At Easter of this year, my friend Laura taught me (and a few others - it was a really fun week in the darkroom) how to develop and make prints from black and white film. I’ve not really looked back since - I don’t have a figure for how many films I’ve developed this year, but I will count them up at some point soon. It’s in the 10s, that’s for sure - both 35mm and 120.

Anyhow, ever since developing black and white film, a few of us UBU Photosoc darkroom types have been contemplating moving on to C-41 (colour print film) development. Various encouraging online articles, and the experiences of flickrites such as Perminna and The Wishy suggested that despite the added complication of temperature control, developing C-41 negative and even E-6 slide film to a decent standard is not too difficult.

Whilst no special kit (beyond the correct chemicals) is really needed over b+w development, we are lucky enough to have a Jobo CPE2 ‘processor’ in Photosoc. I say ‘processor’ because it’s nothing more complex than a water bath with a heating element and simple temperature regulator, and a motorised agitator, onto which Jobo developing tanks (‘drums’) can be attached.

Despite having the Jobo, we found an excuse not to develop colour film - a 1L kit only costs £15 or so, but postage is expensive. Trying to get an order big enough to qualify for free delivery from our chosen supplier delayed progress indefinitely - not least when we received an extremely generous donation of darkroom equipment, sadly due to a bereavement. Amongst this were further Jobo processors, and quite a collection of chemicals - until we figured out what everything was, there was no way we were going to buy more stuff!

Our ‘Darkroom A’ now looks like this (photo by Ben Eddings):

Matt contemplating the chemicals (photo by Ben Eddings):

These included something called ‘CELER-41’ made by ‘Speedibrews’, a powder C-41 developer and ‘blix’ (bleach+fix) kit. Hmmm, we said - did we really want to experiment with unheard-of chemicals of unknown vintage? Colour development went on hold again…until I mentioned it was my birthday on December 20th and I didn’t really have any plans. “How about colour developing?” asked Matt.

To cut a long story short, we went for it, and it worked - after a fashion. The first roll we developed was shot by Alice and as it came out of the final rinse, this is what appeared:

Aaaw, you guys! Too nice! (Even if ‘APPY BIRTH’ was wrongly exposed - Alice blames the camera ;-) ).

Next up was a roll of expired Superia 1600 I’d shot mostly around my office and at a curry with various Bristol-based flickr types. Tat, essentially. There were photos - grainy, muddy, horrible photos - but the roll of the stuff I shot commercially was about as bad. More concerning is the obviously uneven development - we used the CPE2 to intermittently agitate the tank, I suspect we’d have been better off just using it as a water bath and keeping the tank vertical with intermittent agitation.

These were shot with a Pentax ME Super and 40/2.8 or 50/1.4 lenses.

Pretty nasty, but WE MADE PICTURES! I’m still unreasonably excited about the film not being totally blank.

Matt did another couple of rolls at once and then we had to call it a day as it was closing time at the union (when we turned up, they were talking about closing due to a supposedly imminent snowstorm which never materialised…)

I went back the next day to make some prints for Christmas cards, and fired up the CPE2 again to develop a roll of ‘400 SPEED COLOUR PRINT FILM’ I removed from a disposable camera I was given at a conference in Brighton, in April 2010. The photos were all taken with the disposable, so I wasn’t expecting quality. In the interests of science, I stuck with our potentially dodgy agitation sequence and again got uneven development. Continuous agitation next time -although that supposedly makes the CELER-41 times rather on the short side.

Again, there are pictures! Colour in the last one is pretty pleasing. As soon as all the Christmas excitement is over, we’re going to have to get a proper Tetenal C-41 kit and do this properly. If nothing else, we’ve learned how to work the CPE2 (it’s essentially a device for keeping stuff at the right temperature - getting stuff up/down to temp is easy with running hot/cold water) and load the Jobo drums.

It’ll also be good to shoot some decent film in a decent camera for the next test roll!