Cheap and cheerful film developing

[Big Picture ]

There are a million online articles and forum postings that tell you how to develop 35mm negatives. This isn't (exactly) one of them. Rather than intimate that it's dead easy (it is) but dismiss some of the details with a wave of the mouse ("simply pop the top of the canister off..."), I'm going to a) boast about how little it cost me; and b) tie some of the steps down to specifics for raw beginners.

Kit list
My philosophy when exploring new photographic pursuits is always to select the cheapest entry point, on the grounds that you don't waste much money if you subsequently decide not to pursue that avenue. So buy only what you need, search around for best prices (particularly on the most expensive items) and ignore the fripperies. [Suppliers mentioned below are UK-based.]

• Paterson Universal Tank: I lucked out here, finding a new tank for £8.99 in a tiny Aberystwyth photography shop. At "leading high street retailer" Jessops, you'd pay £18.99 - ironically, the shop in question became a branch of Jessops the next day, hence the stock clearance. This is the most expensive item so it's worth looking around. (Paterson's autoload reels are the easiest to master.)
• Changing bag: The cheapest I found was £11.49 at 7DayShop (hint: it's under Accessories, not Darkroom). Large size, 30".
• Thermometer: About £10 in a camera store, but only a few quid if you buy a beermaking thermometer from a discount homeware store like Wilkinsons. This should be sufficiently accurate unless you're doing C41/E6 development.
• Measuring jugs: Two or three covering 0.5-1l in capacity, from a homeware store.
• Plastic, sealable beakers or bottles: Homeware again.
• Large bucket: Buy new so it's clean, and don't use it for anything else (i.e. keep it away from sick family members).
• Rectangular washing-up tub or closed seed tray: For a water bath.
• Small scissors: Again, a dedicated pair that can be kept clean.
• Two clothes pegs, one with a small weight attached (e.g. blob of Blu-tac).
• 50-100ml graduated measuring cylinder: OK, a camera shop may be the only convenient option for this unless you work in a chemistry lab.
• Negative archival pages.
• Liquid developer (well-known brand): Ilford recommend DD-X but that comes in a huge and costly 1 litre size. Try a 250ml bottle of Ilfotec LC29, diluted 1+19, for lower initial cost and decent economy.
• Generic (any brand) fixer & stopper.
• Washing-up liquid: Borrow the bottle from the kitchen.
• Roll of panchromatic (not C41) ISO 400 B/W film: Ideally something cheap, but preferably a type that has published times for the developer you are using. (I used Tura P400, but had to extrapolate the development time from similar film/dev combinations - I guesstimated ten minutes, which was fine.) Note that the "tabular grain" films like T-Max and Delta are said to be less tolerant of exposure and development variations, so you might want to start with a traditional emulsion like Tri-X or HP5+.
• Film leader retriever: May or may not be required, see below.

Procedure

1. This isn't a complete guide. Go to Ilford's web site and download their excellent PDF guide to "developing your first BW film". Print it out and keep it handy. (You may also want the PDF info sheet on their liquid developer range, as it contains some useful charts of dilutions and times.) What follows only covers the steps that are different or incomplete in the Ilford advice.
2. Shoot the film. Just burn up the roll around the house, and don't take anything you can't easily repeat.
3. Set up a place to hang the film after development. It should be warm and reasonably clean. E.g. A length of string hung across the inside of an airing cupboard.
4. Opening the film canister and winding the film on to the reel in total darkness is, by consensus, the most difficult part and the one where you are most likely to damage the roll. So don't make it harder than necessary: leave the leader out of the canister when rewinding and start it on the reel in the light. If you have a manual camera, simply stop rewinding when the crank goes stiff and then completely slack. If the leader has already been wound into the canister (e.g. by a motorised rewind), use a film leader retriever to pull it out. (Label the exposed reel if not developing immediately!) Assuming you started taking pictures when the frame indicator said '1', there are about five inches of blank film that can be pulled out before the first frame. Trim the end of the roll suqare and round off the corners; don't cut across a sprocket hole.
5. Once the film has caught in the reel mechanism, transfer it to the changing bag. Also insert: development tank; central spindle; funnel lid; scissors (write this list out and visually check the items off as you put them in the bag). You might find it easier to put all the other items inside the tank, so you can locate them easily. (Remember to remove them before inserting the reel.)

