Pictures!!!

Yuka finally taught me how to develop my own pictures! It was actually really easy. It sucks that I just now learned how to do it since I will be going to Japan so soon, but I will try to do it in Japan too. This means I will have to find an apartment with a good bathroom. I will probably start spending hours at a time in the bathroom... It was pretty easy. I was a little concerned at first because the room wasn't completely light proof, but my negatives turned out well, and there didn't seem to be any problems. My own dark room will probably be more light tight than this one though... We spent a lot of time preping the room before we even started developing the negatives, and I had some trouble trying to load the film onto the spool since you have to do it in complete darkness. But once it's in the tank, you can turn the regular lights on for the rest. After reading so many B&W photography sites, I thought that they way they did their chemicals was a little shady because they reused everything. According to the instruction sheet, for every 15 times the developer is used, you should increase the developing time by one minute. It seems a pretty inexact science, but it worked out.

Printing was actually more difficult that developing. You have to do test sheets to get the right exposure time, then check the contrast. If it doesn't have enough contrast, then you add a filter and try again. In the entire 4 hours we were in the dark room, we developed 2 rolls of film and two good prints. Once you've tested exposures and contrast on the paper, it should be easy to get the timing right on the actual paper, but the last print we tried to make, one taken by my new camera of Red Square, turned out bad even though we thought we had the exposure right. It's amazing how quick it was though. I think that after that 4 hour lesion, I can go there by myself and be able to do it fine. I think I will try to find some time next week to go back.

Pictures will be posted as soon as I get some scanned. Right now there are just two of my sister and I. The one of Western that didn't turn out so hot is neat looking anyway, but it is so light that it wont scan very well. Ciao!