When I first started getting back into film photography, I told my girlfriend that I wouldn’t be doing any bulk film loading. “I won’t be shooting that much,” I explained. So, anyway, this week I bought my first roll of bulk 35mm film. **insert shrugging emoji here**

Hear me out. My justification is the fact that I’ve collected a lot of cameras…and I want to test and use each and every one of them! But when you buy a roll of film these days, it comes with 36 exposures. It’s not economical or efficient to run 36 frames through a camera just to test if out. If you want to go out and shoot a handful of frames to test a camera, a smaller roll would be very beneficial.

I settled on a Legacy Pro Lloyd 35mm Daylight Bulk Film Loader. I snagged it off a local seller through Facebook Marketplace. I paid the man $25 for it. I’d used a Watson bulk loader in high school, so this one was different than I remembered.

I bought a five-pack of reusable film cartridges and 100′ of Arista EDU Ultra 100. A single 36 exposure roll of this film is $6.00. A bulk roll of 100′ runs $75. It’s expected that a roll of 100 feet of film will give you 18 rolls of 36 expsures each. This brings the cost per 36 exposure roll down to just a hair over $4.00. That’s a savings of $2.00 per roll.

But the biggest benefit is being able to choose your own number of frames per roll. Want 36 exposures? Cool. 24 exposures? Easy. Want just ten rolls to use as a test roll? No problem.

But what about the cost of chemistry for developing all these small rolls of film? It’s clearly not cost-effective to use a full batch of chemistry to develop these smaller exposure rolls. I have a solution. Diafine is a two-bath black and white developer that will be perfect for this. It can be used at a wide range of temperatures (room temp is just fine). It sells for $32 to make a quart of working solution(s). Once mixed, it can be used over and over and over again. My reading shows there’s virtually no limit to how many times it can be used. This makes a perfect developer for these small test rolls I had in mind when I bought the bulk loader. And I’ve already used Diafine on larger “serious” rolls of film. It produces a nice negative. You can see examples of my images produced with Diafine by clicking here. And more specifically, shooting Arista EDU Ultra 100 then developing in Diafine produced images that I was really pleased with.

Installing the bulk roll of film in the bulk loader was super easy and I had no promblems at all. Since it has to be done in complete darkness, I just used my film changing bag. Loading a roll of film initially caused me a little heartburn. The first roll I loaded was backwards and unusable. This was totally my fault since I didn’t take time to fully understand how to use the loader. I guess I zigged when I was supposed to zag. YouTube to the rescue! I sat down with the loader and tried again by going step-by-step along with the video. I got my first roll of 10 frames loaded easily and will have no problems going forward.

But there’s always the thought that maybe I did something wrong and inadvertently exposed the bulk roll or the frames I loaded into a cartridge. No way of knowing until you shoot the roll and develop it. And that’s what I did. I shot the ten-frame roll in a never-before-used camera I had in my collection. Results in the next post!