"Thomas Prufer" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 19 Sep 2015 16:54:42 +0100, Chris French

wrote:

Someone on the local Freecycle was offering a load of darkroom gear,
which I've acquired. And I've rooted out my old film SLR. So now need to
construct some sort of darkroom space.

Once you've got that, have a look at pinhole cameras. These can use photo
paper
as "film", and that makes the dark requirement a lot less stringent. And
it's
something different from digital.

(I was impressed by some long-term exposures of the ocean -- the motion
averages
out over time, and the water looks perfectly flat.)

For chemicals, look at "nonstandard developers". Quick google gave
http://www.caffenol.org/, with suggestions such as cheap beer, coffee,
beet
juice and other developers which sound like they won't break the bank.

As well as developing and printing ordinary B&W film and printing from them
(in a darkroom in the loft - hot in summer, cold in winter, kneeling on
chipboard floor with enlarger in front of me on floor and dev/wash/fixer
bowls for prints on floot) I also experimented with:

- Ilford XP5 film (B&W but developed as for colour film, uses dyes rather
than silver grains for image on negative)

- printing on B&W paper from colour negatives - very muddy (and probably
hopelessly non-panchromatic) prints

- printing from colour slides onto paper (yields a negative) and then
contact-printing that negative onto another sheet of paper - rather
contrasty prints, but a few looked superb.


XP5 was a bugger to get consistent results because the chemicals have to be
warmer than for B&W so the cool more quickly - both times I heated them to
the same temp and used the same timings for each stage, but one film was
much denser than the other. However XP5 seems to have a large exposure
latitude so prints from both films looked equally good in tonal range, even
if I have to expose prints for longer with one than the other. Grain of XP5
at 400 ASA is much finer than for HP5 (conventional silver-based film) at
same speed. And XP5 pushed to 1600 ASA, although much grainier, was far less
so than HP5 with same push-processing - prints from latter looked like
pencil sketches.

Photo club at school bought a bulk load of FP4 and teacher dispensed it to
us all in reusable cassettes of 36 exposures. Unfortunately all the film was
badly scratched with horizontal tramlines due to grid in the bulk dispenser
:-( Easy to clone out on a modern digital scan from the negs, especially
against plain sky where it is most noticeable, but almost impossible to hide
on a photographic print.


I wouldn't go back to film now - I can be far more creative with digital
camera and digital manipulation: adjust contrast, retouch blemishes, clone
out unwanted details like lamp-posts, correct colour casts, correct
perspective errors (ie rectangle becomes parallelogram if camera is not
square on to something - which is necessary if taking a photo by flash of a
reflective plaque etc and you don't want burnt out reflection of flash).