Prewashing Techniques for Black & White Photo Development

Video Transcript

"Welcome back this is Brian on behalf of expertvillage.com. Here we have the small tank that we’re using to develop our negatives, I removed the sample roll that we exposed to the light and put in a roll of black and white that I’ve actually shot to show you the developing process. The first step in that is what’s called the prerinse or the prewash and what this does is it wets the film down so you get an even binding of the developer chemicals to the film to properly develop it and it also removes what’s called the annihilation layer from the film and for this simply pour in straight distilled water and agitate for one minute. Many developer cans call for an agitation of just tumbling gently in over like this…this canister also includes a small wand that you can use to agitate the film but for demonstration purposes I’ll do it like this. After one minute of steady agitation just go ahead and open up your canister and pour it out, I like to take the prerinse water and pour it back into another clean container and you’ll see why in a moment. Okay that’s our prerinse water, now we’ve got our film inside the canister, it’s prewashed and ready to start developing."