I Second That Emulsion (a film thread)

Here we can chat about the non-digital world - films, formats, developing, processing, scanning, whatever.

Saucy darkroom revelations welcome.

Shall I kick things off?

I must admit, I may never have gone back to film had it not been for the following two amazing Freecycle scores about a year ago:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2364448871_01ee568834.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2297/2374962333_04fef02c44.jpg

We'd unearthed the FTb from the shed a few months prior to this but hadn't been tremendously inspired to re-enter that world. The EOS 10/41 rolls of expired slide film made it easy and led to Pam's medium-format investigations.

It's kind of a special treat. I don't take the film bodies out very often (waiting for a good day if I've got Ekta 100GX loaded or something) and I can't afford to process that often (I use a good, cheap lab in Birmingham for E6 and Jessops for C41), but the results are generally fab and require barely any further processing for web viewing (aside from deepening the blacks on the histogram - all scans seem to need this).

The darkroom at college was rampant, frankly. There was more liasoning than printing going on at times.

I still marvel at the dynamic range of good c41; I've got pictures taken with bright white clouds and deep black shadows and it captures the lot of them. But every time the faff of developing and scanning loses out to the USB card-reader. I still keep a range of Ilford in the fridge, just in case, but it mostly just taunts me these days.

I have Ilford in the fridge!

I did tiny bits of work with film at university, nearly ten years ago. I found it fiddly, but quite cool. Developing I enjoyed a bit, but I much prefer digital for convenience sake, and I can't imagine myself ever going back to film. Em fancies it, though.

Let's talk about scanning experiences, good and bad.

I borrowed Porkpie's CanoScan 4400F last night and, after a bit of a nightmare with drivers and USB cables, finally got it working. The colours are pretty wack on the negative scan and the slide scans just aren't very sharp. I know this is about the cheapest flatbed scanner on the market which can actually handle 35mm film, and there are probably calibration settings to be attended to, but I'm curious to know if there's anything that does a good job below the world of the Nikon CoolScan.

I can certainly do without waiting six minutes per frame for 2400dpi scans of 35mm slides (and dust/scratches are a nightmare) but I was tempted by Jessops' entirely reasonable £4.00 for 36-exp E6 processing/mounting (their scanning costs - cos they don't do E6 in-house - are extortionate, so wondered if I could do it myself).

So far I've been using Metro in Birmingham for E6 (£3.70 processing/mounting + £3.50 full-roll scan + P&P; 120-format is a little more). Best to leave it to the pro labs, I guess?

I had a Konica Minolta film scanner once, and while the quality was very good, scanning was a nightmare - dust/hair is the biggest problem, followed by the dismal and deadening prospect of scanning thousands of negatives/positives, 4-6 frames at a time - one roll could easily take half an hour to an hour, depending on how thorough you were being. If someone offered me the option to scan all my film for, say, a sum of $1000 - I'd be very tempted.

My Diana F+ just arrived. Now I need to locate 120 film. Any ideas? I have some in the post but... I want some NOW.

Where are you, g-kit?

Dyao - yeah, the difference between lab scans (pristine, sharp, just need a little more at the left-hand of the histogram and they're done) and my scans (dirty, colour temp all wrong, out of focus) is startling. If I wasn't scanning things I already have on a lab-sourced CD-R (just to test the 4400F), I may not have been so discouraged, but the quality gulf is kinda unignorable.

another request for scanning experts to weigh in with tips. i've just cracked open my new epson v500 which has been lying around for a while and ran the first bit of film through it. not terrible for someone who doesn't know what he's doing, but not great either: i've seen other people get pristine results from this thing though.

please don't say get the pros to do it - it's xpan film and they charge through the nose because they have to do it by hand rather than running it through the fuji minilab.

I'm back from ATP with 8 films that need processing. I filled up my memory card in the 20D halfway through the Breeders set. This is gonna be expensive...

Wish I had some tips for Joe but I'm in a similar place; is it just not focusing well? Can you adjust that in the v500?

G-kit: what sort of film? Metro Colour Lab in B'ham still the best value I've found for 120 and/or E6 (if you're after scans too).

4 rolls of 120 C41
1 roll of 35mm ilford super 400 C41
3 rolls of 35mm slide film to be xprocessed

i ended up sending them to peak imaging in sheffield on tuesday. hoping to get them back tomorrow.

is it just not focusing well? Can you adjust that in the v500?

i think the focus was OK, there's a problem with dust etc, but i should experiment with ICE settings i suppose. main problem is it doesn't seem to be consistent with colour temp at all - which is a real problem when i'm scanning a double width exposure in two parts.

guess i was just hoping someone had a magic bullet that meant i didn't have to read the manual and learn how to use this thing properly.

Fixing up colour temp should be something you can do in post fairly easily (though, having said that, I couldn't get the 4400F scans to look anything like the pro-lab versions in Lightroom - never mind the dust/scratches/focus issues, the colours were way off).

G-kit: good work! Like the 20D stuff too. Peak are very good by reputation - I should check them out again (I think I was put off by the prices last time).

