Well you could knock me down with a feather. Last night I finally got around to doing something I'd been meaning to do for a while: develop some negs. A light-tight tank containing two reels of Ilford Delta 400 had been camouflaged as a paper-weight for over *six months*. A roll of mine, and a roll belonging to my son, Stefan.
The other week when we went out into the floods and ice on a foto-roam (TR), Her Indoors came along sporting her MX and a few lenses. Stef had his Z-10 and 35-70 and I was trying out my birthday present Manfrotto 190 with the DSLR. Well, H.I. was shooting Delta 400 at every passing penguin and berg, and in the week or so since, she has threatened me with various forms of execution lest I tank her roll up and get it done. I held out as long as I could, but the final straw came when she announced that she was off to do it herself. Bearing in mind that it has been a long time since she has developed her own film, I thought of the mental anguish likely to ensue should she poor in stop bath when she should be pouring in developer, and wetting agent when it should be fixer. I dragged myself away from the computer and its nice clean environment with bright and beautiful digital images dancing across the display, into the murky world of alchemy and pain. Alchemy because of the necessary chemicals and the unreal way that no matter how you try to avoid it, you will always get the smell and taste of fixer on your hands. Pain because I would be perched on the side of the bath, the edge slowly but forcefully levering my butt apart in the process. Well would you believe it, I actually enjoyed the experience. The developing, not the butt-levering. In no time at all I had some Ilfosol in there at 9+1 and doing the old agitation bit. I'm an 'inverter' - what are you? Four times on the minute, with a quick gyratory movement guaranteed to get the spirals turning, just for good measure. Stop, fix, wash, wet. Our bathroom is fairly small with a pull-string wall mounted fan heater, so once the film's out of the soup, it hangs by metal clips from the shower rail, and the whole room becomes a drying cabinet. Snip snip snip, sleeved and delivered. "That'll be 3.99," I jest. She replies with a smack in the eye. We're the UK's answer to the Simpsons. Thoroughly enjoyable diversion. Then it was downstairs to fire up the scanner - so long since I've used it, where's the 'on' switch ? Over the lightbox with the magnifier. "You want *how* many scanned ?? Sheesh..." An hour later I've done half a dozen of Stef's and twice that for H.I. The thought strikes me that for all that time and effort, there's less than 20 complete and digitised photographs on the screen, good as they are. I put them onto a Zip and she can crop them until the cows come home. I'll print what she wants and archive them all onto CD. The neg sheets will then rest in a file, undisturbed. Possibly for millennia. On a day off cos I worked the weekend, Cotty ____________________________________ Oh, swipe me! He paints with light! http://www.macads.co.uk/snaps/ ____________________________________ Free UK Macintosh Classified Ads at http://www.macads.co.uk/ ____________________________________
