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Sunday 1 September 2024

Developing, Printing and a Trip to London

New Month Old Post: first posted 20th July, 2016.

All the palaver of pre-digital photography: it seems as much of the past as typewriters and tape recorders: the business of loading the camera, rewinding, posting off the film, waiting for the prints or slides to come back hoping they will ‘come out’ all right, rationing your few remaining shots to avoid having to buy a new film, ordering extra copies for Grandma, and cluttering up drawers with boxes of colour slides, photograph albums and packets of negatives, and lofts with the slide projector, carousels and the glass-beaded screen.

And then there were those of us who took things a stage further: home processing. For that you needed another whole cupboard full of esoteric paraphernalia.

It was Duncan across the road who got me started. His dad developed his own photographs and had given him a packet of out-of-date contact papers. They darkened in light, so objects such as leaves or your fingers would leave a white silhouette. You could even print crude photographs from negatives in the same way. The problem was that the contact papers would continue to darken until they were completely black all over. Your silhouette or image lasted only five minutes at most.

Paterson contact printer
Well, one thing led to another, and before long I was making proper prints from negatives. I turned the yellow shed into a dark room, got a device for exposing photographic paper to illuminated negatives for just a few seconds, and began to spend my pocket money at the local chemists on packets of contact papers and bottles of photographic chemicals: developer to bring out the images and fixer to make the prints light-proof.

With the idea of taking photographs of London, we went down on the train to stay for a few days with Duncan’s grandma in Hounslow, where turboprop aeroplanes rumbled low overhead smelling of paraffin, and we had to be up early so her night-shift lodger could use the same bed. We freely roamed the Underground on our Rail Rovers (would you let two fourteen-year-olds do this now, naïve as we then were?), went to the Science Museum, saw the Houses of Parliament and The Monument, howled with laughter at The Road to Hong Kong in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby get fired into space in a capsule designed for monkeys, and got free tickets for the live Friday lunchtime broadcast of The Joe Loss Pop Show with guests The Barron Knights and regular singer Ross McManus – Elvis Costello’s dad. Actually, it was a bit disappointing to find the guests were only The Barron Knights whose act basically consisted of making fun of other groups. A few weeks earlier they’d had The Rolling Stones and The Searchers.

London Airport (Heathrow) 1966
London Airport, 1964 (renamed Heathrow in 1966)

I took my new Kodak Brownie Starmite camera (12 images of 4x4 cm on rolls of 46mm 127 sized film), but none of the photographs I developed at home were much good. Only one commercially developed shots came out, taken at London Airport (not yet called Heathrow): the last frame on a colour film left over from an earlier family holiday.

Kodak Brownie Starmite camera with flashbulb I used the Brownie camera for the next ten years but with black and white film because colour was so expensive. I could occasionally afford the flash bulbs though: disposable one-use plastic coated bulbs filled with magnesium and oxygen, sparked off by a battery. They melted when fired, leaving ash-filled knobbly glass inside the protective plastic coating.

Black and white film was easy to develop at home if you had a light-proof developing tank, and one conveniently materialised at Christmas. The most difficult part was getting the film into the tank. You had to separate it from its light-proof backing paper and feed it into a plastic spiral which went inside the tank, but you had to do it completely in the dark. The yellow shed was just about dark enough for contact printing – you could do that in the dim orange glow from the contact printer – but film was ultra-sensitive and had to be handled in pitch-black. You had to wait for night time, and then found yourself with head and arms beneath thick bedclothes, trying not to breathe on the film, getting hotter and hotter and gasping for oxygen. You really had to get a move on.

Paterson Major II Developing Tank

Once the film was safely in the tank the lid stayed on and you could work in daylight. It was essentially the same process as developing contact prints. You filled the tank with Johnson Universal Developer for a fixed amount of time, emptied it and replaced the developer with Johnson Acid Hypo Fixer for around a further thirty minutes, rinsed everything thoroughly with lukewarm water, took the film out of the tank and just like in Blow Up hung it to dry weighted by a bulldog clip to prevent curling. After that the negative images on the developed film could be contact printed (I have archived a copy of the Paterson instruction booklet which shows and explains the process).

