Film Developing: Freshness of Chemicals

Video Transcript

"I'm going to talk about how fresh your developer is right now, when you're printing and also when you're developing film. One thing that I've seen over the years is that in order to save some money or maybe just out of sheer forgetfulness, maybe even laziness, your developer might be sitting around for a little bit longer than it should, and when you're going to see that is after you've developed something or in the richness of your print. After years of doing this I would almost rather spend a little bit of extra money and get a beautiful print or make a beautiful negative rather than use something that might be starting to go bad. You know, certain commercial labs in town you can see that maybe their film looked good on Monday but by Friday the film wasn't looking so good and you were shooting it in the same way. This goes across the board, for your developer, for your stop, and for your fix. You really want everything to be as fresh, like you made it the night before fresh. Just ready to go. You don't want to see it exhausted in any way."