Development

Learning about stuff is fun. And the more we learn the more we want to learn more; in other words, we want to learn more about the things we already learned more about. Or something to that effect. Anyway, I started using film a while ago, just to play with some older cameras and get some experience with the medium. That turned out to be amazingly fun so I've continued to use film this autumn. That made me want to learn more about the whole process, so now I've started to develop film myself.

A fellow hobbyist on Midōsuji street.

Black and white film development turns out to be easy. It is cheaper than having a store do it (half price or much less, depending), and for medium-format it's much faster: the store takes three or four days, while doing it at home takes an hour or so. It gives you more control over the result - and more ways to screw up too, of course. You don't need a blacked-out room or anything, and all equipment, chemicals and stuff fits on one shelf in my study. The one single thing that takes a bit of practice is the first step of rolling up the film onto a spool for development, and doing it without seeing what you do. I had to practice doing it half a dozen times with an expired roll of film until it "clicked" and I got the knack of how to do it easily.

Some more examples below; please click through as the images are better viewed large.

Yves Gellie is a french photographer that can take better pictures using a pointed stick than I cold ever do with a camera. He visited the lab to take a picture for a project of his. Of course I had to take a shot of him working. That's a Mamiya 7 he's using in that picture, by the way, and no, I would not mind having one.

I realized I hadn't taken a robot picture in black and white so I set up a simple cross lighting setup and the Yashica on a tripod. One of the great things about black and white, by the way, is that you don't have to care about the color of your lights. The lighting are two dirt-cheap construction site lights and nothing else. Had I taken it in color it'd be a confused riot of red and orange from the construction lights, green from the ambient overhead flourescents and a bit of bluish daylight from out on the left. In black and white it's all smooth, pleasant tones of gray.

Two host club hosts on their way; and people lining up at the most popular takoyaki stand in Doutonbori.