First a little back story: I decided about 6 months ago that I wanted to try my hand at film photography. I love the look of film and the more I read up on it, the more I thought that this was something I could do with minimal expense. I had an old Minolta XG-M but with all the manual Pentax lenses I had, I decided to trade it in for a Pentax ME Super.
Sadly, when the ME Super arrived, the mirror was stuck in the up position and I was unable to release the shutter button nor advance the wind lever. A scan of this site as well as a Google search led me to pop in a fresh battery and attempt to move the curtain very gently with my fingernail and voila, the mirror popped down and I was able to engage the shutter button. But the wind lever would only advance every second or third attempt so I removed the bottom plate (again following instructions found on the
internet) and watched the levers; all of which appeared to be in working order. In the end, regularly working the shutter-> wind lever cycle eventually resulted in it working each and every time.
The next step was to run a roll of film through it to see how/if it worked. My first roll was a flop as I didn’t load it properly but the second roll came back from the local camera store with images so I considered it a success and felt I was ready for the next step. In the meantime, I had been watching the local Craigslist and after a month or so, a listing came up asking for $50 for a complete darkroom set. Jackpot!
I brought home a box full of changing bags, developing tanks and reels, graduated cylinders, trays, an enlarger, a bulk film loader, paper and many things for which I still don’t have a clue what they are. He even included 3 rolls of Ilford FP4+ ASA 125 film (probably expired); one of which became my first test roll to develop at home in my bathroom.
The developing process itself went rather smoothly. I had expected to run into issues loading the film onto the reel in complete darkness but it turned out fine. Measuring the chemicals, watching the temperatures and keeping track of times was also without drama.
If you’ve gotten this far, then you’d probably like to see some photos. Admittedly, these are not works of art but I am really excited to have developed them myself. I still need to work on a scanning workflow that minimizes the amount of dust that appears as well as a drying process that doesn’t include watermarks. Any advice and tips you have would be greatly appreciated.
All photos were taken with ME Super + M50/2.0, Ilford FP4+ ASA 125 and scanned with Epson V500.
Thanks for looking (and reading)!