Hard Times

When photographers mention frugality or a budget approach to their craft, the conversation inevitably revolves around low-cost cameras, the Lomography Sprocket Rocket springs to mind here, or budget, low-cost film stock. Even when it comes to low-cost cameras, there are those who will search out a charity shop bargain and make use of that.

All of these things are valid. Reducing the cost of photography, especially during the current cost-of-living crisis in the UK, is becoming more and more important to photographers.

I understand the mindset of buying the best camera you can for the little amount of money you have available and taking your photographs with that. A nice SLR, even with a so-called "kit" lens, will take some lovely photographs. Sometimes, using what you have to hand is better than not getting out at all.

One of the things that hardly ever gets discussed when talking about budget film photography is how to save money on developing chemicals. I understand that photographers want to get good results and that they believe this is an area where saving money is a false economy.

However, I have a different point of view.

I have mentioned before that I am a user of Ilford PQ Universal developer. I think the clue is in the name. It's a universal developer.

The chemistry behind PQ Universal has a history that goes back to a company called May & Baker, who sold a related developer under the trade name of Suprol.

Suprol was marketed by May & Baker primarily as a paper developer, but the story doesn't end there. May & Baker were a major photographic-chemical manufacturer, and their technical literature covered considerably more than simply developing prints. Suprol was used in technical photography and, according to recollections from photographers who worked with the product, in commercial black-and-white film processing as well.

There is an interesting historical point here. Suprol wasn't simply something that photographers experimented with in their darkrooms. May & Baker supplied photographic chemistry to the professional processing industry, where developers needed to be capable of dealing with a range of films and processing conditions. There was no practical option of saying, 'Sorry, we only develop sheet film in this.'

Ilford's modern documentation takes a much more cautious position with PQ Universal, specifically recommending it for technical and sheet films while saying not to use it for general-purpose 35mm and roll film. That's their recommendation and it's perfectly legitimate. But 'not recommended' isn't the same thing as 'doesn't work'. So the absence of the 1+29 and 1+39 dilutions from Ilford's current recommendations simply suggests, to me at least, that Ilford's documentation is not incorrect as much as incomplete.

My own experience would suggest that the distinction matters. At 1+29, PQ Universal produces perfectly good negatives from 35mm film, and I've got the negatives to prove it.

If May & Baker's own technical literature was prepared for different forms of photographic processing, and Suprol could be used at different dilutions for different applications, then the modern idea that using a paper developer for film is somehow photographic sacrilege starts to look rather silly.

There is the further dilution of 1+39. This dilution wasn't simply an internet-era experiment. There are recollections from photographers familiar with the original May & Baker documentation that Suprol was used at 1+39 for fine-grain film processing.

I use PQ Universal at a dilution of 1+29. My negatives are lovely, fine grain examples.

At a dilution of 1+29, one litre of PQ Universal makes 30 litres of working solution. I use 350ml for a 35mm film, which means I can get around 85 films from a litre of concentrate. That works out at about 18p per film at £15 a litre. And because I use it as a one-shot developer, every film gets fresh developer and is processed in exactly the same way.

And here is the real cost saving: I don't buy Ilford PQ Universal. There is a company called Fotospeed who produce a product called PD 5. I phoned them and asked if I could use PD 5 in the same way as PQ Universal, and they confirmed that it was a suitable alternative to Ilford PQ Universal.

It's a fiver cheaper than Ilford's product, hence my £15 a litre cost. The Ilford product costs nearer £20 per litre. In fairness to Ilford, that still only makes the cost per film around 23p when developing at 1+29.

To contrast with the standard developer from Ilford, their ID-11 product will develop 10 films per litre when the stock solution is reused. At a tenner a pack, that's a quid a roll! And to get the full 10 rolls you have to increase the development time after each successive film.

I don't keep the PD 5 as one large litre bottle once I've opened it, either. I decant each litre into four 250ml bottles. Before capping them, I give each bottle a small puff of butane into the top. Butane is heavier than air, so it sits above the developer and helps prevent oxygen getting to the concentrate and oxidising it. That way, I'm only exposing 250ml of developer to the air each time I open a bottle.

Fotospeed are worth checking out because their FX30 fixer is cheaper than premium-badged alternatives and lasts well. I make up a fresh litre of diluted FX30 at 1+4 and check the time it takes to clear the film. This is usually around 30 seconds. When this changes to 2.5 minutes, I change the fixer, given that the typical MDC fixer time is 5 minutes, and my rule is that fixing time should be double the clearing time.

Reusing fixer like this also saves money and, in my experience, doesn't compromise quality.

Frugal photography doesn't have to mean cutting corners. Sometimes it simply means understanding your materials well enough not to throw perfectly usable chemistry down the sink.

*Note, the photographs shown in this blog post were taken by me and developed in PD 5 at 1+29.