Slide development at home

OK world, let me get back to business at last. It’s been way too long since the last post.

What’s new you ask me? Well, getting on with life is one thing, and doing some creative photography stuff is another. So let me give you some ideas about how to develop your slide film at home. And by the way, I didn’t sell my Olympus Trip 35!

Can’t be done they said, they being the guy from my photography store. Too tight margins for temperature control. You need an automatic thingamagic to do this.

Of course I didn’t listen – who listens to guys who should know?

So I got my gear together and had a go at it.

I bought a Tetenal E6 development kit, a brace of bottles to mix my cocktails and the rest of the stuff I already had. Then I thoroughly studied the instructions!

Oh yeah, forgot the thermometer – mine is suited for b&w and didn’t go up to the required temperature and I had to search a bit for one. Macodirect.de did deliver the correct one.

And of course I needed all the expensive technical stuff, like a big kitchen sink (found one after some searching…. in my kitchen!) And a pail! There are those who swear only by metal pails, then there is the plastic pail school, and there seems to be no definite answer in this dilemma. I went for the cheap one, a blue plastic pail from my garage.

And I was ready, filled the sink with hot water at 48° Celsius (100F), enough water so that it would not cool too fast, but not too much so as the bottles would not float away.

I soaked the spooled film (a cheap Fuji…. sorry, Agfa Precisa CT slide film) in the water from the sink, then went for it. In went the chemicals, one by one, with extended periods of rinsing with hot sink-water in between. That was where the pail came in. You can’t dump the rinse water back into the sink as this will contaminate the developer, fixer and all. Throw it into the pail!

Final rinse and I open the Tank…. tadaa! About 36 nice colorful little pictures, as neat as you want them. No great art, but close enough for a first try. And taken with my trusty Olympus Trip 35.

Not too sharp though, but that’s the problem of my Canon scanner….. which is gone by now. The new one arrived yesterday, but more about that very soon…..