Don’t Stop Believin

Today has been rather productive on the analogue front, despite being a bit of a lost day as the paid job was cancelled, and so I put myself “on duty” for the day as LA for the Loch Ness RNLI. A morning of chores then took over before finding a little time to process a film that I finished off this afternoon.

This was a test of a different developer, one that is considerably less toxic than most - it is based on the old Kodak XTOL formula, but adapted a little by Bellini (an Italian photo chemical outfit) further. The main ingredient of XTOL is Vitamin C! Anyway, I made up the whole batch as it has a working life of about 4 weeks once mixed and should do a good few films in that time. Processing time increases by 15% after the first 6 rolls, and I don’t think I will see many more than that in the next 4 weeks anyway. It does work out a bit more expensive to run though as a result of the limited shelf life, but I want to give it a go - plus I plan to do some development with Angus this coming week, so safe is king! I can actually make it myself from raw ingredients, which is considerably cheaper, and is something I will probably try my hand at soon as the results were really quite good - and home made is very, very cost effective!

So this evening I am scanning the files from both this film and the first I processed with the AGO (a roll of Delta 400 developed in FX-39) I am liking Delta a lot, and I thing that this is likely to become my standard film stock in both 100 and 400 guises, much to my suprise. I do want to compare it to TMAX though as I remembered a couple of days back that this was my favourite film from back in the day!

I also wrote a proposal for a potential commercial job, and then had my Dad look over it for a second opinion - he thought it looked pretty solid, so I am just going to run a few tweaks over the weekend and have it in for Monday… then see what happens! This is a step change in operations if it happens as it would be a properly costed commercial shoot rather than the piecemeal nature of property work.

16th October 2026