I work in a film lab these days. It’s not a professional lab, by any means – but we pride ourselves on being better than the competition in drugstores. A really great part about it though, is interactions with customers. Some of the most interesting have been with people who’ve been long-time film shooters over decades. I’ve occasionally had people rant at me for a full twenty minutes about why switching from film to digital was the greatest choice they ever made. Another time I had a five minute lecture on the importance of thoroughness in film washing. That one really stuck with me, because it’s not something I can really say that I am very good at.

This came to mind when I finally got hold of my own professional film processor, an ancient 70’s/80’s rotary machine from Jobo. You may recall it from yesterday, when I wrote a hackers manual of how to use the thing. Part of the reason for getting the processor was to use ECN-II film, which has a longer-term archival stability than standard color film. Even though I’m not developing that film yet, it occurred to me that the best way to damage the long term stability of a negative is insufficient washing to remove the fixer. I took the opportunity to try something a little different.

My original reasons for shooting film were a mix of economic, artistic and environmental. Artistic reasons aside, the reason to use a rotary processor was to shoot more economically efficient film. There’s a small trade-off there in environment, in that the processor uses electricity to power the processing, whereas previously only my own hand-power was involved in the process. My original washing procedure was to use four washes of around 300ml/film, agitated for a few tens of seconds each. While that certainly gets the worst off, it’s a lot of water for relatively high levels of fixer left in the film. Another environmentally questionable decision was that the first rinse was being dumped down the drain. While fixer is not itself especially harmful, the silver compounds that it leeches from the film can be very toxic to wildlife; this being the reason that we store waste chemicals in the first place.

A nice thing about working in a film or wet print digital lab, for any film photographer – is that shop owners always seem happy to let you dump your waste chemicals into their recycling supply. The cost to the company is pretty negligible, and it’s a great way to encourage your employees to stick around. Because I now have ready access to this facility, I don’t need to be so careful about minimising my stored waste chemicals, as they can be disposed of regularly.

Let’s assume I’m using the two-reel tank on my Jobo. That’s designed to take 400ml chemistry in rotary use, or 600ml when used as a traditional inversion tank. Now, my first step in my rinsing process is to put 200 to 400ml of water in the tank, give it 30 seconds of inversions, then add it to my waste chemicals bin. That puts more silver in the recycling stream (reducing the need to mine the stuff), and less in the waste water (reducing the risk to plants and wildlife). After that, the amount of free silver compounds should be pretty negligible. My second rinse is exactly 400ml, put in the Jobo and agitated for five minutes. The theory is that giving the film a chance to soak, as well as the persistent agitation will help wash more fixer into the water. Finally, I give two gentle rinses in a couple hundred ml of clean water.

My final step is reused for a whole session, Jobo make it very clear in their documentation for other processors and reels that one should never get photoflo on them. That correlates with my previous evidence that the best way to cure ‘sticking’ on Paterson reels is to put them in boiling water and scrub the built-up rinse aid off with a toothbrush. So, instead I fill a Paterson tank with diluted rinse aid, take the film off the reels and ‘dip and dunk’ it. By this point, there shouldn’t really be any fixer left in the film, so it’s no real harm to reuse this solution a few times, and it does help to prevent the water marks I sometimes have trouble with. Of course, using something ‘cleaner’ than tap water for my final rinsing would also contribute to this, but distilling water is very energy intensive, making it quite environmentally traumatic.

I’m pretty sure this process is still far inferior to that my determined customer had in mind for me. Some of the older advice I’ve seen recommends leaving film under running water for 30 minutes, others suggest submersing it in 12 changes of water, and yet more suggest using the ‘wash aid’ sodium sulphite solution that is used to reduce latent fixer content in fibre-based prints. I’ll definitely iterate over this process, but from a ‘smell test’ it seems to do as good a job as my previous method, but at a much lower water usage. The fact that electricity usage is now higher is a drawback, and I do need to measure the power usage of the Jobo at some point, but since I generally develop film in the daytime, I am at least doing it at the point where there is the most solar energy available!