How to Process Black-and-White Film

A few weeks ago, I came very close to investing in an Ilford/Paterson Starter Kit so that I could process film at home. I have four exposed rolls of 35mm HP5+ sitting on my shelf, and I thought that developing them at home might be a nice way to kill a bit of lockdown time. However, I still wouldn’t be able to print them, due to the difficulties of creating a darkroom in my flat. And with lockdown now easing, it probably won’t be long until I can get to Holborn Studios and hire their darkroom as usual.

So in this article I’ll talk through the process of developing a roll of black-and-white 35mm, as I would do it in the Holborn darkoom. If you haven’t already, you might want to read my post about how film works first.

 

You will need

 

Loading the developing tank

Holborn Studios’ darkroom, run by Bill Ling, displays this handy reminder.

The first step is to transfer the exposed film from its cassette – which is of course light-proof – into the Paterson tank, which is designed to admit the developing chemicals but not light. This transfer must take place in complete darkness, to avoid fogging the film. I’ve always done this using a changing bag, which is a black bag with a double seal and elasticated arm-holes.

Start by putting the following items into the bag: the film cassette, scissors and the various components of the Paterson tank, including the spiral. It’s wise to put in an empty film canister too, in case something goes wrong, and if the tail of your film isn’t sticking out of the cassette then you’ll need a can opener as well.

Seal the bag, put your arms in, and pull all the film out of the cassette. It’s important NOT to remove your arms from the bag now, until the film is safely inside the closed tank, otherwise light can get in through the arm-holes and fog the film.

Use the scissors to cut the end of the film from the cassette, and to trim the tongue (narrower part) off the head of the film.

Paterson Universal Developing Tank components, clockwise from the white items: developing reels or spirals, tank, light-proof lid, waterproof cap, and agitator – which I never use. In the centre is the core.

Now we come to the most difficult part, the part which always has me sweating and swearing and regretting all my life choices: loading the film onto the spiral. I have practised this with dead film many times, but when I’m fumbling around in the dark of the changing bag it’s a hundred times harder.

It’s hard to describe loading the spiral verbally, but this blog post by Chris Waller is very clear and even includes pictures. (Chris recommends cutting a slight chamfer onto the leading corners of the film, which I shall certainly try next time, as well as using your thumbs to keep the film flat on its approach to the reel.)

If you’re working with 120 film, the loading process is very slightly different, and this video describes it well.

Once the spiral is loaded, you can thread it onto the core, place the core inside the tank, and then put the lid on. It is now safe to open the bag.

 

Developing

Developing time info displayed at Holborn Studios

Holborn Studios’ darkroom is stocked with a working solution of Kodak HC-110 developer, but if you don’t have this luxury, or you’re not using the Ilford Simplicity packs, then you’ll need to make up a working solution yourself by diluting the developer according to the manufacturer’s instructions. For HC-110 dilution B, which is what Holborn uses, it’s 1+31, i.e.one part concentrated developer to 31 parts water. The working solution has a limited shelf life, so again consult the manufacturer’s instructions.

Further dilution is required at the point of development, at a ratio of 1+7 in this case, but once more this may vary depending on the chemicals you choose. For one roll of 35mm, you need 37.5ml of the HC-110 dilution B, and 262.5ml of water for a total of 300ml.

The developing time depends on the type of film stock, the speed you rated it at, the type of developer and its dilution, and the temperature of the chemicals. Digital Truth has all the figures you need to find the right development time.

Agitating

I was taught to ensure my water is always at 20°C before mixing it with the developer, to keep the timing calculations a little simpler. At this temperature, a roll of Ilford HP5+ rated at its box speed of ISO 400 needs five minutes to develop in HC-110 dilution B. Ilford Delta, on the other hand, needs a whopping 14.5 minutes to process at its box speed of 3200.

Once your diluted developer is ready, pour it into the Paterson tank and put on the cap. It is now necessary to agitate the chemicals in order to distribute them evenly around the film. My technique is inversion, i.e. turning the tank upside-down and back again. Do this continuously for the first 30 seconds, then for 10 seconds every minute after that.

