I developed film!

Alright so back from vacation now. I was on a road trip to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois with my family. Fun stuff =)

Anyways today was a pretty interesting morning. We had our meeting and talked about the field trip tomorrow and how that's going to go. I'm pretty excited. Rumor has it that we are actually going to see contact lenses being made. How cool is that? (Updates on that tomorrow).

But today I made a solution of film developer which was pretty neat. I used 3L of distilled water and mixed it with the powder mix from kodak. There were three baths going. The first one on the left was the developer. The middle was the stop bath which stops the developer from developing any further (hence STOP bath). The bath all the way to the right was the Fix bath which fixes and stabilizes the image. There are silver and bromide ions in the film and if not fixed, when brought into the light, they can blacken over time and ruin the image. So the fix bath protects the image. We filled the big bath of the three tubs in it, with water from a pump and used the Wing-Lych water temp controller to keep the water temp at 69.1 degrees. Then we opened the nitrogen tank and pumped N2 into the 3 baths every ten seconds so that it would oxidize the solutions. We put on gloves so that we could prevent fingerprinting the film canister or film. We placed the film in each bath for a certain period of time and then we placed it into a black tub with a semi-soapy solution which cleans the images and prevents water spots. Then we placed the film in the dryer cabinet for 30 min. And that was the magic of developing film!

I thought it was so cool to have the lights out and the red overhead lights. I've always wanted to take photography in high school and try to develop my own film, but I never have and never will. But at least I got my own little lesson :)

And the remainder of the day I will be scanning the images that I have developed and analyzing them. Fun stuff.