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The guy at the camera shop in Tulsa told me to stop guessing my dev times and it fixed my negatives
Two months ago I was in Tulsa for a wedding and ducked into a small camera shop to kill an hour, and an older guy behind the counter, maybe 70, watched me complain about my HP5 negatives coming out thin and flat. He asked how I was picking my times and I said I mostly guessed based on the box plus a minute or two. He laughed, pulled out a spiral notebook that was falling apart, and showed me his notes from 30 years of the same film, same developer, same temps written down every single roll. He said, "If you don't write it down, you're not shooting film, you're rolling dice." I felt like a moron. I bought a 99 cent notebook on the way back to the hotel and have logged every roll since, and I just nailed a batch at 68 degrees for 7.5 minutes that came out perfect. The part that stuck with me wasn't the times, it was that this guy had probably developed thousands of rolls and still wouldn't trust his own memory. Anyway, does anyone else keep a log, or do you just have your numbers memorized by now?
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