Experience

There is no substitute for..................

In the initial stages of your quest to produce a good set of negatives with your first film, you are starved of knowledge and information and read everything you can lay your hands on. This is counter productive and becomes confusing as different people have their own method of arriving at the same result. Pick one practitioner with a simple method and stick with them, forsaking all others until you know what results will be obtained when you pull the film from the developing real.

The more straight forward the method the less things need to be checked when something go's wrong. What people do not tell you is that film processing is very forgiving and if you don't quite get the time right, the temperature is not spot on or you forget to invert the tank the right amount of times it will not make a vast difference to the final outcome. Possibly they will be slightly thiner or denser than normal but what is normal in your case? It is not until you have processed a number of films that you will truly know. Once you know what to exepect you can then personalise the method to get the negatives that suit your own taste.

Timing development

You should always base your process time on the latest information available for your usual developer. Then be prepared to use these figures as a guide or starting point. You should check each set of negatives carefully, if they are starting to look dark/dense then you will need to adjust the process time by say twenty per cent. If they are looking thin/light then a slight increase in process time is needed. It is a good idea to stick to one make of developer and film until you understand what it is capable of. By doing so, you will be able to extract every detail from the negative that was originally captured. With experience comes knowledge.