It was always exciting to take the shimmering wet film out of the tank to see the dark negatives for the first time and try to make sense of what they were. You could easily have forgotten because the earlier images on the film would often be several months old. When you then printed the photographs it was fascinating to watch the images emerge under the surface of the developing fluid, trying in the dim light to judge when they were ready. 

BBC Better Photography 1965
I was never more than an occasional snapshot photographer, but my uncle gave me his old enlarger for making prints bigger than the negatives and I avidly watched the BBC series Better Photography on Saturday mornings through the autumn of 1965. 

Later, the Brownie Starmite was superseded by a Zenith E, a fairly basic Russian-made 35mm single lens reflex camera for which I bought extra lenses, an electronic flash gun and extension tubes for close-ups. I later tried the more complex process of colour developing and printing but tended to have difficulty with the colour balance because of my colour deficiency. Eventually I moved on to colour slides, and home processing came to an end.

Now, of course, everything is digital and so another of those experiential manual skills has been lost to the electronic world: the exercise of judgement, the physical manipulation of the materials, the strange saliva-inducing smell of the chemicals, the darkroom perfectionism – all gone! Instead, we compile our digital albums, Photoshop our images, blog about what fun things used to be and can be vaingloriously creative without physical skills at all. It’s good in many ways, but not always as satisfying. 

- Maurice Fisher’s website Photographic Memorabilia is a real treasure trove of images and information about photographic film processing and equipment.

35 comments:

  1. I think I prefer digital photography. Probably just laziness on my part but all that palaver with films, processing and sticking into albums; where they slowly started to become yellow and orange over the years - was too much bother for me. Plus the amount of wastage when the snaps arrived back from the developers with all those rubbish shots with heads missing.

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    1. Maybe, but I think we like using physical skills such as knitting, sewing, pottery, woodwork, playing musical instruments, gardening, cooking, and so on. We don't really need to, but enjoy it.

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  2. I like to have my mobile phone with me and capture the moment where ever I am. Did I tell you Tasker when I bought my first Digital camera in Argos in Killarney and I asked the lady cashier: " What film does it take?" I jest not.

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    1. An easy misconception at the time which only looks silly now.

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  3. My father had a Paterson Developing Tank - just like the one pictured. I was the only one of his four sons who showed the slightest interest in developing films and printing them but I did not get into it as much as you clearly did. There is a lot to groan about in the modern world but in my estimation, digital photography is not on that list. It is brilliant.

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    1. Indeed it is, but there was something about the quality of images on firm that it misses. The tank is the one I still have, and I also have a film camera, so am tempted to buy and develop a black and white film for the fun of it. I wouldn't print the pictures, though; I would scan in the negatives and do it digitially from that point.

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  4. It was a lot of effort but very satisfying, I'm sure. I was a hopeless photographer but I remember the flash bulbs. I seem to remember they were quite expensive, but it's all relative, I suppose.

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    1. I don't remember the bulbs as costing too much, but like all the other things, you had to use them sparingly. The flash they emitted lasted for a lot longer than electronic flash which is very brief.

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  5. My dad used to develop his own b&w photos (and my first attempts...) back in my childhood. He had a window-less darkroom in the cellar for it, in the house where we lived from when I was 10. I learned a little bit about the process, but l never really got the hang of the old inherited camera, and switched to instamatic and colour when those became available...

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    1. Home developing cost a lot less when I started, but commercial processing became fairly inexpensive in time, although colour was always a lot more than b&w.

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  6. That was a completely different age. We took very few photos as film and processing were expensive.

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    1. You couldn't afford to be wasteful. Even with 36-exposure 35mm film, it used to be no more than 2 or 3 per holiday.

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  7. Ah yes, darkrooms! My dad built a darkroom in our house and I helped him process some rolls of film. I remember the smell of the chemicals and the magical appearance of the images on the photo paper, after it has been exposed in the enlarger. I also took photography at summer camp and processed film there. I don't think I have any of those pictures anymore. They were mostly crap.

    I understand the nostalgia for pre-digital photography, because it did require such patience and skill. But all told, I'm thrilled with digital, and the way it's opened up the world of picture-taking to virtually everyone, with immediate turnaround and, once you've bought your device, at virtually no cost!

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    1. I don't disagree, and if "nostalgia" means wishing those times were back, I'm certainly not nostalgic for pre-digital photography. But I enjoyed it at the time and have images from those times I would otherwise not have, including indoor shots. I've used them from time to time here, although, yes, from a photography point of view, most of them are terrible.