6. Wind the film on to the reel inside the bag, keeping the canister aligned straight with the feed. Pull the canister away occasionally and check that it is drawn back towards the reel as you wind to verify that the film is feeding on. At the end, cut or tear off the canister (mind your fingers and if the worst happens, don't bleed on the roll).

   Sooner or later, everyone encounters a roll that won't wind on to the reel without jamming. Forcing it leads to kinks in the film, usually on a critical part of an image. To minimise the chances of this happening, it is critical that the reels are completely dry and clean before use. Always wash them well after a developing session. Before starting, warm them with a hairdryer to remove moisture; this also expands the plastic slightly. Ensure that the ball bearings which grip the film move freely, and avoid touching the inner tracks (if your hands sweat, try wearing cotton gloves). Bend the end of the roll back slightly to reduce the curl before loading. As you turn the sides of the reel, gently pull them outwards. If the film jams, try more outwards pressure and a few taps to free it. Otherwise, you may have to pull it all off and try again: take a deep, calm breath and resist the urge to throw the whole thing across the room (which is how I lost a complete film once). In the worst case, if it simply won't go on, cut the film and wind the remainder on to a second, spare reel in the bag. You'll lose a frame, but at least the roll will be unmarked.

7. Once the reel is in the tank and the lid is in place, leave it. Fill the bucket with water and adjust hot/cold until its temperature is around 21C (to allow for cooling). This may take a while but there is no time pressure right now. Use only this water from this point. Mix the required developer/fixer/stopper solutions with it now, in the right concentrations (do them all together because you won't have time midway through, and to ensure that you have sufficient quantity of each). Also pour some water into the tub or tray and put the developing tank and the beakers or jugs containing your solutions in there.
8. Pour in each solution in turn and agitate as per the instructions. If you have suitable airtight storage bottles, you can retain the fixer and stopper for reuse. (Ilford suggest there's little value in reusing developer unless you're doing volume processing.) Follow Ilford's three-wash cycle at the end, again using the water from the bucket. For a final rinse, squirt a small amount of washing-up liquid into the water to prevent drying marks.
9. Unwind the film from the reel, taking care not to let it touch the floor (yes, there should be actual images - woo! - visible on it). Wash and wet your fingers, then run them along the length of the film to squeeze off the excess water, or use a wet paper towel. Be careful with the emulsion side, as it is easily rubbed off while wet.
10. Hang the film up in your drying place using a clothes peg. Attach the weighted peg to the bottom; it should be just heavy enough to stop the film curling up without stretching it. Leave until dry on both sides, then carefully cut into strips and archive.

Afterwards
Most photographers like to have contact sheets of their negatives to act as a reference. If you're not using a wet process, my preference is to scan each strip in VueScan at the lowest resolution, with "Index file" and JPEG as the only Output options enabled (remember to reset the counter), for previewing. When complete, load the index file into your image editor, adjust the levels if necessary and apply some minor sharpening before printing it out on photo inkjet paper.

My initial choice was to scan every negative at full resolution and generate both processed and raw output files. However, this takes forever and uses a lot of disk space. Given that "if there are three keepers, it was a good roll", this is largely wasted effort. It's much easier to scan once quickly for the contacts and then go back and scan the individual shots you want properly later.

Other bubbles

• About.com's guide is one of the most thorough, although it differs from Ilford's method in a few minor details; this shows that a precise technique isn't critical.

Resealing camera bodies

[Big Picture ]

It seems my faithful Nikon EM has sprung a light leak. Thankfully, my fellow Nikonians came to the rescue and last night I was able to (hopefully) repair the problem. Read on for the gory details.

