Film developing

[anselm]

First of all thanks to all who offered advice about my lense choice... after much deliberation and viewing pictures taken with the suggested lenses, Oh and a look at my bank balance, i opted for a 40mm Summicron C.

It has arrived, i have loaded it and am getting to grips with my M6 and new prurchase.

next question is though......where do i get the film developed in Cambridge, UK ???

do i trust it to Boots or Tesco (its a 400 B+W) or a someone else.

I will try one day to develop my films myself, but i want to get to grips with manual photography before i try anything else!😀

thanks i advance.
anselm
😕

 

[kully]

B&W - do it yourself. Unless it is C41 process - you'll be paying £8 per roll with prints and it'll take about a week to get them back. If you get the chemicals yourself from Jessops you're looking at ~£1 (cheaper if you shop around) for the negatives.

It depends, are you going to be scanning/enlarging yourself?

BTW I do know someone who does this B&W dev'ing and printing through the post. USed them once before - I'll dig out the details.

 

[markinlondon]

Thirded. I could also mention that given a little practice you'll also get much better results. The only problem is that it can become an obsession🙂

Mark

 

[Andrew3511]

Only down-side of the DIY approach is you get a nice set of negs but no actual prints. OK you can scan and print but if you are like me that takes ages of fiddling around and by the time you have thrown away 3 bits of photo paper that jammed/smudged/got put in upside down it's not cheap either. Ilford are doing a mail-order service and had mailers on front covers on magazines in the UK recently. According to the website (www.ilfordphoto.com) you can buy the mailing envelopes in branches of Boots.

 

[vicmortelmans]

Scanning and ordering digital print online is also cheap! The only worry I've got so far is that digital print is of course aiming for color. You can upload grayscale bitmaps and get back something not-so-colorful, but I don't have the feeling it's really the same as a black and white photo paper (but didn't expect that either).


Groeten,

Vic

 

[anselm]

..Ilford are doing a mail-order service and had mailers on front covers on magazines in the UK recently. According to the website (www.ilfordphoto.com) you can buy the mailing envelopes in branches of Boots.[/quote]

thanks for that, ironically it is an Ilford reel 😀

anselm🙂

 

[Crasis]

I setup my own darkroom with a decent Beseler 23CII enlarger, all the necessary equipment and even converted a room for the purpose. The cost was about 800 Euros, if I did my conversion right, for absolutely everything needed. A bit expensive, but when you're paying about 0.30 euros for an 8x10 print, and only printing what you want, it's really quite worth it.

If you don't want to go the printing route, developing requires a black bag to get the film into the developing tank, and the necessary chemicals. After this, you can pick and choose what to get scanned and/or printed by your local lab and still save a bunch of money not having them print absolutely everything.

A cheap light table solution, for looking at your negatives, is a childs toy for tracing drawings on paper. It has a basic light through a plastic top and pretty neon sides. 🙂

At any rate, it's hard to find a lab.. even a pro lab, that does a good job anymore. Too much digital for them to bother with film 🙁

 

[woffle]

There's a very good company near me in Tunbridge Wells - Adams Photographic. They used to do all my black and white medium format processing and printing and I can thoroughly recommend them - always got back clean negs and decent quality prints. Not too expensive either.

I'm not sure they have a website, I think they do mailorder - try giving them a ring 01892 512573 (hope this plug doesn't break any forum rules). It's probably also worth checking out the back pages of "Black & White Photography" - there's a whole bunch of small adverts for mail order developers and printers.

Hope this helps.

Joe

 

[anselm]

some great advice here, both for now and the future, as i said i probably will go down the self developing route later, but at the mo' i shall using labs to develop my masterpieces 😉!!

thanks everyone

anselm🙂

off to the newsagents for a copy of B+W photography....

 

[kully]

Ooo, and www.7dayshop.com have cheap mailers for Ilford.