Like a lot of people I became interested in the whole retro photography thing during the pandemic, but I’ve got to admit that while I’ve had a couple of false starts, I really havn’t done much with it.

I’ve some working cameras, a box full of 35mm film, and a couple of experimental days out, but that’s about it.

However, more recently, I became interested in the idea of half frame cameras, and, yes, I ended up buying one online from a used camera dealer in Adelaide.

Doing this was actually tremendously useful as it helped crystallise my thoughts around the elephant in the room – film processing.

I’d already decided that I wouldn’t bother with the whole enlarging and printing thing, and simply have my films processed and scanned.

One of the results of the retro photography boom is that there are a number of companies that will, for a fee, process and scan films. The only problem is that as half frame photography was always a minority sport, which means that a lot of labs – who of course simply feed the exposed films through an automatic developing machine, and then a custom scanner are not set up for handling half frame media.

Given that you can buy plastic half frame cameras from Amazon and others for something between fifty and a hundred bucks, you might have thought they were more geared up for handling half frame media, but no.

Now, as I’ve written before, I used to do my own film processing as a geeky teenager, and I used to have a basic lab setup with a blackout tent, but I realised that I don’t need a lab, all I need is a change bag – basically a light proof bag in which you put the exposed film cassettes and the developing tank, and then by touch you unwind the film from the cassette into the tank spool, and then close up the tank

Simple, no need for a tent or a lab, even though I’m sure that a certain amount of swearing will be involved the first few times.

Then it’s simply a matter of adding the chemicals, stirring and agitating, and you have a set of negatives.

It turns out it’s possible to buy a tank and all the required flasks and stirrers, not to mention special squeegees for drying the film as a package, and again to buy the chemicals as a package.

As with all these things, the startup cost is not exactly cheap, but the more one does it, the cheaper it gets.

The going rate for having a film processed and scanned is something between twenty and twenty five dollars and the startup cost for home processing is something like $250, so do it often enough it’s cheaper to do it at home and also possibly more fun.

You will notice however that I havn’t mentioned scanning, and that’s for a reason.

Commercial labs will scan every image, which of course includes all the duds.

You can buy a home film scanner, in fact I already have a basic one, bought to rescue some family pictures where we still had the negatives but not the original prints, but again they are designed for full frame film.

The alternative is to use a light box and a digital camera (or even your phone) to take a picture of the negative and then process it using Gimp – this gives you more control over the image, and by using a mask – basically a bit of card with a rectangular hole the correct size blank out the rest of the backlighting – and yes, capitalism being a wonderful thing, you can even buy light boxes with mounting brackets for doing this very thing

So, I think I can make this thing work, and more importantly, have fun along the way