So as you have no doubt figured out by now I'm into film photography in my downtime from commercial work, recently I've been experimenting with 'Stand Development' which gives some really interesting results and doesn't require too much effort, given that I'm predisposed to laziness that appeals to me a lot!
in the above imeage you can see the increased perceived sharpness that the stand development process gives and also the whiteout of the highlights.... shadow details look good here - this was developed at 1 hour
For the uninitiated 'Stand Development' is the process of putting your undeveloped film in a light tight canister, pouring developing chemicals on top and then leaving it to 'stand' (you see how this works now) for about an hour - as opposed to 'normal' developing which requires a bit more in the way of effort and jiggery pokery.... all of the images here were shot on my beloved Olympus OM2n film camera and developed myself through varying degrees of experimentation with ADOX Adonal developer through a 'semi stand' process - basically giving the developing tank a few turns before leaving to stand for a period of time....You'll be relieved to note at this point that I am not about to launch into a potentially boring and technical blog post about various developing processes (although some might say that it's too late for that) from here on out however I'll just ramble on a bit entirely subjectively about the following images - the caveat being that this may still be boring to you but I can guarantee that it wont be technical ;)
semi stand development - you can really see the increased sharpeness that this process brings to the details - well i can anyway.....
love this shot - I want to call it "free as a bird" or "bird in a wire" or something like arty that.....tbh i think it could have used with a bit of extra time in the developer to bring the shadows up further... this had 45 mins in the developer....oh well! always learning.....
again - nicely resolved light and shade in this image
Bradford City Centre does a good line in modernist concrete
BELL BOOOOOOYYY!!!
So there we have it! I really enjoy shooting and developing film, it's a whole other stage in the process of creating a finished image and through different techniques, timings, mixtures of chemicals it's possible to alter the look and feel of the image - I'm really keen to try printing images onto photographic paper so that's definitely going to be on the cards this year and fear not dear reader! you can rest assured that I'll write a blog about it!