Freestyle Photo has rebadged Tri-X at $2.19/36 exposures (Arista Premium 400). That's an insane price.

does this look like too much hassle to be worth it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RejaetB-g-o

It's free, so well worth the hassle.

yeah it definitely works well enough to make scans to show online

people have made dedicated setups with DSLRs dedicated to shooting negatives/slides

You can probably locate an old copy stand cheap, which should make the process even easier (camera is locked down, you'll have lights coming in at 45-degrees each way, it would either have a built in lightbox or you could use one.

yeah also for web shots, you don't even need a DSLR - a cheap digicam with good macro focus would also work

so last week i got some photos developed at boots in the one hour one but when i picked them up they had only developed half of them and i could see from the negatives that the other half were fine and i noticed as i was leaving so i turned around and said it to the manager but the guy who did photos was gone so i was like yeah fine ill come back tomorrow and i did and they were still not done and he was gona again so i had work all day the next day and i came back the day after that and i had to like argue w/ the guy for like fifteen minutes to get the diff. in price back b/w one hour and two day photos even tho really they should have maybe just given them to me for free and then in the end he gave me a voucher for free digital printing. today i dropped off a couple rolls in asda for one hour and when i went to pick them up they told me the machine had broken down and they were ringing the guy. ugh.

that sucks dude. are there mail order places in the UK

i think im just having bad luck, guy i work w/ said that partic. asda is p good and its like 5 mins by bus from me.

i was gonna splash out on a lightmeter but i took a chance on a lightmeter app for my ipod and now im only getting one or two smudgy blurs per roll instead of smudgy blurs being p much the main category of photo im getting. its good, im getting a better feel for diff type of light i think. i like it. also ordering some 1600iso

yah the iphone light meter app works really well, matches up with my light meter pretty accurately

only downside is that it doesn't work too well in darker situations

got one of these - http://farm1.static.flickr.com/51/128898468_fcbf47174c.jpg

and im liking it so far

that's a pretty classic camera - great choice

cool! yeah it's p easy to use which is my main concern at the moment

yeah, don't work so well on dark situations but i think it helps narrow things down a hell of a lot more than the ltl-3 built in one which frankly is totally suckass

also it cuts out on the need to make confusing calculations

btw also they fucked up the negatives in boots i think because there's a dark strip running along the entire negative and i dont think its light leak bc i've never head it before.

so also can i ask, is it any more difficult to develop higher iso negatives or can i just drop them off in my usual place and they do the usual thing?

if its color film just drop it off

cool i just got a big box of 1600iso!!!

my fed might be here by friday!!!

toys for me

I need to start hunting for another Canonet. The rangefinder patch in mine is so faint it's hard to use in anything less than direct sunlight.

http://www.pbase.com/anubis_photo/hong_kong_70s__80s

photos are kinda meh but I absolutely love that look of washed out yet saturated color - guessing he was scanning prints & not the actual negatives

lol got my test roll back from the fed, also had 1600iso in it which was the first time i used that and really i didnt get much back that was super great but i get it now i get it. def good for taking pictures at night/in the street. this one of a guy i work w/ made the guy at asda ask me if i had a mad expensive camera and i was like no less than £28 guy.

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00017.jpg

totes glad i went w/ the suggestion of whoever said to try out some 1600 bc my underground photos have been semi successful up until now but really you just need smthng higher than 200 right

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00047.jpg

but its great bc while i love this high speed film it also makes me realise how much i love 200 and what its good for more, like being able to open up the aperture on sunny days and like shooting into the sun, im mad into lens flare atm:

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00103.jpg

anyway taking photos is super fun here are more i got three rolls back today so im in a good mood.

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00076.jpg
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00082.jpg
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00077.jpghttp://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00089.jpg

sorry

Hey these look great! Congrats on the camera!
I love the blue bars and plants, especially. How are you metering?

mostly im guessing (whatever it would be w/ 200 plus a three stops/shutter speeds up) but sometimes i use the lightmeter app on my iphone. im trying to guess mostly, i want to get good at guessing. also thankyou!!!

i shot a load of film today and im gonna double expose it w/ flowers from the park tomorrow!

nj plax - looks like you got a great camera

Nice guessing in that case!

lovin these

what film are you using plax

the guy with the beard, the tube station and the barrier in st. pauls are all 1600iso fuji superia, the taxi, the windows, the tree and the blue fence are all Boots own brand 200iso (i have been told that this is just repackaged fuji superia btw)

really? good to know. boots always has heaps of old film sitting around

you can buy the pack of five for like £8 and its always in the 3 for 2 so it really works out at fifteen rolls for abt £17 and i think its really good film for that price

daaamn thats cheap

you can buy the pack of five for like £8 and its always in the 3 for 2 so it really works out at fifteen rolls for abt £17 and i think its really good film for that price

the slide film that's in this offer is process-paid, btw - have never done anything other than cross-process slide film before, but have recently shot & received slides for three rolls. it's fun.

kinda looking for some interesting new film to try (now the sun is coming out). anyone got any favourites? i bought a roll of ektar a while back & loved it. i like having additional variables that i can accredit/blame my variable photography on.

what type of film do you like to use?

mm, either high or low speed, really; i've kinda given up on using black and white under 400, because it's too grey. so ilford delta 3200 or fuji neopan 1600 for b/w. for colour i tend to just get some fuji thing, though have shot a bunch of agfa and stuff? kodak ektar 100 was a real highlight and was way crisper than anything i usually end up with.

was maybe going to get a roll of portra 800.

what do you like to use, dayo? i've seen a bunch of your b/w stuff & am curious.

oh & also, expired probably should've been a suffix to all of the above, the expired box being where most of mine comes from, ordinarily.

