DIY: Developing Your Own Film

Since a lot of my photography work is shot in black and white film, which I develop myself, I thought I’d do a little How To, if anyone’s interested. I’m not an expert, and I just do it the way I’ve been taught at college, so if anyone does it differently then that’s fine. A lot of things can change based on temperature and the type of film you are using, and I don’t really know much about the chemicals because the technicians at college sort all that out. I’ll learn one day, I hope to have a little makeshift dark room when I’m older, but for now I just do it like this:

Like I said above, this is the way I have been taught, and it’s probably not enough information to go ahead and develop your own, but I made it more as a kind of guideline for people who are interested in how film gets developed, because I didn’t really have a clue before I started.
I’ll try and do a separate one for printing photos from film, but it might be a bit difficult as I can’t use my camera in the dark room, and I can’t take photopaper out until it’s been fixed.
We’ll see :)

DIY Roundup

I thought I’d do a post of all my favourite DIY’s I’ve been seeing on blogs lately:

This Map/Magnet Board by Sincerely Kinsey

These Cake Batter Milkshakes from A Beautiful Mess

These Cake Pops from Delightfully Tacky

This ZigZag Nail Tutorial from The Dainty Squid

This Needle Felted Elbow Patch from Honestly WTF

 And pretty much all of the crafts on PS I Made This

Camera Masks

Last week I came across the film ‘Revolog Kolor’ on the Photojojo website. I looked it up and apparently it came around because a few students experimenting with shining different coloured lights on parts of the film, before it had been developed. I really loved the dreamy colours it made, and tried to find some of my own. Turns out Revolog is a company with a few different films with wacky effects, and they were pretty reasonably priced too at €7, and I was about to buy, except the postage came to about €20. I was very disappointed. And after searching for it on the web, I realised this (and the photojojo store) were the only places it was available. So I figured I’d try and get the wonderful colours in my pictures some other way.

I thought about shining the light on them, but I decided I couldn’t really risk it, as this is the film I was taking to New York with me, and as I’m already playing around with quite a few of the films already, I want to ensure that at least some of my pictures will definitely work. So I did this instead...

 I opened up Photoshop and created eight 3” by 4” rectangles, before adding gradients and textures to them.

I printed this out onto acetate, before cutting them all out. 

Then I cut each one down to size to fit in a specific camera. I put a blue to green plain gradient in my fisheye, simply using tape to keep it in place.

And this one was a nice little mistake. This is the same camera I used for my Steven Gill photos, so I left the beads and the plastic bag, and added a little glitter, but when I put the mask onto the tape, it had too many air bubbles for my liking, so I peeled it of with the intention of putting it back on a little neater, however, the tape pulled off some of the ink from the acetate, giving it a nice texture to it.

And this is my action sampler which I put the mask previously used in the above camera in. You can see where some of the colour has been pulled off and it’s left a really nice texture behind.

So here’s a quick, cheap and pretty easy idea for adding a little colour to your photos. I won’t know the outcome till after New York (LIKE THREE DAYS AWAY!!) but I will be posting all of my results.

Bye :)

Graphics on a Sunday...

This would usually be on a Saturday, but I’m already a day behind so its a Sunday instead. Unfortunately there are no days of the week beginning with a ‘G’, so my alliteration streak has had to come to an end.
In graphics we’ve been working on screenprinting, and since I’ve been going video mad this week, I figured another one couldn’t hurt. So here’s some examples of screenprinting for you to watch :)

Textile Tuesday

eh, cool title huh? see where I’m going with this...

anyway, here is todays contribution, involving textiles. I filmed myself making prefelt today, so I’m posting the video. When I make them into felt, I’ll film that, and probably upload it next week.



seeya