Chemicals for Black & White Photo Development

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Brian on behalf of Expert Village.com, now I’m going to talk a little bit about the different developing chemicals as well as different film types to achieve a desired effect. Now in general, the lower the film speed that you use, the tighter the grain will be and the sharper your images will look. For example, I’ve got a roll of 400 speed film here, from a common uh, photo supplier, um, 400’s a very good around speed film, it’s a medium speed film, its got good ability to gather light so that you can use the shorter shutter speeds and freeze action, um and its also, it also though tends to be a little bit more grainy than some slower speed films such as Pan F-50 speed or 100 speed film, but as I said that’s a good all around film, for a lot of different shooting conditions, you can use it in relatively low light, with a flash or outdoors if you have a high enough speed camera. Also important is the type of developer that you choose to use. Again, the type of developer that you use will have a great deal of impact on the quality of the prints you get back out of it. For example a film developer such as D-76 is a good all around developer, its relatively inexpensive, and it also comes in powder form so you can mix only as much as you need in each batch. Um, as I said, though, it’s a good, decent all around developer, tends to be a little bit more grainy than something along the lines of Tmax or in the case of a different maker, Illford, the ILFOTEC DDX, these are both primarily for fine grain films, uh, while you can use them, while you can use something like the Tmax RX on other film types, such as the TriX that I showed you previously, this is designed specifically for a certain type of film, so it might not be necessary for you to use it unless you’re using Tmax film. Um, of critical importance, make sure before you get started that you have both developer and fixer, they’re both necessary to properly develop a roll of film and we’ll see that later on. "