I use neopan 400, at either box speed or pushed to 1600. do you self-develop? I find delta 3200 to be the king of being too grey! neopan 1600 has been discontinued :(

I mess around with 100 speed films but I can't think of anything to shoot when I use them, they're more of a novelty factor. I've tried APX100, acros, have got 3 rolls of rollei retro 80s that I don't know what to do with. Lucky 100 gives a really old school look.

for color negatives, since I scan I find them all to be much of a muchness - it's hard to get good scans from a color neg, so I just pick up the cheapest big name color film I can find, which is fuji xtra 400 at the moment.

neopan 1600 has been discontinued :(

no shit, that's terrible. i used to think it had the edge over the ilford, pretty much. the kinda extreme, high-contrast b/w aesthetic sometimes feels sorta passé, now, but film that pretty much separates into diffused blacks and whites is still what i want a lot of the time, and gives you some freedom to just shoot wherever. kinda can't imagine how you found it too grey!, it has no midtones afaic.

i've played with some 100s pushed up a few speeds but haven't seen the results yet - that kinda camera-math is a bit beyond me, really, i don't quite know how it all works. i just take my prints to the shop, also, btw.

HP5+ was always the king of too grey for me.
tbh, I'd probably prefer that now - with any kind of scanning I'd rather have a low-contrast negative that can be worked on.

I've only shot three rolls of HP5+ but I really liked the results, it seemed very bright and crisp - I'd shoot it if neopan 400 wasn't nearly half the price.

yeah neopan 1600 had a true film speed of about 640, so when you push it to 1600 or 3200 it gets this 'film noir' look about it. neopan 400 is basically the same thing when pushed. I've still about 12 rolls of 1600 that I'm using for a project.

delta 3200 is so low-contrast it's incredible, it scans as this one big pile of grey. I think that's how they get it to push to 3200 or 6400.

I've been playing around with agitation this week, added just one more inversion per minute and I'm getting nice contrasty negatives straight out of the scanner with HC110. I like it. I'm kind of worried, because so far the majority of my negs have been developed for low contrast (for scanning) so I don't know how they'll come out in a darkroom.

You non-grey people are nuts! I often simply use Tri-X because it's common and (for me, who never shoots faster than ISO 400) fast, but I love using FP4 to get those grey grey midtones. And if it's not grey enough then I'll grey it up a bit.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5013/5564033333_fe837fd679.jpg

MIDS!

For color I stick to Ektar or Portra 160NC to stay low-contrast and low-grain. If I'm cheap I'll by Fuji Superia, but the colors in my lab scans don't look so hot then. I know that I need a scanner of my own... It's next on the list.

So who here scans negatives (or positives)? What do you use and what's your workflow?
I bought a Plustek Opticfilm because my lab scans often featured blown out highlights or clipped blacks and poor color balance. I can now control that a bit better, but my workflow is terrible and slow and I think I should be able to speed it up.
What resolution are you satisfied with, etc?

CURIOUS!

I haven't scanned in ages - my last was a Nikon Coolscan IV, IIRC, circa 2002. Back then it was just too much work keeping the negatives spot free.

Resolution wise, the Epson flatbeds get ~2400dpi and the Plustek dedicated 35mm scanners get ~3600dpi (real world, rather than the state resolutions) - you can (roughly) divide that by 300dpi to get the native enlargement (ie a medium format 2.25x2.25 negative could be printed 18x18inches from an Epson v750, under perfect scanning conditions, a 35mm negative could be enlarged 12x via the Plustek, etc.).

You can probably fudge that and go a bit larger as long as you're not doing something with a lot of fine detail.

I'd like to get back into shooting film and scanning it (and being able to scan all my old negatives and slides), but I'm about to be moving into a new place that's going to cost $300-400 more a month, so I doubt I'll be able to shoot film at all, much less buy a scanner.

I'm pretty committed to film at this point, so the scanner is my attempt to make the process cheaper (lab scans cost too much). Now my struggle is to develop a quick-ish method of working that gets whole rolls scanned in acceptable resolution. Most of the stuff only goes on the web, and I can't imagine printing larger than 12" x 8" so I suppose the resolution I get from the Plustek is fine.
I just had an opportunity to pick up the scanner for not-so-much and had visions of cheap development. After having some rolls mauled at Walgreens and a couple 1-hour spots though I've sworn off non-pro labs.

which Plustek did you get?

I own a Epson V700, that I'm gonna sell when I leave this place. it's been good to me but it's been in the shop once for service and will likely go again before I go, so I don't end up stiffing the buyer. other people on the web have mentioned quality control issues.

I really like it and all the shots on the web I have were done using it. sharpness isn't *great* but acceptable - not as good as the minolta dual scan IV which I owned a few years ago, but more than good enough for making webshots.

process wise, it's nice - it does 24 35mm frames in about ~40 minutes, so you can do a roll in about an hour, an hour and a half. 120's much quicker, the scanner only has to make 12 passes.

I find that it's great with b&w negative, kinda lousy with color negatives and slides. although from what I gather, scanning color negatives is hard no matter what you do - need to figure out the correct color balance, probably need to use Vuescan or some other professional software (I use epsonscan because it's convenient). slides just come out looking soft, it seems, though I haven't really tried fiddling with the settings for that either.

