Wow! It worked!

You really can learn anything you need to know from a book!

I won’t give you a primer on the process, but in order to understand the obstacles I faced you need to grasp that there are two main phases in developing film: loading and chemistry. Loading involves moving the film from the tightly-wound cassette (for 35 mm) or spool (120) to a plastic or stainless steel reel that leaves space within the spirals for the developer and other chemicals. You have to unspool the film, load it onto the reel, and put it into the developing tank in total darkness. If you’ve ever seen a movie scene set in a darkroom, it’s not the kind of “dark” where there’s a red light that allows you to see a little of what’s going on. It has to be pitch black. If you don’t have a completely dark room you can use a changing bag, a small lightproof canvas bag with holes for your arms. You put all the equipment in the bag, put your hands through the holes, and then perform all the necessary operations inside the bag without being able to see what you’re doing.

I tried this first out in the open with the old reel of film that was in my camera when I bought it. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out what I was doing. The film was hard to work with. It kept jumping off the spool or slipping out one side as soon as I’d gotten it threaded on the other.

I then tried it with my eyes closed and found it utterly impossible without the visual cues. So I tried to re-learn the process again using tactile cues. I noted how the flanges felt when the spool was lined up properly, tried to memorize the feel of my hand position when I was lining up the film, and so forth. I was feeling very Zen about adjusting my learning style to fit the situation.

It didn’t work.

So I took a few deep breaths, and I thought, “What would a yogi do?” And then I had this weird idea to try to visualize the film being loaded on the spool properly in my head while I was loading it in the bag. And it just leapt onto the reel.

I was very nervous about trying it with my first roll of actual film. I had shot a sacrifice roll of Dog playing in the snow that I wouldn’t be heartbroken about losing, just in case I screwed it up. I arranged all my materials, put my hands in the bag, and tried to visualize the film going onto the spool. I had a few false starts, but then it seemed to work perfectly. Of course, I still couldn’t see the film, because it was encased in the tank. I wouldn’t know if I had screwed up until I had gone through an hour of pouring chemicals in and out of the tank and agitating the tank back and forth.

The wonderful thing about that process is that you really have to focus in order to do it. Each step is timed, and you’re never sitting around; you need to agitate the tank or tap it to release the air bubbles or count down the seconds to the next cycle. You need to focus on exactly what needs to be done at every moment or risk losing your film, at best, or chemical burns, at worst. So there is no multitasking in the darkroom. After an hour I emerged with adequately-developed negatives, and I realized that my mind had not wandered once.

I tried my luck with a second roll and then scanned all my negatives with my new scanner. This was the best of the bunch:

(And how cute is that?)