School started again. I thought it was two days ago but turned out I got the wrong date... it actually started yesterday. That day I didn't come for nothing though, I happened to bring an exposed Neopan roll with me so I headed to the darkroom to develop it. My second developing session.

I had some little problem putting the roll into the reel... for some reason the roll just kept curled out of the reel so it wouldn't come in properly. D: Uhhhh, I guess that explanation doesn't really give any clear idea for you guys who never did film developing, so for simplicity sake let's just say I fucked up. After a while I got kinda frustrated, my hands started sweating --which is bad-- so I put the film into the tank to prevent light leak and then got out from the darkroom to breathe some fresh air. Luckily the darkroom caretaker came to the rescue, so the film was saved. Phew. I guess it takes a while to get yourself used to the whole deal. :S

Later on the aforementioned caretaker also offered me to learn how to make a contact print, which is cool! He told me to come again the next day, which I did.

So, first you align the negs you want to contact print on a glass plate... that's my friend Rahmat aligning his negs.



This is mine:


After that you go the darkroom and put the glass plate with the negs on top of a photo paper, and then expose them with light from an enlarger for some time. The exposed paper is then developed on a tray filled with developer (it's just the coolest part, since you get to see the images slowly coming out on the paper... seeing it for the first time is just simply wicked), and then fixed and washed on a running water. I'd include photos from inside the darkroom, but a room only lit with a safety red light is just too dark even with f/1.8 @ ISO 1600... heck, even I can barely see anything through the viewfinder. RAW file might be the answer... I'll try it next time.

So let's skip the whole darkroom session and here's the contact print... ta-daah!



They're both mine. And they're identical, except there's a portion that is not properly exposed on the first try cause I fucked up (again). Yeah, sue me for being clumsy. Aside from the Neopan negs from the previous day I also brought the TMAX negs which was from my first developing session and made a contact print of it too. Here are the scanned prints. (Caution, large files! Pardon the quality as well, I'm too lazy to fix them further in PS)

The TMAX:



You can see some ugly stains on some of the frames on the bottom part of the print... that's an error from the developing process. Bah.

And here's the Neopan:



The weird stacking frames on the first strip was because I already used up 5 frames with this roll but then I rolled it back to the canister cause I needed to use a color film for covering the birthdays of my friends back in late October. The stain on the first frame on the last strip? I guess that's because I accidentally rubbed the negs when I screwed up two days ago. ;p

Not many promising pics on this roll, I might print or scan just some of them later. Been slacking off lately, I need to shoot some more.

Catch you all later!

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