we pour the chemicals out, rinse for 30 seconds again, and pour the “Fixer” chemical into the tank. Basically, our image is developed and visible, yet the image is still light-sensitive. Since we want to see the image in light, we have to “fix” the image, basically freeze it onto the film. 
4. After much agitation, and then pouring the chemicals out, we have to stop the fixer chemicals from eating away at the film by washing it in water for 10 minutes. 
5. Last step! Our film is wet, so we have to let it dry. Yet drying it right now would leave a bunch of watermarks on our film. So we have to submerge our newly developed film into a photography flo chemical that helps with the water drying. 

After you wait for a day, your film looks like this! (below)

This is pretty fun because this is the first time you can see what your photos look like after originally taking the pictures! Usually, my pictures look pretty blurry, but I’m always surprised.

Now we just have to cut the film into 5 picture strips (as the original film is a 25-picture strip). Then we place it into one of those clear plastic sleeves so we can safely store our negatives for future use. 

Next week, I’ll describe the process to take our newly developed film into creating an actual photograph (that’s 8.5 x 11 instead of a tiny rectangle of the film). 

Included below is my recent photography lab! We had to photograph an object, and I chose this origami cube puzzle because I thought it would look good with shadows. I’ll explain how we mounted the image to a black background later on. 

Thanks so much!

-Max