How can I minimize the cost of developing Medium format film?

Well, in my opinion, anyone doing event photography on film is nuts, when you need to shoot hundreds or thousands of shots digital is the way to go. OTOH, in my personal photography, I figure that if I can not get it with 12 shots, I am not going to get it.

What I am saying here is that normally, I am going to be processing one or two rolls of 120, not 50 at a time. Since I am retired, broke, worse off than the typical college student money wise, I have to do things on the cheap. I normally buy about 10 rolls of film at a time. I process in Rodinal 1:100, stop in plain water, and use my hypo one shot, I do not shoot enough to make it worthwhile storing used hypo. That comes out to about $2.50 roll. I just got a darkroom set up again to do enlarging, but then came down with this nasty bug, so do not have numbers for that., but since my shooting budget is in the order of $20-$30/mo you can be sure I am not going to be spending a lot. Yes, you can have fun with photography for that little.

Setting up a dark room can cost anything from nothing, many people have been given a whole dark room just to get it out of the way, to many thousands of dollars. But with used equipment you should be able to set something up for about $200-$250. An old rule of thumb was to budget about as much for your darkroom as you spent on your camera outfit.

In the end, it is not how much you spent, but how much fun you had that counts.

graywolf, hypo in tightly closed filled bottles can last longer than six months.

I have no problem doing event photography on film without shooting "hundreds or thousands of shots". If one is shooting than much, they just do not know what they are doing!

Steve

I agree with: 1) buy fresh, quality film; 2) shoot more carefully to save frames 3) develop B&W yourself; 4) Epson V700 scanner as best bang for the buck and very widely used. Check Flickr, Photo.net and da Google for discussions of that scanner. It's a good one for scanning to put images online, including, ironically APUG. What a weird place this is. It's also a good scanner for printing small. Bigger prints in color, go pro.

The beauty of using film is that the equipment is super high quality but cheap and the software/computer requirements are minimal, further cheapening the process. I use Nikon NX2 rather than Photoshop for basic adjustments and it's awesome unless you want to really mess with the file.

Enjoy your film and don't let the curmudgeons on this site chase you off.

I agree with jeff, don't go for expired film, don't even care about 1 or 2 frames and develop yourself because it's cheap and easy. the resolution of a good negative is far beyond digital cameras and scanners an ordinary individual can buy. I also agree with the epson v700 for a b&w start. if your photographing really takes off, go for a professional scanner. I have a minolta dimage which was quite cheap on ebay. I use gimp, a free software, which is about as powerful as photoshop. it's a bit of a pain to start with, but you will find a solution to any question you have easily on internet.

good luck. kind regards

reinhard

Even color is easy to develop yourself. Not sure why the mystique continues for color developing. Really if you do temperature control for B&W, color is no different at all except the temperature is higher.

If you have clients which will accept scanned film output, great! I wish mine would but for all my corporate event work it is digital. Sadly even when I would have time to develop and scan before they need it, they want digital. I suppose I could shoot film and scan it and they probably wouldn't notice but that would be dishonest.

hpulley said:

Even color is easy to develop yourself. Not sure why the mystique continues for color developing. Really if you do temperature control for B&W, color is no different at all except the temperature is higher.

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Exactly. Developing color film is actually less difficult than black and white, in my humble opinion. You can push and pull process, but mostly you have a standard time, standard temperature, and a standard agitation regime. You don't deviate much from it. Simple, and certainly easy for someone used to black and white film processing.

Thomas Bertilsson said:

Exactly. Developing color film is actually less difficult than black and white, in my humble opinion. You can push and pull process, but mostly you have a standard time, standard temperature, and a standard agitation regime. You don't deviate much from it. Simple, and certainly easy for someone used to black and white film processing.

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Chalk me up as another person who thinks this. You have one major hurdle, temp, but everything is is more simple than b/w. No developing charts, fewer chemicals, you can throw different films together, etc.

I do my own B&W developing, but I don't bother with temperature control since the place where I do it at is consistently at 20 degrees. How vital is the temperature control for doing color developing, is there a safe deviation?

Dr.Pain-MD said:

I do my own B&W developing, but I don't bother with temperature control since the place where I do it at is consistently at 20 degrees. How vital is the temperature control for doing color developing, is there a safe deviation?

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You should be 100 F plus or minus 1/2 F average temperature throughout the process. That means you can start at 102 F as long as you end at 98 F, in other words.

Dr.Pain-MD said:

I do my own B&W developing, but I don't bother with temperature control since the place where I do it at is consistently at 20 degrees. How vital is the temperature control for doing color developing, is there a safe deviation?

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Consistency is more important in color, as the others have indicated, temperature is the one real hurdle.

Directions call for 100 +/- 0.5 F.

Some people have temp controlled baths, some start at say 102 and let the temp float through to 98.

Both work and give reasonable results. Regardless of the method or my mistakes, I have always gotten workable results.

Just like B&W you may have to adjust your standard time and temp a bit to get the perfect negative density.

Unlike B&W once you "nail the process" it is normally then "right" for all C-41 films regardless of brand or speed.

B/W developing can cost as little as 20 cents a roll, however color processing will end up costing you around $2 a roll.

With what chems? I do better than $1/roll for C-41 with JOBO/Tetenal Press Kits.

djacobox372 said:

B/W developing can cost as little as 20 cents a roll, however color processing will end up costing you around $2 a roll.

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FreeStyle sells a C-41 kit for about a $1 US a roll. FreeStyle is an APUG sponsor.

Steve

djacobox372 said:

B/W developing can cost as little as 20 cents a roll, however color processing will end up costing you around $2 a roll.

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B&W is a bit less expensive, until you get ready to print.

markbarendt said:

B&W is a bit less expensive, until you get ready to print.

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Indeed I don't like to think of how much it costs by the time I'm satisfied with some Ilford Warmtone fiber prints... but it's all worth it when you have the final print with everything just perfect.

hpulley said:

Indeed I don't like to think of how much it costs by the time I'm satisfied with some Ilford Warmtone fiber prints... but it's all worth it when you have the final print with everything just perfect.

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'tis fun, yes.