What happens if you develop film too long

How long do you fix film? Fixing typically takes about 5 minutes in total, a minute or so longer won't hurt, but the total amount of time is not as crucial as the development stage.

After fixing your film, make sure to return the solution to your bottle using your fixer-dedicated funnel or graduate, and save. Is Stop Bath necessary? No, you don't have to use stop bath. The acid of stop bath immediately halts development and prevents the alkaline developer from exhausting your fixer.

So if you need absolute precision in developing time or want to absolutely maximize the life of your fixer you can use stop. How do you make black and white films? Let's start with loading the film.

We would definitely recommend getting some exposed film to try the next step out in the light. Load Your Film. Now open your undeveloped film. Mix Up Your Chemistry. Develop Black And White Film.

Stop Bath. Fix Your Film. How long is fixer good for? Putting fixer in plastic bottles HD-Polyethylene and sqeeze it a bit is the most convienient way to stock it. Regular fixer concentrates will last for years. How long does stop bath last? The E6 first developer is not metol-hydroquinone, sorry to say.

It uses 2 other ingredients instead. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. The question is pretty basic and should be asked for reference's sake : how can I tell if I have over- or underdeveloped my film? What are the signs? First, some background: Developer works by turning silver halide crystals on the film base which have been exposed to light into metallic silver.

When the film is put into fixer, silver halide unexposed is dissolved and any metallic silver exposed is left alone.

Being an analog process, crystals which have been exposed to more light will react with the developer more rapidly than those exposed to less. There are other factors that have an impact on the reaction rate, notably the temperature and how much the solution is agitated, but let's assume they remain constant. If you don't leave your film in the developer long enough, less of the halide crystals will turn to silver, and more of them will be dissolved during fixing. The result will be a "thin" negative that's mostly see-through.

An extreme version of this would be to process a piece of scrap film in fixer without developing it first. Since none of the silver halides have become metallic, all of them will be removed and you'll be left with just the film base. Leaving the film in the developer longer gives the less-exposed crystals more opportunity to react, resulting in more metallic silver being left on the base that won't dissolve during fixing.

The resulting negative will be "thick" and harder to see through. Leave the film in the developer long enough and you'll get black negatives when you pull them from the fixer. In both cases, one clear sign of over- or under-development is a lack of detail in the negative, because the details tend not to be solidly exposed or not exposed.

Being on the wrong side of "correct" development will mean those parts react and swept away in the fix or don't and remain on the base. If you've heard the terms "push" or "pull" processing, they mean the deliberate use of overdevelopment to bring an image out of underexposed film and deliberate underdevelopment to prevent overexposed film from going black. Most of us do this to some degree with paper prints under safelight by watching for a satisfactory level of development and putting it into stop bath to halt the process.

The following is a little "Ansel Adamsy" there are assumptions about the characteristics of a 'proper' negative , but it was what I was doing back when I worked in the dark room with black and white negative film:.

For black and white film is normal process is to make a contact print. First run a test strip to find the minimum exposure that makes the "blank" area of the negative completely black using a medium contrast paper.

Then use that exposure to make a contact print of the whole negative or strip of negatives. In essence, unless you're dealing with Kodachrome, there's a good chance that any film you find can be processed. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Learn more. Do disposible cameras go bad if you don't develop soon after using? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 9 months ago. Active 4 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 86k times. I've just found an old disposable camera after a bit of a tidy up, no idea what's on it. Improve this question. People already showed you there is the possibility that it is still good. I had the opposite experience after about one year Pictures came out with severe degradation. Mind you it was not kept in controlled conditions just my home which varies temperatures with the seasons and get extremely humid in the summer.

You may find treasures there No, they go better! Im so happy to read these post i have like 30 undeveloped cameras from 8 yrs to 3 yrs ago. Had them put away in my boxes in my aunts house! I was so down thinking i might not get any pics! Can't wait to start developing them! Can walmart help me, or do i need a special lab????