Stop Bath for Black & White Film

Video Transcript

"I'm holding in my hand the chemical called stop bath. This stop bath I make in dilution, one to sixteen, so this will actually go a very long way too. Stop bath is essential for printing, and film development. It has a very vinegary smell, you never want to open a bottle of stop bath and smell it, it's very, very strong. You want to really avoid doing that. This type of stop bath is Kodak Indicator stop bath, meaning that when it goes bad when I'm printing it will actually turn like a blue-purplish look to it, which you can see under the red light in the darkroom and it's really, as soon as it goes bad, it's extremely important that you replace it. If you don't replace it, you can get staining on your prints which is not something that you want to try to go for. The other thing about stop bath is you really want to open this bottle in a ventilated area. Once when I was, when I was young, a teenager, I started making stop bath in a, a room I was using, actually I burnt some of my tissue in my lungs, so this is something that you really want to be careful when you are using."