The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.
We use cookies to make your experience better.To comply with the new e-Privacy directive, we need to ask for your consent to set the cookies.Learn more.
Processing your own film can speed up your workflow and give you quicker access to your negatives. It is also typically more cost effective and best of all there is nothing like the sense of satisfaction you will gain by taking control over the full end-to-end process of your photography.
While trying it for the first time might be a daunting prospect, fear not. Below is our guide on what equipment, chemistry and method would be suitable for anyone new to processing films. For more detail, you can downlo...
The first stage of making a darkroom print is to determine the exposure time.
If you have already created a contact sheet of your negatives, and they appear correctly exposed, then you should have a rough idea of the necessary exposure (provided you haven’t moved the enlarger head or aperture setting after exposing the contact sheet). Note: If you change the degree of enlargement you will also need to adjust the exposure. Some enlargers have scales printed on their columns to make this easier.
Another...
What are film developers?
Film developers are a photographic chemical that turns your exposed film into working negatives as part of a processing workflow. (You will also need a stop bath and fixer - for more information on how to process your film or which chemistry to choose read our guides).
We offer a broad range of film developers that are designed to exploit the different characteristics of our films. Developers are available in either powder and liquid concentrate form and have a range of charact...
When photographic material is exposed to light it begins to darken. The more light the material receives, the darker it becomes. This opens up a range of possibilities for making fun, creative and artistic images without a camera.
Making a picture without a camera couldn’t be easier and is a fun activity to try with children. However, for many, exploring and experimenting with different effects of light on photographic /blog/the-luminogram-process/materials can become an art form by itself.
Where to sta...
Filters have long been a popular accessory for photographers and offer a number of different functions or effects. In both analogue and digital photography it is possible to recreate some of these in the darkroom or digital darkroom. However there has always been a benefit to getting it right in camera.
In black & white photography, colour filters in particular are useful as they can control how the colours in a scene are reproduced as greys. Normal black & white films are sensitive to all wavele...
General health and safety advice
This section provides advice to our customers on the safe handling, use and storage of our photochemical solutions, best practice for waste disposal and specific advice to women who are pregnant or breastfeeding a child.
If you are looking for information on the chemical safety of HARMAN photochemistry solutions, please refer to the Safety Data Sheets (known as SDS or MSDS)
24 HOUR OHES emergency line for advice on chemical incidents
Safe working practices
It is essen...
Split grade printing
The version of split grade printing described here is that taught to me by the ILFORD head printers, Mike Walden and Terry Offord, and is the simplest, fastest way to make good darkroom prints from pretty much any negative. (The exception is really underexposed negatives to print these you usually only need high contrast).
This is a very powerful technique that can be used routinely with variable contrast (VC) papers, such as ILFORD MULTIGRADE. It makes use of the differing performa...
A lifelong hobby
One of my lifelong hobbies is photography. I have been taking photographs since I was about 10 years old when I was given an old Kodak folding pocket camera that had belonged to an uncle, Bertrand Perrett, who was a professional photographer and painter in England. I learned to develop and print black-and-white film at school when I was a teenager back in the 1970s.
The Slower Pace
When digital photography came along I moved to that medium, but recently I’ve come back to film aga...
I’m a passionate film photographer. There are plenty of us about and indeed plenty of reasons for choosing film as a medium. Many of these reasons are quoted ad nauseam by any and every film photographer. One of the biggest problems I have with digital photography is that it's given film photographers a soap box to waffle on about how much better film is… Yawn… I’m going to make some assumptions about the audience of this blog, and as such I’m not going to repeat all of the justifications usually ...
My name is Charles, I do film concert photography since September 2014. I chose analog over digital because I like to do things with my hands instead of using a computer. I mostly use HP5+ film (pushed to 1600 ISO) which I find very powerful in difficult light conditions, it’s a good compromise between precision, grain, and dynamic range.
Concert photography is easy and difficult at the same time. It’s easy to take a picture of a charismatic singer on stage, but is this enough to have a great photo...