hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2050.txt

Episode: 2050
Title: HPR2050: Developing Black & White Film
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2050/hpr2050.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:44:28

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This in HBR episode 2015 titled Developing Black & White Film, it is posted by first time
post-hand some pirate and in about 16 minutes long.
The summary is Black & White Film is actually pretty easy to develop.
Follow along and I do so.
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Hello, my name is John Delaney.
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Hello, my name is John Delaney and today I am developing some black and white film.
The film in question is some Kodak 400 TiEx black and white
and I will be using Ilford Chemicals such as the Ilford
Ilfusol 3 developer Ilfustop and Ilford Fixer.
The first step is to go ahead and get your chemicals mixed up with some water.
Now these chemicals come concentrated so basically you're deluding.
The Ilfustol 3 which is your developer needs to be diluted at a ratio of 1-9.
The stop bath needs to be diluted at 1-19 to stop bath to water and the fixer needs to be at 1-4.
It just so happens that I have an old pill bottle that when I filled up 10 times with water
matches the capacity of my developing tank.
I've gone ahead and marked on it lines to fill to when I'm filling the concentrate
and then I just use the canister to actually measure out the quantity needed.
I went ahead and ran the water for a bit and got it fairly close to room temperature
just above room temperature.
I have five containers that I use the first and the last one I just filled with water.
That's for the initial water bath and then the final rinse.
What I'll do is I'll go ahead and get those filled up.
I'll let them sit out for about 10-20 minutes to let any of the bubbles separate out from the water
because we don't want to have any air in our mixture.
Once I've got the chemicals and water measured out in setting, I then load my developing tank.
And this is a process that needs to be done in total darkness.
The tools you'll need here are basically a bottle opener and pair of scissors.
And what you do is you use the bottle opener to pop the bottom off the film canister
and then you poke the actual roll of film out.
From there, at least with my developing tank, it's a matter of you snip the funky shaped end off
so you have a nice square end and my developing tank is a spiral tank.
So what I'll do is I'll load the film and pull it around manually about about three quarters
of the way around.
I then complete loading the film by ratcheting the loader back and forth.
This will advance the film about one frame at a time.
Once I get that loaded, when you get to the bottom of the roll of film,
you snip the film off the bowl and then do the last few ratchets to get it completely loaded.
And then put everything in the tank and close it up and put the lid on.
At this point, the tank is slight tight.
It's okay to turn on the lights, otherwise prefer to keep the room dark just in case.
So the first step of the developing process is to go ahead and put our initial rinse into the
developing tank. Now this has a dual purpose. First of all, it goes ahead and it wets the film so that
you won't wind up with as many splotches and air bubbles.
It also goes ahead and warms the film to be the same temperature as the water,
which while it's close to the room temperature, it's just slightly off.
So we want to be sure that everything is exactly the same temperature.
So we put in our first water bath.
And we tap the developing tank on the workbench so as to disturb any air bubbles and make them rise to the surface.
I'll also go ahead and insert my little rotator here and swish it back and forth once again
at the same goal of removing any air bubbles that might be on the film.
So we're going ahead and dump this out.
And I'll get ready to put it in my developer.
Now the developer will need to be in here for a total of about six minutes.
And that's six minutes of agitation and you know moving the film around, swishing the film around
in the developing tank and even inverting the tank entirely and just moving everything or keeping
everything in fairly constant motion. So the developer is in half.
So I've swished it around some. Now I'm putting the lid on the tank and I'm going to completely invert it.
And I will continue this process for six minutes total
and approximately once a minute I'll put the lid back on and invert it.
But meanwhile I keep agitating it.
And then it is once again time to invert.
And our final inversion.
And notice every time that I set it down particularly hard, this is to tap any potential air bubbles off the film.
And approximately 45 seconds the process will be complete.
At that point we'll put in our stopper, well drain this, put in our stopper,
that will need to be in for ten seconds and then we'll proceed to our fixer.
And once again we're now on our fixer.
This will need to go for about three minutes.
And finally our rinse bath.
And then we're going to rinse it off with a little bit of water and then we're going to rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and
rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse
with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off with a little bit of water and rinse it off
At this point, it's safe to turn on the lights and our film is done. Just need to pull out this bowl and then hang it up to dry.
Since we get hung up, we'll squeeze the off some of the water so it doesn't get splotchy and let it dry.
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