Processing my 1st film

When I say processed my first film, what I really meant is that I have just processed my first film for a very long time. As mentioned in my previous post, I haven't used 35mm for over fifteen years. I put a roll of Ilford HP5 Plus in my Olympus OM4ti last year and took a series of photographs during a trip to London, especially around the bustling Borough Market. I also took the camera with me on a recent trip to Cambridge and this morning took the last half dozen frames in and around my home. This is due to the family self-isolating as a result of  having a high temperature over the weekend.

In fact I see this period of self-isolation as a good opportunity to rediscover my love for film. I bought the chemicals from Ilford, namely Ilfosol 3 film developer, PQ Universal print developer, Ilfostop and Rapid Fixer. The last two, the stop and the fixer, can be used for both film processing and printing. Currently you can purchase an Ilford Paterson film processing starter kit with chemicals, developing tank etc, for further info contact : sales@patersonphotographic.co.uk

When I was in the RAF we mainly used black and white, predominantly 120 roll film but also 35mm.  These were all processed in Paterson dev tanks, exactly the same as the one I used today. I used to process and print several rolls of film every day, it was second nature to me. I acquainted myself with the tank and the spiral and went over in my head the correct procedure. Not feeling 100% confident I checked online and watched a very good video from Ilford Photo - I will post the link below - I turned the light off and started to pull the end of the film onto the spiral. After a bit of fumbling I managed to feed it through and it all felt very familiar.

I prepared the chemicals, with temperatures as close to 20°C as possible. The development time for HP5 using Ilfosol 3 1:9 (30 ml to 270 ml water) is six and half minutes, with agitation for ten seconds every minute. The Ilfostop stop bath 1:14 (15 ml stop to 285 ml water) is agitated for about twenty seconds and the Rapid Fixer 1:4  (60 ml to 240 ml water) for approximately five minutes.

I nervously pulled the spiral out of the tank to check there were images on the film. Success. I will never forget that sinking feeling many, many years ago when I was processing a couple of films in the Air Force. I can't remember the actual film job, the memory must have been too painful...I took the film off the spirals and two films of 36 exposure totally blank, no edging numbers, nothing but clear acetate. It dawned on me that I had mixed the chemicals up and so fixed the films first, then used the stop bath and finally the developer. Thankfully no such disaster today and I was very relieved to see images.

I hung the film up to dry, put the kettle on and sat down and had a cup of tea. With the next two weeks at home, I look forward to the printing stage and also maybe using my Nikon Super Coolscan 8000ED for scanning the negatives onto the computer. We may be living in uncertain times at the moment and for the foreseeable future but there was something extremely gratifying to go back to something which played an important role in my life a long time ago.

Another useful introduction video about processing film from Ilford Photo :