Gonna head out the door in a sec, but I'm using the Opticfilm 7600i, the one that is bundled with the full version of Silverfast. I've been getting decent color scans with it, but not *great*. I think I'm figuring out more as I go along though. It definitely takes some time spent fiddling!

yeah I had a pro lab scan some slides/negatives and then compared them with my own V700 scans - difference between night and day! OTOH they know what they're doing.

color slides/negatives, that is.

probably the best digital film workflow would be v700/750 to make a rough digital 'contact sheet', then using a plustek or other dedicated 35mm scanner to make higher quality scans. I still think the old discontinued ones like the minolta dual scan IV offer amazing performance.

here's what I'm talking about re: the difference between my epson and the pro lab. I could probably get the V700 pretty close if I wanted to fiddle, but I'm not really that invested in my color shots. *shrug*

http://i.imgur.com/0JBRA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/L71tG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ZNvjA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/IEDNE.jpg

also if you want cheap development, and you don't mind supporting the eventual corporate takeover of the world, you could try wal-mart. they outsource all of the film developing to fuji by this point, takes about a week but if you request "develop only" it can be cheap, like $1 a roll - I was never able to get them to only develop though :/

you can also try one of the C-41 DIY kits from freestyle, I've heard that C-41 isn't nearly as fiddly as it seems.

Whenever I can afford to go back to film, I'll probably stick to medium format w/ a V700/V750, farm out drum scanning in the event that I ever want to make an enormous print.

that's assuming color MF film exists at the point in time :(

I just bought two rolls of 120 fuji t64 - tungsten film from an urban outfitters type store here. lol, but I'm curious to see how it responds in daylight. might cross process a roll as well.

I certainly do not get quite the same sharpness as my lab scans anymore, and I now have problems with color noise that I am trying to solve, but I now don't lose my highs and lows at the same rate as I used to:

lab scan:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/labscan.jpg

home scan:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/homescan.jpg

Your lab scans are probably oversharpened, really - that was my experience with the Noritsu/Frontier automated scans, even at highest quality.

Oversharpened sounds right. Also too much contrast dialed in. I started asking for low contrast scans which were a little better but still sometimes featured clipped highlights. I am also stuck with a lens (Voigtlander 35mm) that is very contrasty and works better *without* adding on even more contrast on top. Thus the adventures in self-scanning.

which voigtlander 35mm do you have?

I have the Color Skopar 35mm f2.5. Mostly because it was the cheapest 35 I could buy once I picked up the Leica. It works well and all, but I'd prefer a lower contrast lens. I'm thinking of selling it and applying the $$ towards a Summaron 35mm. I think lower contrast will just be a bit more forgiving for retaining shadow detail and I like the look more. The color skopar drops off to pure black *soo* fast. I don't have the same problem with my other cameras (mostly fixed lens rangefinders with (probably) single coated lenses), or the lenses that I use on my Pentax.

look into the canon rangefinder 35mm's. the 2.5 was based on the canon design. I have a 35mm 1.8 and it's nice and low-contrast. the summaron is nice too. I picked up a canon 35mm/2 which is supposed to be more modern and high contrast, haven't run a roll through it yet.

but yeah I shot with a rollei 40mm/2.8 for a while, sooooo high contrast. sold it.

Voigtlander makes single-coating versions of some of their lenses that will be more pleasing with film (particularly B&W). They're marked SC vs MC.

yeah but they're still pretty high contrast, modern designs

I think the 35mm/40mm 1.4s come in sc and mc versions

Well, doing periodical B&H browsing yesterday I saw a 35mm f3.5 Summaron for $299 and without thinking bought it. It arrived today and is beautiful (on the outside at least!). I'll have to report back on how it looks! I know the f2.8 is the preferred version but I could not resist the immediacy of getting the thing the next day or the low price.
It is the version made for the M3 bayonet mount without goggles by the way. Meaning it focuses accurately but brings up 50mm framelines. I will have to decide whether I'd prefer to have a tech trim the lug to bring up 35mm framelines or just live with it (35mm framelines on an M2 are pretty much just the whole viewfinder anyway).

And Dayo, do you have shots with the Rollei? I used to use my dad's Rollei 35 when I was back in the Bay Area and compared to the Voigtlander lens it was *low* contrast. I had been keeping it in mind as a preferred look.

yeah, but I don't remember if I have any daylight film - the roll I know was took with the rollei was 400 pushed to 1600, so the contrast was exaggerated even more. it's supposedly the same lens design as the Rollei 35's but I think updated to modern performance standards.

congrats on the summaron! I hear that's a wonderful B&W lens.

hey photo bros, so my gf got me a canonet for my b-day + i got a couple of films developed + some of the pics in the second roll of film are all kind of blown-out in the white parts? and the thing is on the 2nd roll i was using a different type of film as well as a warming filter that i picked up.... so does a warming filter have that effect? or is it the film? or is it something else -
http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_jTfWBcejvU8/TcGqFbgKK3I/AAAAAAAAAyU/0Xax-mtGmSg/s720/84970024.JPG

http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_jTfWBcejvU8/TcGrqeQB6rI/AAAAAAAAAy0/B6MrZEVx2Tg/s720/84970019.JPG

Could well be the scans (basic developing lab scans tend to be extremely high contrast, per above), could be overexposure in the camera (old Canonet meters are a crapshoot). It doesn't look like the scene itself should have exceeded the dynamic range of color negative film, and even overexposed negative should hold some detail - so my money's on the scans.

i got prints tho, and they looked the same... they still do prints straight from negatives right? or maybe not?

