Using Fixing Solution on Film

Video Transcript

"Welcome back this is Brian on behalf of expertvillage.com. Now that we’ve stopped the developing process with a rinse water we’re ready to move on to the fixer. Now fixers are very important, the film that’s inside the canisters still sensitive to light and what the fixture does it removes all the silver from inside the chemicals on the film to render it no longer sensitive to light. We’ve decided previously that our time needed be 5 minutes for the fixture so go ahead and start our timer and pour in chemical…agitate the fixture solution the exact same way you did the developer initially for a straight 30 seconds and then for 10 seconds at each minute there after. We’re going to take this to 5 minutes and we’ve gone 30 seconds, now you noticed I took the container that I’m using for my fixture and I put it back in the sink I’ll put a funnel on this, as I stated the purpose of the fixture is to pull all of the silver out of the film to make it no longer light sensitive but that does mean that fixture solution is contaminated with heavy chemicals that is not something we want to pour down the drain. Most photo shops will willingly accept that because they can actually use the silver, they can pull it out of the solution and actually sell it and reuse it, photo labs at your local school or what not can do that or if you’re fortune enough to have your own silver recovery unit you can use that to remove the silver from the solution. Okay the timer is going off meaning our fixing is done so let’s go ahead and pour that back into our jug as I said it previously…as with the developing process we want to halt the fixing process and we can do that just with plain water, there are solutions available from both Illford and Kodiak called stop solutions which helps this process terminate a lot more quickly, generally though that’s better off left for when you’re printing on paper."