Medium format film processing.

When I first began studying photography, DSLRs were more than expensive, and so I got through my college course with a borrowed Olympus 35mm and roll upon roll of black and white film. By the time I started university I'd finally got a DSLR and never really looked back, but there are so many things I miss about film photography, like the tactility and unpredictability of it, that I've always continued to collect cameras and equipment so that I could get back into analogue photography again.

Last week, ordering a new back of developer chemicals I loaded up my Yashica 635 and took a few test shots of my daughter playing. With no light meter I had to estimate the exposure settings, got into a bit of a wrestling match with the film trying to fit it on the reel as quickly as possible because my bathroom is anything but light-tight and I'd lost hope that the film would show anything at all. But then I got these! And sure, the film got a little roughed up by my frustrated hands, and about half of the frames were either fogged or blank from bad exposures, but the good ones, were really good!

Without any paper, it was pointless setting up the enlarger, and while I have a 35mm scanner it doesn't take 120 film so I had to get a bit creative to get the images digitized. I cut a square out of some paper to make a frame for the negative, securing it with hair grips so that I wouldn't mark the film and then taping a square of white paper to the other side of the glass, behind the negative for the light to shine through before photographing it on a DSLR with a 24mm lens. It certainly didn't provide the level of contrast or detail that scanning or printing via enlarger would have, but it provided better results that I'd been expecting.

I'm so glad I can finally say that I've put my medium format to some good use, and that my efforts paid off. I can't wait to take out the Bronica next time!