black and white – Timothy Whittlesea

The Bathroom 35mm Developing Kit Shopping List

September 24, 2018February 4, 2021
by twhittlesea

When I started using film I knew I wanted to develop it myself, but I also wanted to avoid spending a great deal of money on equipment that I might only use a couple of times. I have also always quite liked the DIY ethic of putting a developing kit together for as little money as possible. Fast forward a few years, and through a mixture of ebay, freecycle and other people being generous with their old kit, I basically have a pretty great home development setup. However I still get asked fairly regularly what I use, and if it is expensive.

So I put together ‘The Bathroom 35mm Developing Kit Shopping List’. Full disclosure, I put this together a couple of years ago, but I think all of the prices are still pretty much accurate. What the list does is outlines everything you’d need to develop black and white film at home in your bathroom. There are three parts – one column gives you everything you could possibly need (the total is £141), another gives you some cheaper/free alternatives if you want to get started for as little money as possible. This comes out at £56.60 – not bad if you are on a budget. Finally, the last column gives an overview of what the item is/is for.

You can download the list as a PDF here: The Bathroom 35mm Developing Kit Shopping List

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Photography

Selling all my digital gear

September 10, 2018February 4, 2021
by twhittlesea

TLDR: I like film more than digital

Initially, using 35mm was a fun experiment – something that felt a bit more involved and thoughtful than digital. Then, I started to use 35mm more extensively, bought different cameras, and acquired everything I needed to develop film at home. After this I also gained access to a dark room and learned how to print my pictures, slowly realising that I was taking pictures that were absolutely on par, in terms of how much I liked to look at them, as those I was taking with my digital camera.

At this point I would say I was using film about half of the time, but digital was reserved for holidays, when I felt like I would be taking a lot of pictures. Then came an experiment in Scotland, where I took nothing but an old, fully manual 35mm camera, and three 36 exposure rolls for a one-week trip. After this I decided, I didn’t feel like digital was adding a great deal to my life.

There are a number of more pragmatic reasons for this. I have acquired a Ricoh GR1, which I will write about after using it a little more, which is absolutely tiny (far tinier than any remotely capable digital camera), and is still full frame though. Equally, after my Scotland holiday I picked out some of my favourite images, did absolutely zero post-processing, and put them in a book. They were covered in dust where I had left them for a couple of weeks before scanning them, and on one of the rolls I had used a lens hood meant for a longer lens – so they have a big vignette. They look like something that could have been shot on an Arctic expedition. This was the first time I had done anything at all with pictures taken on holiday, and it was purely because I had shot them on film.

But more than all of this, the most important reason to own and use a film camera, is simply because it is more fun. Taking a picture on 35mm film is a mechanical, chemical process – you create a tangible, irreversible change that, if treated well, will last for the rest of your life. You are limited by the amount of film you want to carry, and so you think about what you want to record. And finally, developing and printing your pictures is like magic. You’ll never get the thrill of pulling a roll out of the developing tank, or seeing your image appear in the dark room by plugging in your USB cable and clicking through your images.

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Photography

Rodinol

June 19, 2018February 4, 2021
by twhittlesea

TLDR: I like rodinol

I am a huge fan of Rodinal for much the same reasons as many other photographers:

It is a ‘single shot’ developer, so what is left in the bottle basically lasts forever (or for long enough to not have to write a date on it)
Measuring out the amounts you need with a syringe makes you feel like a cool scientist
It is basically an ancient formula, so using it feels especially apt when using older camera

There are loads of blogs out there discussing the various benefits of using Rodinal in terms of things like sharpness, grain size and other photographer type things – I’d recommend this one from Ed Buffaloe if that sort of thing is important to you – but what I want to talk about here is how Rodinol represents a turning point in my journey as a photographer.

I have explained elsewhere how the decision to explore 35mm photography was primarily a result of receiving a not insignificant amount of expired 35mm film for free. It was because the film had expired that I didn’t want to invest money (that I didn’t have) on having it developed professionally (is that the correct term? Are the people working at fotofast professionals?), just in case it was too far gone. So, after a fair amount of ‘how to’ watching, I ordered the cheapest developing chemistry I could find. It didn’t occur to me that mixing chemistry from different manufacturers might be something some people frown upon, or that carefully weighing out D-76 powder and working out ratios to make up just the right amount to develop one film was anything but normal (it isn’t don’t do this, not least because all of the powder developers literally tell you not to do this).

