Mixing Solutions for Black & White Photo Development

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Brian on behalf of expertvillage.com. The next step in developing your own black and white film at home is to ensure that you have proper solutions made. Now here I have a premixed solution of the developing chemical all ready to do but I don’t have any stop solution of the developer so I’m going to show you how to make that. Inside the instructions on the solution are mixing instructions, for this particular one for use with film as opposed to paper you want to dilute the concentrate one to four, that means for every ounce of water that you use or every ounce of fixture that you use you want to use four ounces of water, that’ll vary depending on the brand and the type of fixture and or developer that you use, pay special attention to the instructions that are on there to get consistency and good results with your negatives. Now on our small tank that we’re going to be using to develop the film we’ve got a maximum capacity of 550 cubic centimeters of 20 ounces so we’ll be mixing about 20 ounces of stop solution just what we need. Another thing to pay attention to on your fixture and on your developer is the amount of time that this will keep in a stop solution, in the case of the fixture generally only last about a week before the fix of oxidation reduce the effectiveness of your fixture so you don’t want to keep it on hand longer than you need it. So to begin making 20 ounces of solution, so we’re going to pour in 4 ounces of straight developer and dilute that with an additional 16 ounces of distilled water. Make sure you always keep your containers labeled you don’t want to accidentally put fixture in before you put developer in as that’ll completely ruin your film and leave you with no images, also for safety considerations it’s a very good idea to keep all the chemicals labeled around your home."