Loading Film on the Spiral Reels

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Brian on behalf of expertvillage.com. Now that we’ve gotten our film outside of the canister we need to load it into the spirals of our small tank to properly develop it. This is one style from a company called Paterson that greatly simplifies the task of loading it on as you can see the two sides of the spiral alternate and can twist in opposite directions, as you’ll see in a moment this feeds it onto the roll. Another style involves metal spirals a little bit more difficult to use but a little more versatile as well, again either one works equally as well and it’s up to you to decide what you like better. Now in this case and again remember you want to do this in a completely dark environment any kind of light will completely damage the film it’ll fog it and erase the images that you already on there, so again it takes practice but it’s very easy to do once you get the hang of it. To load this you want to cut the leader off and also a small tab on one side so that it feeds itself easier onto the spiral, now for the first few inches of film it doesn’t matter if you touch them as this is how you had to handle these two loaded into the camera already anyway and it’s already been exposed to the light for the first few inches as well. So go ahead and feed that into your canister and feed that into your spiral…as you can see as you rotate it back and forth it draws the film off the reel, once you’ve reached the end of the reel simply snip off the remaining and finish loading the roll onto the spiral."