Probably not. Prints are made from the quickie machine scans - been a while since optical enlargments were common.

i did not know that!

those images don't look particularly overexposed but I'm no expert with color negs

those lab scans do look pretty bad though

I don't think the lens on the canonet should be diffused like that. Could maybe be smudginess on the filter too? I'm not really sure though. Maybe see if it continues to only come up when you use the filter. Take some shots with and some without and see what happens.
By the way, so far the Summaron looks great. It's a world of difference from the Voigtlander and I really think that lens was what was bothering me about my photos lately.

thanks guys! i'll have a play around. it might be something as simple as being overexposed, i just realised that w/ those photos i was relying on the light meter but w/ the 1st roll (that turned out ok) i had just been using the sunny 16 rule.

sunny 16 is a+. and with color negs it's usually a good idea to overexposed by a stop anyhow. you can also download light meter apps for iPhone and android and they ate surprisiglu accurate

Gifts from a friend - a 1959 Ilford Sportsman II (in lovely leather case)...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2378/5694777542_7511ba676a.jpg

And a 1986 Chinon CE-4 (with 50/1.9 and Tokina 200/3.5 lenses, both of which will go on the Pentax K-1000...)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2306/5694203639_9b5d3e1a03.jpg

The Ilford in particular will be a challenge...

nice - how are the shutter speeds on the ilford?

Well, as you may be able to see, there's three: 1/25, 1/50, 1/200 (plus B). A 45mm f/2.8 lens. "Made in Western Germany". I'll give it a go...

Well, doing periodical B&H browsing yesterday I saw a 35mm f3.5 Summaron for $299 and without thinking bought it. It arrived today and is beautiful (on the outside at least!). I'll have to report back on how it looks! I know the f2.8 is the preferred version but I could not resist the immediacy of getting the thing the next day or the low price.
It is the version made for the M3 bayonet mount without goggles by the way. Meaning it focuses accurately but brings up 50mm framelines. I will have to decide whether I'd prefer to have a tech trim the lug to bring up 35mm framelines or just live with it (35mm framelines on an M2 are pretty much just the whole viewfinder anyway).

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Wednesday, May 4, 2011 6:20 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

fyi I've been doing research on the 35mm summaron and uh, sorry to break this to you but it won't focus accurately at close distances without goggles...

You sure about that? This is the first m-mount version of the lens that was manufactured sans-goggles, intended for use with an auxiliary viewfinder (focusing through the built-in viewfinder with the 50mm framelines pulled up). The goggled version came later which notoriously will not focus correctly if they are removed (and which might be more common).

That's my understanding anyway. I'll have to get back to you as I get more rolls back, but so far I haven't had any focusing issues.

hmm, maybe you're right. seems there were a lot of versions of this lens made. if I were you I'd do some close focus tests and see if anything's amiss.

I think I get back a couple of tightly and closely focused wide open photos tomorow, so I'll see what I've got, but I'm feeling optimistic! I think I have a few already that meet the criteria that are fine.
The real question is whether to leave the lens as is, or shave it to bring up 35mm framelines. I guess I'd be destroying any collector value, but it's not really a collector's lens. On the other hand it isn't that much trouble to manual trigger 35mm framelines when I *really* need them. Tough call.

tape the lever in place!

I guess an easy way to check is by looking at the minimum focus - iirc the goggle'd ones go down to .65m

Ah, this one only goes down to 1 meter.
Yeah, I'll keep then lens with the 50mm framelines and will only get it altered if I realize, after a long time, that it's absolutely necessary. I think having the 50mm lines actually assists a bit with framing anyway. Sometimes with 35mm lines it's too easy to get lazy and feel discreet by keeping the subject too close to the edge of the frame. 50mm lines with at 35mm lens keep me honest about actually pointing the camera at the intended target instead of chickening out. And I'm more likely to hold it level in situations where that's important. AND as mentioned before, the full viewfinder is basically a 35mm frameline anyway.

Focus checks out! Love the lens!

Here's a photo from my current M2/35mm Summicron/Plustek Opticfilm scanner combo. With $3 per roll for develop only, taking pictures is now cheap!

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3051/5700292739_051f4f32ee_z.jpg

Yikes! That's Summaron not Summicron. I'm not made of money.

Took a long walk yesterday from the West Village up 5th Ave. and some side streets to the Queensboro Bridge. Finished a roll in the Leica, then loaded and shot a roll in the Pentax. Lots of candid pictures, places that were new to me, people in what I thought was interesting light. Felt like I was getting close/bold etc.
Today I realized I misloaded the roll and didn't expose any film!

We've all done this right? It's crushing when it happens.

Ordered 25 rolls of Arista-branded Tri-X ($2.69/roll!) plus 5 rolls apiece of medium-format Provia 100 and 400X from Freestyle. I hadn't realized how crazy color film prices had gotten - time to start hunting for out of date film.

tri-x is for kids

:o

MIDS!

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, April 5, 2011 8:56 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark

btw this post explains so much about yr aesthetic dude, i love it

tri-x is for kids

was really agitating for this as ILP board slogan but i know it is facing down an establishment pick

TRI-X IS THE GREATEST FILM OF ALL TIME AND YOU WILL SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTHS

y'all

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tZLFn1V1zn4/TbQ263OGAqI/AAAAAAAAAdk/dvvpA89aGEU/s1600/Trix.jpg

was just kidding, co-sign one trillion percent on tri-x (i have only tried 400?, should i try others?, there are others right), i love it. i bought a roll today. it is so 'luminous'.

They used to make a Tri-X Professional in 120 and 4x5, but I think that's been completely discontinued. TX400 is the only Tri-X game in town (until Kodak goes bankrupt)
Plus-X is the old-school slow speed Kodak film.

plus-x is hard to find!

they used to make a tri-x PAN. not sure what that was about.

Tri-X Pan is the old name for Tri-X - pan just stands for panchromatic. They dropped that with one of the later formulations.

