Color Developing at Home

I usually shoot Black & White film and do my own developing at home. One day I was reading one of the Film Photography Project's blog entries and saw mention of their C-41 Developing Kit so I thought I'd give it a try.

I loaded up a roll of Fuji 200 ISO color print film into my Nikon F, put a 35mm F/2 lens on it and walked around Chicago to get a few shots on a sunny day.

I had to buy a new set of chemical bottles to keep the color solutions separate from my usual black and white. Having to heat the chemicals to the appropriate temperature was an extra step beyond the usual B&W process of just adjusting the developing time. But it's most important to have the developer at the right temp for the initial steps, so I didn't worry about monitoring temperature of the solutions for the later steps.

The pictures came out pretty good. These are straight from the scans on my Epson V700, no adjustment of color, saturation, etc. Also no de-spotting in Photoshop, so excuse the dust spots. Less contrast and vibrancy than sending them out for processing, but certainly quicker turnaround.

I saved the solution and did a couple more rolls from other cameras in the next 6 weeks and the solutions seemed to store well enough.