And it remained normal – making up a new bottle of developer was a chore, I’d save up films for a good while so I could use a batch before it lost all its good developing power, and I built a solid collection of brown plastic bottles from manufacturers with stern sounding names that promised to keep everything airtight but that all eventually succumbed to what I am calling ‘chemical degradation’’. Either way, it was my process, and, because it worked, it never really occurred to me to change it.

Fast forward a good number of years from when I first began my adventures in 35mm, and my understanding had progressed to the extent that I was seeking out stores that sold film, and these stores also (quite logically) also invariably sold chemistry. More importantly, by this time I felt comfortable speaking about my process to other people, particularly, people who happened to work in those stores that sold chemistry. This was really the turning point – I could answer questions about what I wanted in terms of my process, could confidently say what sort of films I was using in different circumstances, and what I was doing in terms of my photography – and this meant I could unlock all of the knowledge that I wasn’t getting when I was buying D-76 on the internet.

It was a very short hop from here to someone recommending Rodinal. When you are asking which film is cheapest its pretty obvious that recommending a developer that will last for ages and can be made up in whatever amount you like is going to get you a sale. The biggest thing about this was that it all made sense to me – a conversation that would have made absolutely no sense to me a few years before now sounded completely normal, and it really hit me how much I had learned about 35mm photography.

None of this changes whether my pictures are good or not, but it has meant that everything has become more affordable and predictable, meaning that I am happy to take a 35mm camera on holiday instead of my digital camera, and have embarked on projects that will require the development of a not insignificant amount of film – all of which I am undertaking with confidence and enthusiasm because of the power of Rodinal, and the knowledge that I had to acquire to discover it. Perhaps if I had been smarter I would have done more research when I bought that first batch of developer, but it makes me far happier to consider how far I have come, and to look forward to the discoveries of the future.

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Photography

The ‘Cardboard Cutout’ film scanner

March 23, 2018February 4, 2021
by twhittlesea

TLDR: It didn’t work too well

Having survived with a 5 mega pixel, very cheap, 35mm scanner for a number of years now I have decided that it is finally time to invest in something that produces higher quality images. I have been exploring the confusing world of DPI values and various ‘in scanner’ touch up tools. The strange thing about all of this is that it seems that since the advent of digital photography there don’t seem to have been any major leaps forward in scanning technology, it’s almost as if all the major manufacturers said, “Well, you can scan your film, what more do you want?”. This is means the process of buying a new (old) scanner is actually a very involved review of ancient scanners on ebay – and the requisite trawl through websites that were last updated in 2008 to find reviews. I’ll keep you updated. Anyway, as this fabled scanner may be a rather long way off actually arriving, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what other 35mm-to-digital options there were out there – and first in this series (of probably…two…) is the method I am christening ‘the cardboard cutout’.

At its heart this method basically uses a digital camera to take a picture of the 35mm negative. So, armed with my digital camera and a roll of pictures taken in the Scottish Highlands (that eventually ended up as the ‘Highlands’ photobook) I embarked on my experiments.

Experiment one, simply holding the negative in front of a light source, and taking a picture worked ok. It was too difficult to hold everything in position though, and there were some pretty major bright/dark spots from the uneven light source and because it was fairly bright (too bright!) the image doesn’t really have the contrast we need.

You’ll notice there is a lovely vignette on the image too, this is simply because I used a lens hood for a 50mm lens on a 28mm lens – entirely my fault, and nothing to do with my scansperiment (scanning experiment). The image is a pretty challenging one, a lot of snow, clouds and generally not a huge amount of contrast, but you can see here that even the grass and field borders in the distance are not very well defined. It gives a fairly nice effect – something akin to an old print, but its definitely no improvement over my current scanner.

So for experiment two I cut a negative sized hole in the end of a box, and with some leftover card and tape created a rudimentary negative holder. I then used a piece of tracing paper to diffuse the light-source, and put my camera in the other end of the box. Holding everything still with the box meant I was able to spend a lot more time getting the focus spot on, and could play with the aperture until I had it where I needed – I figured wide open, as I’d be focussing on effectively a very flat plane and wouldn’t need any depth of field at all, would work best.

And the result is improved on attempt one. My ‘negative holder’ gives a nice lumo frame that wouldn’t look out of place as an Instagram filter from five years ago, but the results are still far from optimum.

The tracing paper solved the issue of the very bright spots though, and the contrast is much better (it is a more contrast-y image anyway, but it definitely helped. Its also much sharper, probably because of the extra attention I could pay to focusing.

I did some playing around with one of the images, cropped it and worked on the contrast, and the conclusion – a new film scanner is still required! You can see the rest of my images on this roll below anyway. I’d post a picture of my cardboard cutout scanner, but it went in the recycling as soon as the experiment was over.