Tri-X Pro was 320 ISO instead of 400, I don't know what the other differences were, I never used it.

oh okay. i was looking at expired film on ebay (i had not done this before it is interesting) & felt like i'd seen tri-x 1000 or something, i guess it was a diff kodak film. TY. long live 400 anyway, it's everything i want.

TMZ3200, which is kind of sucky. If you need 1600 ISO, pushing Tri-X or HP5 works better IMO.

Going to buy some HP5, actually, to push to 1600 for the wedding I'm officiating Sunday. Keeps me from having to dance at the reception.

would you not use ilford delta, or neopan 1600, in that case? i think they're both nice films if you use them right, the biggest factor is that SUPER HI CONTRAST SHADOWY BW PHOTOGRAPHY is sorta played out atm. or is this if you're trying to get something comparable, midtones &c

HP5 pushed has finer grain and nicer tonality (IMO) than the Delta/TMax3200 films. I used to enjoy using that with a Holga & direct flash in the middle of mosh pits. (negatives all disappeared now, sadly)

We all knew this was coming, right?
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/eastman-kodak-files-for-bankruptcy/

Whenever there is news like this, discussion on a lot of photo forums starts getting all "ha, nothing to worry about! their film division as actually profitable! they recently unveiled new film types! I don't see film dying off anytime soon! there will be a huge market for whichever company is left! they just need to cut the fat and focus on their film division! etc. etc. etc."

I think these folks are deceiving themselves. These reassuring discussions occur so often (every time another film product is discontinued, which is very frequent!) that it's absurd.

I'm definitely a film pessimist.

I swear if the news tomorrow was that 99% of all film types were discontinued, discussion board dudes would be all "actually, this is great news! I see a robust future for film! great consolidation strategy!" Totally delusional.

i guess what i hope happens with this is what i assume - & i haven't totally been paying attention bc it's not my field - happened w/polaroid; has happened to some degree with film (partic its ~weirder~ variants) in general; has been pronounced w/vinyl; & which you sometimes see when a chocolate bar which people had fond childhood memories of is eventually retired: that there will be some kinda of resurgence in reaction to a decline. people ironically make petitions demanding production of the twist bar be resumed and redoubled, it forming such a critical part of the fabric of the nation. so i hope that in response to an increased divide between film and digital, people's investment in film will be matched by attempts to provide for people on that scale. but what's probably worrying is that film is like hi-tec shit, right? & so with stuff like kodachrome it's retired for whatever practical reason, & isn't the kinda thing that can just be knocked up by enthusiasts in basements.

i just hope you can get one of the basic, staple types of film in fifteen years, whether it's from a weird thing like the polaroid project or whatever. not to fetishise the variety and 'unknown' of film photography but i do feel like, now at least, part of shooting film is going to mean working with what's there and trying to explore & extend the possibilities of that, which maybe is different from having been able to rely on working sensibly with your preferred tools. but maybe it will be that or nothing.

appreciating the mustard-enthusiast-style window into what it's like in internet film rabbit holes, btw, i've never really checked those places

the other prob with people's nostalgia prompting a resurgence of a product from childhood thing is that a ton of people *already* think film is dead! like I can't count how many times people will say to me on the street, "wow you can still buy film?? that's crazy!"
prob just gonna have kinda expensive hobbyist black and white eventually right?

the inevitable switch to digital is actually kind of exciting for me, but it's going to be expensive (I rarely have much money for electronics).

Odds are, things will shake out over the next few years leaving a couple of options in B&W film - maybe just Ilford and one of the cheaper Foma/etc. types. Color will probably die (unless Fuji keeps it going as a labor of love), particularly if the movie industry stops buying film completely.

B&W film is supposedly fairly easy to make on an industrial scale, unlike color, so I think that's pretty safe for our lifetimes in one way or another.

/\/\/\ This. I am definitely interested in seeing ways in which film can be manufactured by an "amateur".

I am still a film guy and will still definitely shoot film as long as I can find it, even though I am now in DSLR-land (somewhat sceptically). Whether it is another 10, 5, 2 years, I plan to go all out and enjoy it.

Whenever there is news like this, discussion on a lot of photo forums starts getting all "ha, nothing to worry about! their film division as actually profitable! they recently unveiled new film types! I don't see film dying off anytime soon! there will be a huge market for whichever company is left! they just need to cut the fat and focus on their film division! etc. etc. etc."

I think these folks are deceiving themselves. These reassuring discussions occur so often (every time another film product is discontinued, which is very frequent!) that it's absurd.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Thursday, January 19, 2012 10:18 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

I'm a film optimist - I have to be! so much money invested in equipment. but here's my understanding:

-kodak's film division is profitable. kodak's bankruptcy doesn't mean the end of kodak - perhaps after restructuring they'll have a more sustainable model.
-although film divisions can be profitable, compared to the profit gained from digital or other areas of photography, the profits are minuscule. I remember reading about a breakdown of fuji's financial report (on some photography forum) where it was said that fuji's film division accounted for like, 1% of its total profit. or maybe it was less than 1%.

what are my arguments that film will live on? idk, some sense of obligation on the part of photography companies, devotion to the tradition. sigh

I feel like ilford is an example that yes, a company can be profitable and make its primary business about photography. I just wonder if film has truly bottomed yet in 2012, or if it can bottom still further. I wonder if hipsters will buy black and white film if/when color film stops being made.