1. Buy a light seal foam kit from Jon Goodwin (interslice) on eBay. Shipping time (to the UK) was about a week(!). The large $9 kit contains enough foam to do about a dozen cameras.
   When you receive the kit, unpack it carefully. Identify and label (using sticky labels on the backing paper) each type of foam strip based on the descriptions in the booklet.
2. Gather the tools recommended by Jon in his detailed instructions, most importantly the X-acto type knife. Cotton buds ("Q-Tips") are also very useful for removing the crud.
3. Sit at a table with a clear workspace. Set up a good, close light, like a desk lamp.
4. Remove any mounted lens from the camera and fit a body cap while working on the rear. If the focusing screen is designed to be removeable, take it out.
5. Follow the instructions carefully. The most tedious part of the job is removing the old foam. Some kind of solvent (applied via a cotton bud) is useful to soften the adhesive; I used Surgical Spirit, which seemed to do the job well (NB. not sure if this is recommended!). Expect this part to take a while and don't rush.
6. The sealing strips for the back should be pushed down bit by bit with the wooden tool. Cut with scissors when you reach the end of the gutter. Check that the back still closes properly.
7. Jon includes advice for Nikon FMs, which should be fairly generic. I found his recommendation of 3/32" foam for the mirror damper a little thick in practice compared to the original stuff, although I'm sure it will work OK - 1/16" is probably a closer width though. I considered using the neoprene foam instead, but thought it might be too firm.
8. Measure or guesstimate the size of the new foam and cut it out using the knife and a good ruler - a steel ruler shaped for safe holding is probably the best choice. Grip the new piece gently in a pair of tweezers (the adhesive will be sufficient to keep it on) while positioning it, before using the wooden tool to press it down as you remove the tweezers.
9. Clean any crud away from the focusing screen and mirror using a clean cotton bud - be very gentle. The bud should pick any bits up. (While you're at it, clean the viewfinder externally with a bud too.)
10. Check the camera operation afterwards, and don't use the first roll of film for anything important.

Results TBC!

Other bubbles

• Precise seal instructions for specific camera models from Jon Goodman.
• Replacing deteriorated foam from the Medium Format digests (applies to 35mm too).
• Micro-Tools also sells foam kits.

Good news for the environment

[Big Deal ]

BB would just like to congratulate all the main political parties taking part in the upcoming European and local elections. All of them have recently made significant contributions to environmental improvement, collectively making the biggest difference ever through party-political means.

If anybody has more electoral leaflets that they would like us to add to our recycling bin, please get in touch.

Nagios SNMP plugins

[Big Job ]

Nagios is a great network monitoring frontend. NET-SNMP is a good SNMP implementation for the backend. Somehow, nobody appears to have yet connected the two in any useful, simple way. If you feel that you ought to be able to use SNMP to perform remote host monitoring checks in Nagios, here are two such plugins that monitor load and disk space.

Nagios has some useful plugins for monitoring host state, but most of them only operate on a local system. To run them against remote systems, you need to use either the NRPE plugin (extra setup) or the check_by_ssh plugin (setup, shell access, protocol overhead) to execute the same plugins remotely. SNMP is supposed to be tailormade for remote monitoring and it should be more lightweight than the existing solutions, so why not leverage that instead? Furthermore, NET-SNMP is a portable, open implementation that gives easy access to host operating data.

Prerequisites

• Working installation of Nagios on your monitoring server.
• Working installation of NET-SNMP on all your hosts, running the snmpd daemon with the UCD-SNMP MIB enabled. The configuration should at least allow your monitoring server to read values. (You will need the snmpget and snmpdf utilities on the Nagios server.)

Warning: some assembly required. Check the downloaded files over and edit any required settings first (e.g. command paths).

check_snmp_load: This Perl script is a modified version of one of the standard Nagios plugins. It uses the NET-SNMP snmpget command to read the 1, 5 & 15 minute load averages of a remote system via the laLoad entries in the UCD-SNMP MIB.

check_snmpdf: This is a rewritten version of the existing check_disk plugin (which only checks space on the local system). The link is to the C source file. To compile it, drop it into the plugins/ subdirectory in your nagios-plugins build tree. Then either copy, paste and edit appropriate rules in the Makefile in that directory and type "make check_snmpdf", or enter the compiler commands directly:

$ gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I../lib -O -c check_snmpdf.c
$ gcc -O -L. -o check_snmpdf  check_snmpdf.o utils.o \
../lib/libnagiosplug.a popen.o -lsnprintf -lsnprintf

(Assuming you've previously built the rest of the plugins.)

