still making headway developing. i had to get a respirator to keep from breathing the powders in before mixing them – the first batch, before i'd thought to protect myself at all, had me sick for a week, what a drag. since then, i've done a couple more runs and have a fair few more contact sheets to show for it.
temperature control is the hardest part – i mix the developer and fix at 49°C but do the actual development at 20°C. i have an excellent heater (the
cinestill tcs-1000) but nothing to chill my chemistry with after mixing, so for now i'm keeping about 6L of water at a time cold in the fridge and using that to try and crash cool my chemistry after mixing, in a stockpot that becomes suddenly small and crowded with all my bottles. i'm thinking one eventuality for after i move will be to get an aquarium of about 20L and set up a thermoelectric cooling system, to have a hands-free temperature control bath.
conventional wisdom about black and white film is that temperature isn't so important, but after having seen enough rolls turn out overdeveloped, with extremely high contrast breaking every gradient, it's easy to remember the conventional wisdom cane from news photographers printing high contrast for newsprint, in halftones that'd hide all those harsh transitions. at a certain point, it becomes impossible to compensate for high temperatures with shorter development times. so, each run takes about four hours, of riding a thermometer and cycling water through three pitchers in and out of the fridge. there's a better way, but after the move (and after some cost, ack).
things will be a little easier in color, working at 35°C (which is about as cool as the tap water gets in my apartment in this summer heat) but that's for some later projects.
