My little Rivy-Bear is finally on film. Ilford Ilfocolor Vintage Tone 400 film, to be exact. It’s not a shot from today, but, hey, it’s film! Hopefully down the road the speed of my workflow will allow for a “film” shot of the day.
A Film Journey update down in Stray Pixels, along with the rest of the shots from my first roll of Ilford Vintage Tone.
Click for a Film Journey Update
On Monday, I figured I’d done enough research, studying, and practicing, and that I just needed to jump in. I developed my first roll of B&W film since 1987, and it went really well, except I didn’t have some cooled rinse water ready… I was rushing around while the fixer did its thing, mixing tap water with some refrigerated water. Ugh. (My cold tap water is way too hot and needs to be mixed with cooled water from the fridge; life in the desert).
You can see the results of that roll (Kodak Tri-X) and a Kodak Portra 400 roll taken with the Kodak Snapic here.
On Wednesday, I had two rolls of color film staring at me on my desk and figured, why not? The cold tap water is too hot for B&W; why not just do some C-41 processing, which requires 38°C? I had wanted to do a few more rolls of B&W first, but what the heck, I’ve done my research, and I had two rolls of film that were not important, test rolls if you will, in case I screwed it up.
I set up my sous vide, mixed up the chemicals from the Bellini C-41 kit, and got them in the water to preheat while I wrote out a task card. Temperature control is very important with color, so you want your steps down pat. I haven’t had any trouble with putting my film on reels; I practiced a half dozen times, and so far, everything has gone smoothly in the dark bag. I did have my dev temperature drop by 1 °C in the Paterson tank, so I think next time I’ll raise the sous vide temp to 40°C.
Preheat, Dev, Bleach, Fix, Wash, and Stabilizer all went well. After each step, I poured the chemical back into its bottle. Bellini says you can get 16 rolls out of one kit. I hung the film up in my shower with weighted clips and let it dry for about two hours while I cleaned up and prepped for scanning.
Scanning is getting better. I’m using a Valoi system to scan with my Nikon Z8 and using Negative Lab Pro to convert the negatives in Lightroom Classic. I spent a good while figuring out how to do batch conversions because if I have to crop, convert, and process each picture individually, I’d pull my hair out. I also experimented with using CineStill Convert Tools with the B&W negatives and was very happy with the results. I need further testing and experience to make a judgment call.
The learning curve is steep but fun. I have glimmers of my process streamlining and becoming more efficient.
I have an up-to-date resource page here. If you are interested in doing any of this and have questions, please feel free to email, comment below, or reach out on Mastodon. If there is any way I can help, please let me know.
The shots below are nothing special, but it’s all about testing my process and learning.
- Camera: Nikon F3, Lens: Nikkor 50mm ƒ1.4
- Film: Ilford Ilfocolor Vintage Tone 400 Plus
- Developer: Bellini C-41 kit
Film borders: I did not take the time to crop; you get the real film border with these shots, no fake film borders put on in post with these! I intentionally used generic Frontier scanner settings and did very little tweaking to the photos so you can get a good feel for this film.
*Click the first picture to open a full-size viewer, then use the arrow keys to navigate through the whole set
