5 hours ago
4
Shooting film is one thing. Developing and scanning it yourself, hundreds of miles from home, inside a van with blackout blinds and a couple of red lights, is a different level of commitment.
Thomas Heaton sets out to test whether he can run an entire film workflow off-grid, from loading the camera to holding a scanned negative. He shoots Ilford Delta 100 on a 6x6 medium format camera up in Assynt, in the northwest of Scotland, working through classic black-and-white techniques along the way. For the opening view of Suilven, he reaches for a green filter, which brightens foliage and separates the tones between different greens for more contrast and detail. He stacks that with an ND grad and a polarizer, then compensates his exposure by a stop for the polarizing effect. Heaton is honest that he doesn't expect masterpieces here, and that admission sets the tone for a video about process rather than portfolio shots.
The developing itself becomes the real drama. Heaton hasn't processed his own black-and-white film since 2002, and the hardest part turns out to be spooling the 120 film onto the reel inside a changing bag. The van is hot, his hands are sweaty, the film's emulsion turns to glue when wet, and what should take a few minutes stretches close to an hour of crumpling and sticking. Once the film is safe inside the light-proof tank, he moves to the chemistry using a Jobo film processor, which handles the temperature control and timing that make or break a home develop. He measures out developer and water, runs his stop and fixer stages, adds a wetting agent to prevent water marks, then hangs the roll to dry. The results, when they finally appear on the scanner the next day, land somewhere between success and disaster.
Heaton also raises a practical point that anyone shooting long exposures on film runs into: reciprocity failure. With a 10-stop filter on the water and a calculated one-minute exposure, he can't check whether Ilford Delta 100 needs a correction at those long times because he left his phone behind. His workaround is to shoot a safety frame at a lower stop count, hedging against a result he can't predict in the field. That habit of bracketing when you're unsure is worth carrying into digital work too, especially with slow shutter speeds and stacked filters where the math gets slippery. Film simply forces the issue, since you can't review the shot the moment you take it.
The van darkroom fits into a wider revival that has kept film alive well past its predicted death. Ilford still manufactures a full black-and-white lineup, and film prices and demand have climbed steadily over recent years as more people chase a slower, more physical way of shooting. What Heaton demonstrates is that the barrier to processing your own work has dropped, mostly because temperature-controlled units take the guesswork out of the part that used to intimidate beginners. If you've thought about developing at home, the lesson from his sauna-hot van is that the chemistry is forgiving and the loading is the skill you actually need to practice. Do it a few times with a junk roll before you trust it with images you care about, and the rest of the process is largely following numbers.
His favorite frame, a reflection shot of a lighthouse, comes out the most damaged of the bunch, with marks he can't quite explain and a crumple hole from the tangled spooling. The dust picked up during drying is another wrinkle, since he assumed the roll would dry in an hour when it really needed closer to eight. He's cutting the ten developed 120 frames into individual squares and slipping them into random calendar pre-orders, damage and all, which is a fittingly loose ending for an experiment he treated as a test rather than a shoot.
Watch the full run above to see which frames survived the van, and whether the concept holds up start to finish.
English (US) ·