This spring I changed the order. Negatives go into sleeves, the sleeves go onto a sheet of paper under glass in the bathroom-turned-darkroom, and I make a contact print. Only frames that look interesting on the contact sheet get scanned or printed properly. On a good roll that is three or four frames. On most rolls it is one.

What surprised me

I thought I would miss having everything digitised. I do not. The contact sheets live in a ring binder with the date and the film written on the back, and flicking through them is quicker than any photo library. Mistakes are visible in a useful way: I can see where I hesitated, took the same thing four times, or got bored halfway through a walk.

It has also changed how I shoot. Knowing that most frames will only ever exist as a thumbnail on a contact sheet takes the pressure off individual pictures, and I take more chances. Strangely, the keeper rate has gone up.

The practical bit

You do not need an enlarger to make contact sheets. A desk lamp with a low-wattage bulb a metre above the paper, a sheet of glass from an old picture frame and a cheap pack of resin-coated paper is enough. My exposures are around eight seconds at f-nothing, because there is no lens involved. Test strips first, as always.

The scanner is still on the shelf. It just gets used about a tenth as often, and I have my evenings back.

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Shutter first

On these cameras the front lens elements unscrew without special tools if you have a rubber jar opener and patience. Behind them the leaf shutter was coated in old oil that had migrated onto the blades. I cleaned the blades with lighter fluid on a cotton bud, a few drops at a time, firing the shutter between each application until it ran freely. It took an evening. I did not take the shutter apart further than that; I know my limits and the springs are tiny.

Focusing and the fungus

The focusing helicoid needed its old grease removed and a thin layer of new grease. The fungus on the viewing lens wiped off with a dilute mix of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, leaving a slight haze that does not matter because nothing is recorded through that lens. The taking lens, luckily, was clean.

I checked the speeds roughly by recording the shutter with a phone app that listens for the opening and closing clicks. It is not a proper tester, but it told me the slow speeds were now within about a third of a stop, which is better than my metering.

First roll

Twelve frames of HP5 on a grey Sunday around the canal. Two are double exposures because I forgot that this model does not stop you winding on wrong, and one is completely black because I left the lens cap on, which a twin-lens reflex will happily let you do since you are looking through the other lens. The remaining nine are the sharpest negatives I have ever made. There is something about a six-by-six square of film on the light box that makes even a lock gate look important.

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So from November to the end of December I loaded the Olympus with Portra 400, set the meter to 400 and left it there. Five rolls in total, all metered with the camera's centre-weighted meter and no compensation except for the obvious backlit scenes.

The results

Honestly, they are fine. The lab scans have a bit more grain in the shadows than the overexposed rolls I shot last summer, and the skin tones lean slightly green under streetlights, but nothing I would call a failure. Overcast daylight frames are almost indistinguishable from the summer ones once I had corrected the white balance.

Where box speed really showed was in mixed light: shop windows at dusk, the inside of the bus, a pub with one lamp. Those frames are muddy in the darker half. Another stop of light would have helped, but another stop would also have meant a shutter speed I cannot hand-hold.

What I would do differently

I would still rate it at 400 in winter, but I would meter for the shadows instead of letting the camera average everything. And I would stop expecting a 400-speed colour film to behave like HP5 pushed to 1600. It is a different tool. In the dark months the black and white film comes out again.

The best frame of the lot is a boring one: frost on the allotment shed roof at about ten in the morning, low sun, completely flat greys and one rusty corner. It is in the contact sheets, sort of.

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Here are the two reference scans I use, straight off the scanner with all corrections switched off, 16-bit TIFF at 3200 dpi:

• HP5 Plus, base + fog, developed in ID-11 1+1 (about 13 MB)
• Portra 400, unexposed leader, C-41 lab dev (about 20 MB)

They are mostly useful as an example of what a “flat” scan looks like. Your own film, developer and scanner will differ, so make your own if you can.

What I actually use

The kit list is short and mostly borrowed from the kitchen: the tank, a changing bag, a measuring jug, a thermometer that lives in a drawer with the cake tins, three old squash bottles for chemistry, and a timer on my phone. For developer I settled on Ilfosol 3 at 1+9 because it is forgiving and the bottle lasts. Stop bath is plain water. Fixer is whatever rapid fixer the shop has in stock.

Loading the reel in the bag was the part I dreaded. The first roll took me twenty minutes and I creased the leader so badly that the first three frames have a half-moon on them. What helped was practising with a sacrificial roll in daylight, eyes shut, maybe ten times in a row. After that it became a thing my hands do while I listen to the radio.

Times and temperatures

HP5 at box speed in Ilfosol 3 is around six and a half minutes at 20°C. My kitchen in March is nowhere near 20°C, so I stand the jug of developer in a bowl of warm water until it comes up. I agitate for the first ten seconds and then four inversions every minute. When I push it to 800 I add about two minutes and accept that the shadows will be a bit thin.

The biggest improvement did not come from chemistry at all. It came from a wetting agent in the final rinse and hanging the film in the bathroom after a hot shower, when there is less dust in the air. Drying marks were my most common fault for months.

Was it worth it?

Financially, yes, after about the sixth roll. More importantly, I see the negatives the same evening, and that short loop between taking a picture and looking at it has done more for my photography than any book. I still send colour film away; C-41 at home is a project for another year.

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