Both commands give usage help with the -h switch. Install the new commands with the other Nagios plugins and add new entries to the Nagios checkcommands.cfg file. E.g.:

define command{
  command_name check_snmp_load
  command_line $USER1$/check_snmp_load -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -C public -S 2 c -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$
  }
define command{
  command_name check_snmp_disk
  command_line $USER1$/check_snmpdf -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -C public -S 2c -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$
  }

(These examples assume that your SNMP v2 read community name is the default, public; you should use something else in your own site and define the name as a macro in resources.cfg.) Add new service checks that use the new commands as normal.

Caveats

• No warranties; free to use or modify; if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces; etc.
• I don't plan to offer ongoing support for these, although if anyone wishes to send me bug fixes or simple enhancements then I'll try to integrate them.
• Both these commands spawn extra processes to read the actual SNMP values; on a large Nagios setup, this will add considerable overhead. One fix would be to use the appropriate native API libraries for NET-SNMP.
• The load check uses the same figures that uptime outputs, which is claimed not to be the most accurate representation of "system load".
• AFAIK, the command syntax won't support specification of SNMP v3 security credentials.

Other bubbles

• 2007-11-05: Haven't tested these yet, but these Nagios snmp plugins appear to be the same thing done right and with more monitoring options.
• Nagios SNMP plugins to check disks and processes using the host monitoring in the SNMP daemon itself. Written in C using the NET-SNMP library. Requires GNU autoconf/automake to build (err...that's not how it's supposed to work), or hack a config.h together from another already-configured autoconf package.
Posted by Ade at 04:59 PM | Reply

Reduced Shakespeare Company reduced review

[Big Words ]

Strident Yanks bawl at audience for two hours. Some laughs.

The red tide

[Big Noise ]

Ashley Norris over at the Guardian becomes one of the first mainstream journos to sample the All Of MP3 "samples" (that's full length, unprotected samples in the format of your choice, bud). He offers some unintentional (we think) black humour.

There was no way on earth I was ever going to give my credit card details to the site, so I went for the more secure option of paying via PayPal.

...These guys are about to give him access to gigs of cheap western music (a service he can't actually receive in his own country), they're not even insisting on a direct view of his credit card number and yet he still implies that his bank account will be emptied before a young Moscow bride turns up on his doorstep a month later. Whereas those stalwart fellows at Paypal have proved to be a model of capitalist restraint and consumer rights in the past, haven't they?

"...if you can square it with your conscience..."

"Conscience, is it OK if I download stacks of cheap MP3s?"
Yeah alright, if you promise never to buy another overpriced CD.
"Cheers, you're a pal!"

For most users too the iTunes, Connect and Napster services, when they finally launch in the UK, will more than suffice.

...Yes, being granted temporary asylum in the paradise of earthly MP3 delights before eternal exile to DRMed, Microsoft format Hell will be plenty sufficient for we folk of simple tastes. We're sure consumers will say "Thank christ I can now pay an arm and a leg for a lousy play-once WMA file that I can only listen to in mono on Fisher Price headphones at a volume too low to drown out the coked-up giggles of record company execs as they receive another bevy of high class hookers! That cheap Russian MP3 site was an unholy threat to civilisation that ranked alongside Mr Bin Laden!"

Of course, if you download from All Of MP3 then the artists won't see a cent either - so it's marginally worse than a standard record contract then. On the other hand, a self-financed independent artist with their own label is much worse off. Remember: it's not stealing if you only download tracks belonging to huge multinational conglomerates with myopic and questionable business practices. It's more like...justice.

Rather like Matt at Debris, BB's quandary is that there's nothing we actually want from the site (so our contribution cancels out, as there's nothing we want from the record store either). However, we're tempted to download a few Coldplay tracks just in case this technology really is killing muzak (mental image of Chris Martin shrinking and crying out "I'm meltiiiinnnnngggggg!!!").

(Somehow, we resisted the urge to title this entry "All Of Your MP3 Are Belong To Us", but we're sure others won't.)

On the waterfront

[Big Picture ]

A fisherman's bondage gear [? check this - ed.] down by the harbour.