My First Development

April 27th 2025

Film is expensive, and development adds another layer of cost. I was motivated to try to develop my films by myself.

I first suceeded to secure a little (dark) space with a sink and table, got myself some second hand and donated materials, and got into it.

I love colour, but since I never developped film before, I was hesistant, thinking of starting with black and white, easier according to all blogs I’ve read. But I love colour, so what’s the heck, I loaded some Kodak Gold 200 in my dear Olympus OM10, and roamed in the streets of Marseille a sunny April afternoon.

Back in my improvised darkroom, I started processing my freshly shot roll. I chose to start with the Adox C tec c41 kit. I basically followed the 38°C process to the letter. And after about 30 min, I opened my Paterson jar, and saw images on the film.

Here they are, with a little correction during the scanning process (mainly correcting a magenta cast and adding a wee contrast).

Bottom line, I’m quite happy with this first experiment. The contrasts are okay for me, maybe I need to improve the colour balance on some photographs, nothing too complicated though.
I find them overall a bit overexposed, I am not sure if this is due to the development process, or the very sunny day that I didn’t expose correcty.

Overall, I am now all in with home dev ;)