I posted some of my Pacific Northwest photos over on 365Pixels. I thought I’d write out some tips and tricks for this latest three-roll develop and scan.

Developing

I had my first fairly major leak using the AGO processor. It’s just a press fit, and it can come loose when you’re dumping out chemicals. You have to press it back in place after each dump just to be safe. I poured in my bleach, looked away for a while to prep for the next stage, and looked down to a bright yellow towel! I lost about half of my bleach and thought, well, this is going to be my first developing failure. I stopped the leak and let it process with the reduced amount of bleach, hoping for the best. I was doing 3 rolls of 35mm and just cringed at the possible loss. Thankfully, I don’t see any damage done to the photos. The process is more forgiving than most people think online.

Scanning

Scanning photos is going well. I use my Nikon Z8 and a macro lens with the Valoi system. The big upgrade this time was using an one-time $9.99 app called Orion, along with a $19 HDMI to USB capture card dongle, you can use an iPad as a HDMI monitor. This works for many things like game consoles, etc., but you can plug it into your camera via HDMI so you have a big, beautiful screen to align your negative and check focus. Highly recommended.

I’m learning to be more efficient and use batch processing better with NLP (Negative Lab Pro). This just becomes mandatory when processing several rolls at once. The time required to do each picture individually is just unrealistic. NLP has a very good help section. Take the time to read all the tips and tricks, especially on batch processing. NLP only works with Lightroom Classic, so if you are not a keyboard shortcut kind of person, you soon will be. The time savings are considerable. Consistent scans are very important when it comes to, say, cropping. You can crop one photo, then copy and paste, or use sync to crop all the rest of that roll. It’s beautiful and a massive time-saver, but only if your scans are consistent. If each scan is wonky in placement, you won’t have this sync option, and you’ll have to crop each photo manually.

The next new thing is dealing with 120 film. I haven’t spooled or done any 120 yet. The processing is the same, but I haven’t tackled spooling it in the dark bag yet.