80 rolls of film to process this week in my home. I’ve just set up the film hanging racks. It’s been maybe around two or three years since I started to process film myself and it is still very much a learning experience.

There’s something very satisfying about being in control of the entire process from shooting to printing. But I must confess I still have issues with the film curling once it’s up to dry on the hanging racks you can see in the photo above.

I’ve got a humidifier set up this week to see if that will help, as I believe the curling happens because there are different surfaces on each side of the film and one dries quicker than the other.

I’ve been meaning to write for a while now about my experiences with the film processor I bought. I got an Analogico Dev.a film processor which on paper looks to be ideal. I did however buy it one year into them releasing it and had a hunch that I might be an ‘early adopter’ and to expect teething problems. This has turned out to be true more than I had imagined, but I have found Analogico’s support to be first rate and they always get back to me within a few hours. Always with a solution.

Perhaps at some point, I will buy a newer machine from them, as I think the one I have is now full of so many custom fixes to keep it going. So many things have broken over the time of using it, and always they have encountered the issue before and have a solid reliable fix for it. I am sure that when I do get round to getting a brand new machine, i’ll maybe look back at my first one as an early prototype.

I also had issues with the film developer I was using. If I am not mistaken, I think it’s quite hard to process E6 films in a drum processor and the best way to get even development is to use true inversion (in other words - shake the drum around every once in a while to ensure even coating - this is not possible when the film is sitting in a drum that is fixed onto a spindle on the machine).

I’ve got it tuned as best as I can, and I’m quite happy with the results now.