Why I don’t miss film.

I found this photo earlier this afternoon. I probably took it in about 1978 in my room in Berlin- and it really made me grateful for digital as we have it today.

What you are looking at is the chemistry to develop E-6 process color slide film- back then, that was Ektachromes for us Kodak users. There were about 11 steps to the process, and the chemicals had to be maintained somewhere near 100 degrees Fahrenheit with very little variation. There were wonderful ingredients in that warm stew: Sodium hexametaphosphate, Sodium thiocyanate, and Potassium ferricyanide were some of them. As I recall, I used to drag a chair and a couple of sensitive thermometers into the bathroom and sit there juggling the water temperature to get all the chemicals nice and toasty, then sit through the process, carefully timing each step: 4 minutes here, 6 minutes there. If you had all your ducks in a row, though, you could have dry, mounted slides in a couple of hours after the shoot. The alternative was to mail your film off to a lab somewhere and wait one to three weeks to see what you got back.

Some wisenheimer emailed me to say that Pepsi and Dr. Pepper are not approved parts of the E-6 process. Well, true in a certain sense, but sitting over a steaming hot sink of chemicals used to make me awful thirsty, so they were required to hydrate the photographer. Satisfied, Brian?