Jan 24, 2021
C-41
by matt
A journey… These next few photos are my first home developed, and DIY scanned, colour negatives. I’ve had great success developing and scanning black and white film for a while now, and I wanted to try colour. I bought a C-41 chemistry developing kit from a little independent film shop and after many evenings of reading and prep, I decided to go for it. I did four rolls in four nights, and the fifth a couple of days later. Since then, I’ve realised some of the mistakes I made in the developing stage (which caused some faint vertical streaks in some images). I’ve realised that I had under exposed quite a few of the shots (parts of some images look grainy and muddy). I’ve realised that temperate really is super important for developing C-41 (it must be 38degC). I’ve realised that the Heston Blumenthal digital thermometer I bought specifically for doing colour dev (a) isn’t waterproof and (b) is inaccurate by a couple of degrees. I know what CRI is and what it means in terms of being important when digitising colour negatives. In short, the last few weeks have been a steep learning curve. But I’ve come out the other side now knowing that I can develop and process my own C-41 colour negative film and get digital image results comparable to what I was paying a lab to do, and sometimes, better. I’m pretty chuffed.