Processing Sheet Film in a Darkroom

Video Transcript

" My name is Jeff and I want to talk to you a little bit about processing 4 x 5 sheet film, like this. There are a couple of ways of doing it. One; is in a tray which takes a little technique to develop negatives in a tray but in general, you are in the dark of course. You’ve got your developer in here and you want to drop one in it, drop another one in it, then you are going to pick the bottom one up and put it on top, pick the bottom one up and put it on top, pick the bottom one up and put it on top, pick the bottom one up and put it on top. You want to do this in a very regular manner. Now you can move the chemicals around a little bit. I would keep them moving pretty constant in there, one on top of the other whether you’ve got 2 or 10; however many you got in there. The more you got in there, the more you are going to have to keep them moving because you don’t want them to sit in one place for very long. The other way of course is in a large standing tank like one of these that you can use a film holder like this. If you use these types and they have holes in the back like these, you want to have the base side of the film facing those holes, the emulsion side facing the other direction. So you will have to determine where your notch is and that will determine where your emulsion is, then you just slide them in there like that and close the top. Now no matter how many sheets you put in one, you always want to close all the gates because if you leave them open and you have another rack next to it, it is going to scratch it, so you always want to close all the gates. Now for agitation in a standing tank with racks, you pull them once every minute and list them off. The next minute you want to list them off in the other direction, one more minute, list it off in this direction until your processing time is up. "