Inside the tank, your latent image is being transformed into an image proper, wherein every exposed silver halide crystal is now black metallic silver.

 

Fixing

Once the developing time is up, remove the cap from the tank, and pour away the developer immediately. At this point some people will say you need to use a stop bath to put a firm halt to the developing process, but I was taught simply to rinse the tank out with tap water and then proceed straight to fixing. This method has always worked fine for me.

After rinsing the tank, pour in enough fix solution (again prepared to the manufacturer’s instructions) to fill it completely. Put the cap back on, agitate it for 30 seconds, then leave it for ten minutes.

During this time, the fixer renders the film’s unexposed crystals inactive and water soluble. When the ten minutes is up, pour the fixer back into its container (it’s reuseable) and leave the tank under running water for a further ten minutes. This washes away the unused silver halide crystals, leaving only the exposed black silver corresponding with light areas of the scene, and just the transparent plastic base corresponding with the dark areas.

Squirt a little diluted washing-up liquid into the tank to prevent drying rings, then drain it. You can now open the tank and see your negative for the first time.

 

Drying

Remove the film from the developing spiral, taking care to only touch the ends and the edges. Squeegee the top part of the film, dry your hands, then squeegee the rest. This removes droplets which can otherwise mark the negative.

Now attach two hooks to the film, a light one at the top to hang it from, and a heavy one at the bottom to stop the film curling as it dries. Holborn Studios is equipped with a heated drying cabinet, but with patience you can hang a film to dry in any dust-free area.

When your film is dry, you can cut it into strips of six frames and insert them into a negative storage sheet.

You can now scan your negatives, or better still print them photo-chemically, as I’ll describe in a future post.

How to Process Black-and-White Film

A History of Black and White

The contact sheet from my first roll of Ilford Delta 3200

Having lately shot my first roll of black-and-white film in a decade, I thought now would be a good time to delve into the story of monochrome image-making and the various reasons artists have eschewed colour.

I found the recent National Gallery exhibition, Monochrome: Painting in Black and White, a great primer on the history of the unhued image. Beginning with examples from medieval religious art, the exhibition took in grisaille works of the Renaissance before demonstrating the battle between painting and early photography, and finishing with monochrome modern art.

Several of the pictures on display were studies or sketches which were generated in preparation for colour paintings. Ignoring hue allowed the artists to focus on form and composition, and this is still one of black-and-white’s great strengths today: stripping away chroma to heighten other pictorial effects.

“Nativity” by Petrus Christus, c. 1455

What fascinated me most in the exhibition were the medieval religious paintings in the first room. Here, old testament scenes in black-and-white were painted around a larger, colour scene from the new testament; as in the modern TV trope, the flashbacks were in black-and-white. In other pictures, a colour scene was framed by a monochrome rendering of stonework – often incredibly realistic – designed to fool the viewer into thinking they were seeing a painting in an architectural nook.

During cinema’s long transition from black-and-white to colour, filmmakers also used the two modes to define different layers of reality. When colour processes were still in their infancy and very expensive, filmmakers selected particular scenes to pick out in rainbow hues, while the surrounding material remained in black-and-white like the borders of the medieval paintings. By 1939 the borders were shrinking, as The Wizard of Oz portrayed Kansas, the ordinary world, in black-and-white, while rendering Oz – the bulk of the running time – in colour.

Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and legendary Technicolor cinematographer Jack Cardiff, OBE, BSC subverted expectations with their 1946 fantasy-romance A Matter of Life and Death, set partly on Earth and partly in heaven. Says Cardiff in his autobiography:

Quite early on I had said casually to Michael Powell, “Of course heaven will be in colour, won’t it?” And Michael replied, “No. Heaven will be in black and white.” He could see I was startled, and grinned: “Because everyone will expect heaven to be in colour, I’m doing it in black-and-white.”

Ironically Cardiff had never shot in black-and-white before, and he ultimately captured the heavenly scenes on three-strip Technicolor, but didn’t have the colour fully developed, resulting in a pearlescent monochrome.