I will be very sad if, in 10 years, I'm only able to shoot lomo brand black and white film in my cameras. *_*

sense of obligation on the part of photography companies, devotion to the tradition

yikes we're all screwed.
thing is I think the *marginal* profitability of, say, kodak's film division is down to motion pictures, and that is going to disappear in an instant. I also think it can't be "spun off" very easily since it depends on kodak's (the big company for which film is a minuscule interest) chemical resources etc. not easy to spin all that off.

the thing is, really, ultimately, as much as I love film, this doesn't really even register as a human tragedy or anything. just a format/medium change. I'll still be taking pictures.

I just want to end to be delayed as much as possible.

halp

Just tried rewinding the Leica, and noticed that it stopped resisting really quickly. Searched, was informed that maybe the lead had never caught appropriately, and had maybe not shot anything. Popped the bottom off, saw film, panicked, closed it up. What happened??

sometimes if my om-1 hasn't caught, i can still see a strip of film because the first few frames are still stretched between the roll & the spirally thing - so it's all set, it just wasn't turning, somehow.

hope it's okay, it's deeply crushing to me when that happens, particularly because you realise in such an insta-depressing, mechanical way :/

in the above situ i think it's that the film has curled under the spirally thing but not got tangled enough to actually spool and keep turning, btw. assuming the architecture of leicas is vaguely the same.

basically I've lost everything right

how long did you keep it open for?

1-2 secs

oh ime briefly opening it doesn't actually mean that much?, like you'll just bleach out a bunch of the few frames that are showing/get light leaks, etc. but like if the roll didn't spool then :/. after all my unspooling drama recently i started winding back one i'd carefully & meticulously loaded, cognisant of the risks, only to feel resistance after a few seconds. i can't quite bring myself to go get it printed just to find out it never spooled properly.

there's a developing place nearby I think---could they help? obv I have no darkroom

yeah depending on the light in the room, etc. i'd get it developed somewhere cheap anyway, see what comes out. no point getting too worried. try to feel neutral about the outcome and you might get a roll of interesting scars.

good attitude imo

if the rewind is really heavy in general it might be a sign that the m6 needs a CLA :(

it's not heavy, it's my brother

this is the best way to load a leica btw

http://nemeng.com/leica/000b.shtml

that's how I did it!

hmm. well it may need a CLA? or it might be really cold in duluth and the lubes may be slow because of the cold. my m4 had a really stiff rewind, I sent it in for a CLA and the guy fixed it.

The rewind isn't stiff tho is the thing

oh sorry, I completely misread what you had typed! sounds like your M is fine. and yeah, after the first few rewinds the film starts running real smooth (at least for me). I can usually feel though when it's released from the take-up spool

uhm, the worst that has ever happened to me was that the film broke on the last shot, so when I rewound, there was no resistance, and all the film stayed on the take-up spool. lost a roll *_*

oh man I wonder if that's what happened? it's fcking freezing here---the film could've gotten super brittle maybe?

so when you opened up the cam, was the film still attached to the canister?

honestly don't remember. it all happened so fast!!!

I wld probably rewind it a lot, then go into a bathroom and turn off all the lights and open it and see if it was rewound

I opened up the back on a Leica once - you'll probably get a kind of wavy pattern where light has penetrated through the three leaves of the take-up spool, just a bit.

I think whatever happened, the roll is lost so I should just open it up and do an autopsy

did you open it in broad daylight? i've salvaged rolls that I opened in daylight before

take into a store & get someone to put a bag on their head & poke around, it's fun to watch & will preserve whatever you've got as things are

so when you opened up the cam, was the film still attached to the canister?

― I am that young sis, the beacon, a yardstick (dayo), Saturday, January 21, 2012 3:52 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so i just checked this out, in the bathroom with just a sliver of light: canister and film have completely disassociated.

:( what kind of film was it?

if it was cold it could be that you wound too fast. film gets very brittle in the cold and a little caution is needed or it can snap.

fwiw the film that I had break off in the camera was kodak e100, and it was like 70 degrees outside!

Did the rewind lever slip to where the takeup spool wasn't disengaged? I had that happen once.

maybe, but i'm def thinking it was the cold. it was prob 18F at the time? maybe i can take what's out and stuff it in a sock or something? seems like its worth a shot, might get something interesting

Kodak getting out of digital, staying in film:

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2145203/kodak-phases-digital-businesses-film-alive

know your strengths

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2156493/kodak-discontinues-colour-reversal-films

:(

oh goddamn right when I'm itching to try working with chromes a bit. gotta grab some and do it now I guess.
back to the old film pessimism for me!

Is Fuji down to Provia and Velvia in E-6, or are they still making Astia?

oh damn. i have to recheck the negs but i think i shot some E100 recently and loved it, i was meaning to order some more online :/

no more Astia
schlump, if you have to check the negs, it's probably not Ektachrome!

lol

outside of kodachrome have rarely if ever shot slides. according to TOP, slides have always comprised single digit percentages of color film sales. :/

oh ha right, thanks, yes. i should look it up & find out what it was though. i took this w/it.

wow. like a stained glass window!

feels weird -I thought all the lomographers loved kodak slide films for x-processing. didn't think they were too hot on the fuji stuff.

not surprising about the rarity of slide film use. kind of a pain to use, more difficult to manufacture, more expensive to buy etc.
but the vivid and saturated colors can be a revelation. high saturation negative films don't really achieve the same effect, and it's hard to 'fake it' in the computer too.
if anything I think it's maaayyybe even easier to fake digital for chrome than it is to fake negative for chrome? exposing for the highlights with each etc.

xpost

fake digital for chrome?

lomography in not saving the film manufacture industry shocker?

salty dog photographers always said digital was like shooting chrome - because of the decreased exposure latitude, the ease with which highlights are blown. it's not strictly true - clipped highlights look like ass in digital, blown highlights look more pleasing (to me) in slides

haha. feel like hipstamatic + instagram killed lomography

I mean that I think it might be easier to take a digital picture and try to achieve the "chrome look" than it would be with negative film. The "chrome look" being the exposed for the highlights deepened shadows thing.

xpost again

ie. salty dog theory

MJ's stash at the top of the thread is looking better and better each day!

