I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to try my hand at colour development this year. The results I’m sharing here are from a roll of Fuji Superia Velvia 800 I shot in March. It gifted to me by some friends for my birthday last year; not an easy to come by film – it was actually sourced from Japan. That alone should tell you I should have sent it to a lab, but I decided to develop it myself anyway. This was only my third go at developing colour film. Obvs decided to develop in the evening of a day where I’d had about 3hrs sleep the night before. I think I’ve been trying subconsciously, to squeeze as much art into the last 10 days as I can, knowing I have some stressful stuff coming up in my day job in the next few days, which will wipe me out as far as creative inspiration goes.

Anyway. I used the chemicals from my Tentenal C41 kit again for this one. Side note here for the self developing nerds, I’ve noticed the developer going dark already, and I only mixed this up about 2 months ago and have done only 2 films so far. Not great. Would be keen to know what C41 developers other people are using. This kit is supposed to be good for 10 rolls, but doubt the developer will last that long. Onto the actual development; I must have put too little blix in, because I ended up with a whole roll of only half – 3/4 exposed frames. If I had inverted the development tank to agitate the blix it might not have happened, but blix leaks out of my tank when I invert it, so used a stirrer instead. I did something wrong anyway. I could be annoyed with myself, given how promising some of the shots look, but I sort of love these shots anyway; they hint at something greater.

Despite the lack of sleep I ended up scanning the film the same night as well. I think scanning film when you’ve been awake for 21 hrs is the “you can’t just pause the game, mom” of film. A few sample shots below. Keen to know what you guys think.