Years ago, when old Pa Pitt was taking pictures mostly on film, he used to develop black-and-white film on the kitchen counter. It was not difficult. Instead of a darkroom, he had a changing bag, which is a portable darkness with holes for one’s wrists, and a daylight tank. Once the film is loaded into the tank inside the changing bag, everything else can be done in broad daylight.
There are several steps to traditional film developing. First pour in the developer and slosh it around in the prescribed way: this sloshing is called agitation, and there are important chemical reasons for it that would be boring to go into. Then pour out the developer and pour in a stop bath, which stops the development. Then comes the fixer, which makes the film lightproof, so that you can actually see the negatives without turning them all black. Then you rinse the film, and if everything went right you have pictures—negatives, that is, which can be scanned or printed to make pictures you can look at.
A monobath promises to simplify that process by bundling the developer and fixer into one solution. The idea is that the developer works fast enough to outrun the fixer; once the development is done, the fixer does its work, and once you’ve rinsed off the chemicals, you have developed and fixed negatives in one step.
Now that Father Pitt is picking up film cameras again, the economy and speed of developing the film himself are once again appealing to him. When he heard about the idea of a monobath, he decided to try it. It worked the first time, so here is a description of the experience for anyone who might be considering doing the same.
For his test roll, Father Pitt took an Argus A, a cheap and not very capable camera from the 1930s, to Clinton Cemetery. He was also taking digital pictures, so if the whole roll was wasted, the only loss would be the price of the film. It was Kentmere Pan 100, which is some of the cheapest black-and-white film you can get, and in spite of its cheapness Father Pitt has almost no complaints about its quality. The one small complaint is that this particular roll seems not to have been attached to the spindle in the cartridge. You should know that the film is at the end when you can’t turn the winding knob (or push the advance lever for you fancy types whose cameras are newer than ninety years old). This roll just wound all the way out; we knew it was done because the rewind knob stopped turning. Fortunately the roll was destined for the changing bag anyway, but it would have been very inconvenient if Father Pitt had been planning to take it to the lab.
For processing, Cinestill offers a “Df96 Mono Film Processing Kit” that includes much of what you need to get started: the chemical solution, a small daylight tank for one roll of 35mm film, and a funnel with mesh filter (that’s important, because you’ll reuse the chemistry multiple times). If you don’t have a darkroom, you’ll also need a changing bag, and you’ll definitely need an accurate thermometer. It also helps to have a small tub that you can fill with water to maintain the right temperature in the chemistry.
Temperature and agitation are everything in this process. It is more or less self-timing: at a certain temperature, with a certain amount of agitation, the developer will do its job in time before the fixer is finished. A shorter time would not produce the result you want, but a longer time doesn’t seem to make much difference.
Since the temperature is so important, Father Pitt filled a tub with water at just a degree above the proper temperature and set the bottle of solution in it for a while. When the thermometer showed that the solution was at the right temperature, he poured some of the bath water into the tank with the film and left it in there for a minute. Then he poured the solution into the tank, followed the agitation instructions, and waited till the time was up. After that, he poured the solution back into the bottle and rinsed the film according to the instructions. Then he took it out and hung it up to dry.
It was obvious from a glance that the film had developed, and when the film was thoroughly dry scanning the negatives showed that nothing had gone wrong with the development process. Some online sources say that monobath developing increases the grain, and that may be true; we can only say that the grain seemed to compare favorably with the grain in the same brand of film processed by a local lab.
Well, this seems like a good way to get film developed with minimal effort. In the whole process, the hardest part was getting the film on the plastic spiral reel in the changing bag, and Father Pitt will share one hint that seems to have made that part much easier. Cut off the corners of the end of the film that goes into the reel: those sharp corners want to catch on everything, and smoothing them out seemed to make the film slip into the reel much more easily.
For his next roll, Father Pitt will try the same process, but with a better camera.
Update: Here is an example of a picture from a Kodak Pony 135 (which is a simple camera with a good lens) on Efke KB 25 film, developed in the same monobath chemistry:
