I developed my first rolls of black and white film, and I decided to stay within the Kodak spectrum of things so TriX 400 and D76 was my way to go. I felt confident to try it out after watching many tutorials on YouTube, but the one that resonated with me was this one: "How to Develop Black and White Film at Home" by Prime Studios Learning to develop film has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. I was always intrigued and intimidated by how is done. Now that I got a taste of it, I can see myself shooting and developing B&W many times more from here on.
A suggestion I found online was to take pictures without serious intent in case something would go wrong when processing my first roll of film. Although that suggestion makes a lot of sense, I decided not to go that way and instead set up some still lives and have a film camera with me on my most recent photo walk to get something worth developing. Knowing I had some shots with good potential in both rolls pressured me to take things seriously!
I'm aware these pictures are not technically right, and I'm not entirely sure where they fall short. Perhaps I'm spoiled by the latitude on a RAW file, maybe is a matter of rescanning at a higher resolution, or probably it was my agitation and how I handled the chemicals, who knows - Nonetheless, I can't help feeling good about myself for finally developing my first rolls of B&W.
I'm not a film purist. I want to take advantage of all that's at my disposal to enjoy image-making, and film processing makes things a tad more interesting.