C-41 Processing

C-41 is the development process used for color negatives.  Traditionally these negatives were printed in the darkroom onto color photo paper.  This is the process that was used back in the day when we all took our color roll film from our 35mm cameras to the 1 hour lab...!  How's that for a blast from the past...!

I don't shoot much color film, mostly because I've never been able to print it properly.  I have the darkroom and the equipment to do it, but I'm somewhat color blind, and really struggle to properly balance the colors.  This is the main reason that I got into Black & White photography nearly three decades ago.  I struggle to tell tans and browns and greys and greens apart.  In fact all of these usually look olive green to me.  On the few occasions in the past that I have attempted color printing, prints that looked good to me, looked too green to everyone else.

Nowadays, when I am out photographing with my large format camera, every once in a while I come across a scene that I think might look good in color.  I usually carry around a couple of film holders loaded with color film.  Sometimes it is color negative film and sometimes color transparency.  I shoot these emulsions from time to time, and save up the film until I have a big enough batch to justify setting up the processor and mixing up the chemistry.  The chemistry is still available, but a little difficult to obtain.  Some of the ingredients in the chemistry have been deemed restricted by the US Government since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  So, the developing kits can not be shipped out of the United States to a private individual.  I have to order them through a Canadian distributor, who can then re-sell them to me.  A bit of a pain in the ass, but I continue to do it, at least until I use up my current stock of film.  Much of this stock is past it's best before date but it seems that with fresh chemistry, it still yields acceptable results.  Most films scan nicely and these images can then be fine tuned with photo management software such as Photoshop.  I can then print the resulting image with my ink jet printer, if I so desire.  I seems I really don't get the desire very often as I rarely print anything digitally.  But I enjoy viewing the finished images and sharing them on my blog.

The batch of film that I recently processed included about forty, 4" x 5" color negatives.  These images were all taken between the end of 2013, right up to a couple of weeks ago.  This particular one was taken during my trip to the badlands in October of this year.  I previously posted a black and white version of this same shot, and now I'm sharing the color version.