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  8. Two things I had forgotten, the melting flash bulbs and somehow we had a flashlight and it was huge. I think it took eight D batteries. But how did it know to flash when a photo was taken? Bluetooth? That would be about sixty years ago.

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    1. I don't think I encountered one of those big flash guns except on tv and films, but I guess they would have been connected to the camera by a wire.

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  9. Oh, the good old days. I spent much of the seventies in love with film, especially 35mm black and white and later color. Developing, printing. Kept me off the streets.

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    1. I'm not saying I would want to return to all the trouble and effort, but you clearly remember the satisfaction in the process.

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  10. At school, we learned to develop photos with all the chemicals etc. involved as part of our Arts lessons. I quite enjoyed that, but it was never more than a school project for me. My Dad had a lot of photo equipment in terms of cameras, objectives etc., but to my knowledge he never home-developed the films.
    I used to have a digital camera and loved it, but once the smartphone cameras became standard, I never looked back - I just hate being weighed down with lots of stuff on my walks, and my smartphone is just that one item that can cover so many needs/wants when I am out and about, fitting in every handbag or even just the pocket of my coat.

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    1. I still use a digital camera being averse to smartphones - I've been addicted to too many computer games in the past, and don't really want to be bombarded by intrusive apps. (even though I know how to program the things). But I can understand the convenience of carrying one piece of equipment. That's why my dumb phone stays in my sack switched off.

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  11. Like Meike, I love my smart phone camera and all my images are taken with it, holidays and home. My father had a friend who had a fully equiped dark room in his loft. I was fascinated by it, the red light and pictures hanging round on pegs. Nothing was spared in terms of expenditure on equipment as far as I could see as a child. He was very enthusiastic amateur photographer and took many home movies as well. We are all in his home movies as children and often wonder what happened to them. My mother was bored rigid by it all but as children we loved it. As for 14 year olds in London, I think we would still let them roam around and have some freedom. I believe Kirsty Allsop has just let her 15 year old go inter-railing with a 16 year old. We were grown ups at 16. My brother and I would go off on bus trips when I was 10 and he was 14 and we were always back at the picking up point at the time we had been told to by our mother. Reliable and no mobile phones.

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    1. They were different times. We weren't cushioned much at all - e.g. 30 mile bike rides returning when we got back, however long it took. It probably depends on the individuals now. And we can stay constantly in touch. Even so, didn't someone report Kirsty Allsop to social services? Probably malicious.

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    2. At 15/16 we were considered grown ups back then, my brothers all left school at 15. Now 18 is only just termed out of childhood. Different times. As Kirsty Allsop said, she knows her son. I know many stories of young teenagers going travelling alone and often being bundled off by parents to get them out of the way for summer.

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  12. As someone who also left school behind at 15 years old, I went on to work and buy my own stuff. Enjoying the world that was opened up to me, only studying later. As for cameras, how old fashioned those early cameras were and what a slog with the film. Only just started using my phone as a camera and am surprised at the quality of the photo. Technology has certainly come up apace ;)

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    1. Our family tape recorder reveals that at 14 my voice had not yet broken. I was still small and had childhood interests. My friends were the same. That had probably changed by 15 or 16. Children have to grow up sooner now.

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  13. Your post reminds me of the 1960s movie THE VIPS with Elizabeth Taylor and

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  14. Apparently it was traditional photography that caught out former US President Clinton and Ms Lewinsky. Digital was becoming more popular and it is easy to simply delete photos that don't fit the commision. However traditional have to be developed to assess their 'value' and even the 'duds' get stored somewhere. I understand it was one such reject from weeks earlier that established POTUS did indeed know that woman.

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  15. Rail Rovers has a great ring to it. When I was a teen in the 80s, we also had free reign to take public transit unaccompanied by adults. There were creepy men to contend with, unfortunately, sometimes, but I am glad I was able to get out and about.
    The old Hope/Crosby pictures played on our televisions when I was a child. I enjoyed them, but probably preferred the zaniness of Abbott and Costello, if I'm honest.
    Thank you for sharing this, ahem, snap shot of your youth (har-har) with us. :)

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    1. It was indeed a snapshot. Like so many others, it emerged when looking through old photographs.

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