I just processed my first two rolls of Black and White film in 20 years. It was sometime in 2003, that I last used a roll of film and now with using a new film camera, I have just processed two rolls of Rollei Retro 400 that expired in 2010. One of these rolls of film went to Australia and got x-rayed only once. And that was in England leaving the country, I have always found the English customs harder to negotiate not x-raying film with, than any other country. So now, I have to sort out the film scanning situation. I ordered a wet scan attachment for my Epson V750 scanner this afternoon, so I can at least have a go at digitising the images, otherwise I need to set myself up a Darkroom.

I have chosen to use mostly Adox Chemistry to process my film, the developer was Adox FX-39II with AdoStop as my stop bath and I used Fotospeed FX30 Odourless fixer as I am processing my film in a stainless steel kitchen sink. I also have Adox XT-3 developer (it is the same chemical formulation as Kodak X-Tol) which I will also use depending on the effect I want to have from the developer. I have decided not to use my former favourite film developer (Rodinal) as it gives a grainer result to the images.

My next rolls of film to use will be 3 rolls of Tri-X that expired in 2013. I also have a lot of Colour transparency Kodak Tungsten film that I have been storing in a fridge for a long time, which I have to work out what to do with, as I think it would look rather interesting on the right subject. That will then leave me with only new film stock to use. I could’t believe that I still had film just sitting in draws and never been used. If you notice in the top image I also had the old measuring cylinders that I had kept, I did however splurge on new concertina storage bottles to store my chemistry as that will help keep the air away from it and let it last longer between each film processing session.

I really enjoyed using my new Leica MA camera to make these images, going back to film has slowed the process down a lot and I believe that is a good thing.