Arno Peever

Analog photography is having its revival, 2003 everything went down when photography market saw consumer purposed digital cameras taking over the analog photography for good. Since then, there have been few new developments and majority of equipment production has been discontinued. Things have changed in las few years, films sales are going up and some Kickstarter campaigns have emerged to produce digitizing, developing or other analog photography equipment, but vast majority of the industry is still heavily relied on old, depreciated equipment.

This thesis decided to investigate film developing infrastructure and map the problems of it. Biggest discovery in this work was that around 50% of films are developed at home with the equipment which was developed 40 years ago. The idea was to take points of concern what people face when developing film at home and propose a solution which adapts to current infrastructure in order to support the revival of analog photography.

Proposed solution: AGO ecosystem- it consists of AGO+ web platform and AGO film processor. AGO+ is web platform collecting all the intelligence to develop film and accounting features to count and manage consumables. Ensuring simple use even for beginners and possibilities to manage bigger undertakings for lab environment.

After data is processed the outputs of AGO+ are program which is sent via Wi-Fi to the AGO processor and a chemical recipe/instruction of liquids to be prepared before the process.

Next AGO film processor is a device which is attachable to Paterson Super System 4 tanks. AGO automates agitation process, informs operator at the right time when chemical exchange is needed and measures temperature to improve development quality.

AGO transforms how film will be developed at home, it detaches the person form constant presence and giving operator pockets of free time between every chemical exchange.