The Dark Room Experience 19th November
With last week's photography lesson all about taking photos,
this one was about developing photos. It was something I had always found
interesting, and being able to do it myself was a great experience. We started
with a run down of what we had to do.
We started with taking the film out of the camera. This has
to be done carefully and in a dark room because if the film is exposed to any
light it would have ruined the photos and we wouldn't be able to use them. With
that in mind we were then given a run down of what we had to do step by step. Each
step had a number of instructions. We then took it in turns to develop our
films. As we had taken our photos in pairs, we were sent in the same pairs to
develop them. I had the task of going into the darkroom and loading the film
onto reels in a light-proof tank. This was harder than it sounds because not
being able to see anything was disconcerting. I had to completely rely on my
sense of touch.
It was now time to start the development process. We started
with mixing 560mls of water at 20C with 80mls of developer. We then had
to leave it to stand for nine minutes, agitating for 10 seconds every minute.
After pouring the liquid away, we added 320mls of
"stop" per film and agitated that for 30 seconds.
After emptying the container again, we could then pour in 320mls
of the "fix" solution leaving it for 5 minutes, agitating it, then
leaving it again for another 5 minutes.
Finally we could take out the film, pour away the fix and
leave the film in a bowl of running water for 5 minute, adding a couple of
drops of washing up liquid to the water to create a surface on the film so it
wouldn't be scratched so easily.
After that, our photos were developed. It was a long, but
interesting process. Every stage was different and something you don't normally
do with digital photographs. I really enjoyed it.
No comments:
Post a Comment