The First Black & White Film

It was the first time I used a roll of black & white film on my own camera, the first time I developed my black & White film at the Darkroom in MMU and the first time I used a film scanner.

I could expect I would need 4 days to get the procedure of developing and scanning the film done. On Monday morning, I finished the last 5 shot in the All Saint Park and planned to develop it in the afternoon. The darkroom re-opened at 1:30pm after the lunch break. I went to there at 2:30pm but someone was using it. I waited and I could use it at 3:00pm. When I tried to put my film in the barrel with light off in the darkroom, I spent nearly half an hour on it but I still couldn’t get the film on. I was wondering didn’t forget how to do it? I was so lucky that I didn’t break the roll of the film and I could rewind the film to the roll. I went out of the darkroom and a girl studying photography was just right there. I asked her why and she looked at the barrel carefully. She separated the barrel in two pieces, put them back together and told me the little two metal balls in the barrel were not in the same position, there why I couldn’t roll my film to the barrel.

I didn’t know the barrel can be separated in two pieces. I borrowed it from the photography office and used it immediately. However, now I know, it won’t happen again. The time was 4:00pm until I realised that so I had to do it next day.

The next day was Tuesday, the busiest day of a week. I got a lecture in the morning and a course meeting in the afternoon but the darkroom was not open during the lunch break at 12:30-1:30pm. Fortunately, the meeting finished a bit early and I had just enough time to develop my film. There was no fault this time, I was so satisfied when I saw the images on the film while it was been washing in the water. Eventually, I left the film in the dry cabinet over a night.

I got the dry film next day, cut it in six frames per set and planned to go to the Mac suite to scan the film. The female staff of the AV store told me there was a film scanner at the Mac suite. When I was using the film scanner, I was so frustrated. The scanner was Nikon Super-scan 9000, something like that. It was so freaking slow and always crashed by its old software. Even the staff of the Mac suite couldn’t give me a help with that because the software of the scanner is pretty old but the iMac is a new thing. I spent 4 hours to do the scanning and I finally got every image on the computer but I unexpectedly left my memory stick at home. I thought I had to scan them again because any files would be erased once I log out the Mac. But thanks god, the files were still there when I went to the Mac suite next day. I was so glad to see them there.

In this series of photos taken with Ilford HP5 B&W film, I found that I used quite many different lenses to take those shot. They are:

Canon FD lens 28mm F/2.8

Canon FD lens 70-210mm F/4 Macro
This lens is a tele-zoom lens but it can be a macro lens. I can get a quite close up shot when I twist the length to 70mm. £14 for this lens is a very good deal.

Canon Fd lens 50mm F/1.8

Nikon AI-s lens 50mm F2.8 Marco
Using it on Canon AE-1 Programme with a lens adapter

Canon FD lens 35-70mm F/4

Don't like to use zoom lenses because most of them have small aperture and cannot produce images as good quality as prime lenses. However, these three images look all right.