Anyone still develop their own film?

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Pulp

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Kids bought me a dark bag, a Paterson tank, and some chemicals for Christmas. I finally finished a roll of B&W and got up the nerve to try it.
 

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ratski

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I used to do A LOT of my own developing and printing.

I learned more about photography in the darkroom than behind the camera.

Nothing teaches composition and lighting more than spending all day developing the film and trying to print correctly only to find out that there is a telephone pole in the background that looks like it is sticking out of someone's head!!
 

OKCHunter

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Kids bought me a dark bag, a Paterson tank, and some chemicals for Christmas. I finally finished a roll of B&W and got up the nerve to try it.
Very cool. I've never developed film but believe I would enjoy it. I do like digital in that you can "spray and pray" without cost to get good photographic results. And, with editing software you can get professional results. With film, however, you need to be a true photographer before the shot in order to keep from spending a small fortune. I've seen discussions about how film is making a small comeback among advanced amateur photographers.
 

NightShade

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Did it while I was in school years ago. 8th grade I think... Anyway took some pictures turned out interesting. Now it's easier to just transform to black and white in photoshop. As far as pictures and retouching them 99% of what I do is croping them down a little.

The major advantage of film is that it can be blown up to large proportions without loss of quality when a decent camera and film is used. Beyond that I would rather run digital. I'm not like the "pro" photographers who run through and delete out half the pictures they take either. Memory cards are cheap and I would rather swap it out. Was reading about that kind of thing happening at the major functions and such and then photographers finding out later on that they snapped a picture of something important only to not realize it and delete the picture to save space.
 

Pstmstr

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Very nice and a great hobby. I used to shoot exclusively in b&w and love the process.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 

Fyrtwuck

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Y’all have got me beat. My experience consisted of catching the picture when it was ejected on the bottom side of the camera and timing it to peel it open.
 

TerryMiller

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When I first got into film SLR cameras (an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic) back in 1967, I gave the darkroom on base a try with color slide film. After a few rolls of that, I decided that I wasn't into that part of the process. When digital came along, my first one was in 2000. While I can really appreciate those that do still develop their own, I prefer to take the pictures with composure in mind instead of trying to manipulate all the camera settings.

Because of that, I've gotten some pretty darn good pictures over the years that I might not have gotten if I were looking at the camera and not the subject. And, unless a photo is obviously blurred or may subject is blocked in some way (taking photos in a moving car), then I seldom ever delete a photo. At my Smugmug site, it is pretty much that people can see everything that I saw, even if the same subject has been taken with different zoom settings or other factors.
 

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