Meanwhile, DPs like John Alton, ASC were pushing greyscale cinematography to its apogee with a genre that would come to be known as film noir. Oppressed Jews like Alton fled the rising Nazism of Europe for the US, bringing German Expressionism with them. The result was a trend of hardboiled thrillers lit with oppressive contrast, harsh shadows, concealing silhouettes and dramatic angles, all of which were heightened by the lack of distracting colour.

A classic bit of Alton's noir lighting from The Big Combo
“The Big Combo” DP: John Alton, ASC

Alton himself had a paradoxical relationship with chroma, famously stating that “black and white are colours”. While he is best known today for his noir, his only Oscar win was for his work on the Technicolor musical An American in Paris, the designers of which hated Alton for the brightly-coloured light he tried to splash over their sets and costumes.

It wasn’t just Alton that was moving to colour. Soon the economics were clear: chromatic cinema was more marketable and no longer prohibitively expensive. The writing was on the wall for black-and-white movies, and by the end of the sixties they were all but gone.

I was brought up in a world of default colour, and the first time I can remember becoming aware of black-and-white was when Schindler’s List was released in 1993. I can clearly recall a friend’s mother refusing to see the film because she felt she wouldn’t be getting her money’s worth if there was no colour. She’s not alone in this view, and that’s why producers are never keen to green-light monochrome movies. Spielberg only got away with it because his name was proven box office gold.

“Schindler’s List” DP: Janusz Kamiński, ASC

A few years later, Jonathan Frakes and his DP Matthew F. Leonetti, ASC wanted to shoot the holodeck sequence of Star Trek: First Contact in black-and-white, but the studio deemed test footage “too experimental”. For the most part, the same attitude prevails today. Despite being marketed as a “visionary” director ever since Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro’s vision of The Shape of Water as a black-and-white film was rejected by financiers. He only got the multi-Oscar-winning fairytale off the ground by reluctantly agreeing to shoot in colour.

Yet there is reason to be hopeful about black-and-white remaining an option for filmmakers. In 2007 MGM denied Frank Darabont the chance to make The Mist in black-and-white, but they permitted a desaturated version on the DVD. Darabont had this to say:

No, it doesn’t look real. Film itself [is a] heightened recreation of reality. To me, black-and-white takes that one step further. It gives you a view of the world that doesn’t really exist in reality and the only place you can see that representation of the world is in a black-and-white movie.

“The Mist” DP: Rohn Schmidt

In 2016, a “black and chrome” version of Mad Max: Fury Road was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, with director George Miller saying:

The best version of “Road Warrior” [“Mad Max 2”]  was what we called a “slash dupe,” a cheap, black-and-white version of the movie for the composer. Something about it seemed more authentic and elemental. So I asked Eric Whipp, the [“Fury Road”] colourist, “Can I see some scenes in black-and-white with quite a bit of contrast?” They looked great. So I said to the guys at Warners, “Can we put a black-and-white version on the DVD?”

One of the James Mangold photos which inspired “Logan Noir”

The following year, Logan director James Mangold’s black-and-white on-set photos proved so popular with the public that he decided to create a monochrome version of the movie. “The western and noir vibes of the film seemed to shine in the form, and there was not a trace of the modern comic hero movie sheen,” he said. Most significantly, the studio approved a limited theatrical release for Logan Noir, presumably seeing the extra dollar-signs of a second release, rather than the reduced dollar-signs of a greyscale picture.

Perhaps the medium of black-and-white imaging has come full circle. During the Renaissance, greyscale images were preparatory sketches, stepping stones to finished products in colour. Today, the work-in-progress slash dupe of Road Warrior and James Mangold’s photographic studies of Logan were also stepping stones to colour products, while at the same time closing the loop by inspiring black-and-white products too.

With the era of budget- and technology-mandated monochrome outside the living memory of many viewers today, I think there is a new willingness to accept black-and-white as an artistic choice. The acclaimed sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror released an episode in greyscale this year, and where Netflix goes, others are bound to follow.

A History of Black and White