Working notes kept while learning to shoot and develop black-and-white film.
These pages are a notebook, not a course. Everything here comes from rolls I actually shot and mistakes I actually made, written down mostly so I would stop repeating them.
Negative film tolerates overexposure far better than underexposure. The practical rule that finally worked for me: meter the darkest area where I still want texture, and place it two stops below middle grey.
Most of my early inconsistency was not chemistry. It was letting the developer drift three or four degrees between tanks and then wondering why contrast wandered.
The most useful piece of gear I own is a notebook and a thermometer.