The joy (aka anguish) of film

A sunny Wednesday afternoon, half way into our week off work. What better time to develop a roll of Tri-X 400? That was what I thought, especially having used this blog post to work out how to more efficiently use my Kaiser film leader retriever.

Film, spiral, developing tank into the light bag. Film wound straight onto spiral, the hair drier having done the trick before spiral went into the bag. Much satisfaction and looking forward to seeing the images, until I realised that I’d made an error with the easiest, but most crucial element, and had reassembled the tank incorrectly. The result? One totally exposed roll of Tri-X 400, and one unhappy photographer. Also an unhappy wifey, who’d been looking forward to seeing the shots from Rotherham Fair that I took on Sunday, particularly of the hamster show.

The only positive I can take is yet another lesson learnt, and a mistake to ensure that isn’t repeated. Sadly these are rather stacking up.

Yesterday’s visit to York is still in the camera on a roll of HP5+, so intending to shoot the remainder of the film tomorrow and develop that on Friday, hopefully with more satisfying results.

Monday evening brought dinner with my old photography teacher, and some experimentation with the Canon kit. Not sure that I have ever had so many photographs taken of myself, so it’ll be interesting to drop the images into Lightroom and check out some professional, if not entirely sober, portraits.

Time to fire off the remaining HP5+ and load in another roll of Tri-X, not sure that the first roll was really a good way to evaluate it.

Happy snapping!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.