FilmDev blog

May 17 2011 ∞

“ Using such a low quantity of dilution means that the developer needs a lot longer to act. I’ll address actual timing in a minute, but with the increase in time comes a compensation effect. Basically what happens is that the highlights develop first and then the shadows slowly develop detail over the remainder of the time the film stays in the solution. This means that in high contrast scenes this form of development is useful for capturing detail that might otherwise be lost using conventional development methods. Additionally, the grain tends to be lower since there is less agitation.

—

Rodinal: The Magic Elixir

Great post on stand developing with Rodinal from Feeling Negative.
Some good stuff in the comments too (including a plug for FilmDev from long-time user and Rodinal fan skink74).
I’m gonna have to try stand developing some Rodinal real soon now.

Rodinal recipes on FilmDev.

Mar 16 2011 ∞

“ Extremely smooth fine grain, totally flexible mystery soup. Shadow detail that dumbfounded folks, and which made those great long scale shots in smoky jazz clubs possible, without ever burning out a highlight.

—

777 Fine Grain Developer

Every now and again a FilmDev user will add a new recipe with a film or developer that’s not in the FilmDev database.

At this point I usually log in and add the information - a simple process; Lomography have a new film out or I didn’t realise Tri-X came in 320 speed (oops!).

Sometimes though I need to use a little detective work to track down the information I need (the manufacturer and available speeds etc).

Such was the case with Defender 777. Turns out it’s ~~not been sold in years~~* quite hard to track down yet somehow someone has got hold of some, developed some film with it and now added the details to FilmDev.

I get a warm happy feeling whenever anyone adds a recipe to FilmDev but I get an especially warm one when something like this happens.

Defender 777 recipes on FilmDev.

* Thanks to Hattipop for pointing out that 777 is still for sale.

Aug 18 2010 ∞

900 recipes!

I was going to wait until we hit 1000 recipes before posting but I was quite taken with the symmetry of 900 recipes and 450 users so am posting anyway.

FilmDev

Apr 21 2010 ∞

Filmus Monochromus - Blogus: Diafine - Two Bath Developer

Diafine is usable over a wide temperature range with one developing time for all films. Fast, medium and slow films can be developed simultaneously without adjustment in developing time.

I wasn’t aware Diafine had these properties.

I often wait until I have two films to develop as I own two tanks so can “batch them up” so to speak.

But as I often shoot different films at different speeds I can’t put two rolls in one tank as the developer times differ.

Not so with Diafine it seems.

Diafine recipes on FilmDev.

Mar 29 2010 ∞

New release

FilmDev has a new release with the following changes.

You can now filter search results by film and/or developer.
This makes it much easier to compare film/developer combinations.

Although displaying of photos for a recipe has always been limited to 30 per page (due to the Flickr API terms of service) it’s now possible to view further pages of photos.
The pagination links appear on a recipe page (assuming it has more than 30 photos) after 1-2 seconds when viewing a recipe.

Film/developer pages now have filtering and pagination.
User pages now have pagination of recipes.

There are RSS feeds for users/films and developers.
These should be detected by your browser on the relevant page (I’ll add regular HTML links soon!).

Fixed a bug where tagging couldn’t find new photos once you’d already tagged 30 photos.

Oh, and in the middle of me launching the changes, recipe number 700 was added to the site.

Feb 24 2010 ∞

New release with lots of changes.

FilmDev has a new release today with lots of changes.

Significantly improved searching.
Search results are ordered by relevance and higher ranking is given to film and developer names (as opposed to just the name being mentioned in the notes).

Tagging photos works with Javascript disabled (but is slicker with it enabled).
Imports still require Javascript but I will fix that soon.

Some stuff around adding recipes.
There is now a checkbox for stand development when adding a recipe. You can search for them by typing “stand” in the search box.
You can specify development time seconds in 5 second intervals.

Removed some menu options, they are all at the bottom of each page.

http://filmdev.org/

Dec 22 2009 ∞

FilmDev has now hit 500 recipes!

And by the time I got around to doing a screenshot for this post another 22 had been added.

This is all great news.

I was never really sure if the site would take off so seeing people join and add recipes on an almost daily basis please me greatly.

Since I did the new version of the site in November 2008 it’s been a pretty consistent upwards growth.

As we get more and more data added to the site the next steps are for me to think about better ways to allow people to compare results for different developer combinations.

Nov 07 2009 ∞