Film Processing Equipment
If you can bear with the ramblings of a senior flatulent (a few of you will get that), I'll tell you how it was back in the day when film was all we had.
First, let's see what's in the picture. In the front are a few rolls of hand-rolled HP5+. The yellow things are two empty cassettes, ready to be loaded from the 100-foot roll of film in the daylight film loader, which is the black box with the red cap. The stainless thing on the left is a processing tank, and on the right are two 35mm film reels. The tank holds two of them or one 120 reel. I also have a larger tank that holds four 35mm reels or two 120 reels.
The long black tube in the rear is a Unicolor Film Drum. It can be used to process black and white film, but I only used it to process color slides -- seven rolls of 35mm or four 120 rolls at a time. I used it in a homemade water bath (a restaurant bus tray) with a fish-tank heater to regulate the temperature.
My photographic obsession began in 1968. Over the next 35 years I shot many thousands of rolls of film (not to mention some sheet film). Some of the film, including all color negative, was sent out for laboratory processing, but much of the color slide film I processed myself, using Unicolor or Kodak chemistry. I also processed all the black and white film in house.
Being thrifty (okay, cheap), I saved a lot of money over the years by buying my black and white and slide film in 100-foot rolls and loading it into cassettes myself. (You can do it while watching TV.) This, by the way, is something you can still do. The equipment is still available, as are many black and white films. Color is more problematic.
But it all ended in 2003, when I bought my first digital SLR. I've shot a few rolls of color transparency since then, but sent them out for processing.
Do I miss it? I miss the days of shooting and processing film keenly. Would I go back to shooting film? No. It's far too expensive to shoot color these days, and I'm a color photographer. I could shoot and process my own black and white film at reasonable cost, and I love black and white. But color is the way I see. So no, no going back for me. YMMV.
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Photography and text copyright 2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