I shot some fuji 64 tungsten balanced slide film last year. now there's a film that you probably won't see on the market for long!

so i am going to drop off films today (tri-x 400), and am gonna have them scan it---any rec'd instructions i should give? or should i just see what comes out? (this was all p much 'how do i shot film' rolls, so i'm not worried that they'll turn out weird or anything)

just check on the available scanning resolutions I guess? (usually there's a low and high res option) if you feel that you consistently over- or under-exposed you could ask them to push/pull, but I'd probably just let loose and see what you get. Everyone does it differently. Some labs are def. better than others for scanning, and the price seems to vary pretty wildly.

gbx send the rolls to me

...if you want to wait three months to get them back. but hey!

actually, I'd probably just ask what their standard B&W development process is - what developer they use being p important

see the problem is that I wouldn't know how to follow up on that question

and ty for yr offer!

haha well let me know what they tell you the answer is, and then I'd tell you my ~informed opinion~ about it

"excuse me a moment I need to consult a message board"

hey it's the year two thousand and twelve, get with the times

good lord

asked to get the stuff scanned (2 rolls, 1 horrible broken roll that i pulled from the camera in my darkened bathroom and threw into a stuff sack), and they said that hi-rez scanning would be $2.50. PER FRAME.

six rolls and i've got a neg scanner of my own at that price, holy shit!

that prob means they are using a really high quality scanner like a drum scanner or a noritsu? prob overkill if you just want to get a general feel of what each neg looks like

yeah, i just asked for negs. i've got a loup and can jerry rig some way of checking em out

yeah if you have a digital camera you can make an ad hoc film scanning setup pretty easily

did you ask what developer they used?

i was too scared

oh i even just meant eyeballing em, not even scanning---most of these are going to be shit, it's just the first few rolls from the m6

$2.50 per frame is probably some kind of Nikon Coolscan setup.

Drum scans are more like $50-100/frame.

if it's drum scan it's too cheap. if it's anything else it's too expensive. $2.50/frame makes exactly no sense.
you can probably take it to just about any other place instead and get something normal (normal = probably between $12-$17 for a roll to be developed and scanned. scanning resolution and format will vary).

honestly that is really crazy. I feel like most people get scans and never see prints these days. it's pretty automated for just about any photo lab to do developing and scanning all from one machine.

$2.50 is about right for 'pro' scanning w/ TIFF files.
Noritsu/Fuji Frontier scans should be $12-15 for a roll of 36. That's ballpark for all the pro labs I've used (BWC, Precision Camera, North Coast Photo)
Saw a Imacon Precision on EBay for the price of a 5D Mark III - that would be pretty awesome, if you can keep it running.

MJ's stash at the top of the thread is looking better and better each day!

Ha! I need to do a stock check sometime. I received quite a bit of Velvia as stocking filler the Xmas before last but I've barely used that. In danger of even newly-bought film being past expiry by the time I use it, never mind the 2008 Freecycle haul upthread.

there is a maybe similar bind with getting reprints, sometimes, which is that individual prints are expensive but getting a roll done from negatives is just however much they charge for developing & printing a roll, hopefully minus processing.

1 horrible broken roll that i pulled from the camera in my darkened bathroom and threw into a stuff sack

wanna see how this came out!

yeah i'm curious too

...developing...

also somehow only recently learned about this place: mplsphotocenter.com

soooo u think it's worth 150 bucks for a six month memberships? darkroom! Free scanning!

might be a good way to learn stuff I dunno

Worth it to develop film and make contact sheets if nothing else, IMO.

would definitely be good if you had time to make use of it! do you have to supply your own paper or not?

otoh, basic equipment to develop B&W film at home: $50-100. epson v500 - $110 from amazon. ~shrug~

yeah i am intrigued by contact sheets-as-editorial-process tbh, something about the tactility

xp wait the epson is that cheap? thought it was $500 or something

huh, looks like a plustek 7600 is only 360 on ebay, which is temptingly affordable

er, amazon

If I get a place of my own when this lease is up, I think I'm going to start developing my own film at home. Too hard to time it right for drying over the tub with a roommate.

so my local cvs only had Kodak bw400cn, what is this stuff I bought

B&W film that you can drop off at the CVS (cheapest place is wal-mart actually)

gr8080 posted a p alluring set shot on 400cn in the other thread a couple of days ago:, what do you see like: 2012

i had kinda mixed results on the roll i shot, some shot in really-low-light coming out nicely & daylight stuff looking really boring

huh well whaddya know, thx dude

This was Fuji Neopan 400CN, which is their equivalent of that Kodak C-41 B&W stuff (sorry if I've posted this before):

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6150/5944030099_e958159755.jpg

so with this c41 stuff is the idea that Walmart developing/scanning will be adequate?

Well, more that it's C-41 chemistry so it can be run through the usual Fuji Minilab (or similar) machine that high-street processing stores tend to own. Exactly like colour negative film. If it wasn't C-41, you'd have to go to a "proper" lab. So, it's cheap.

yeah I guess I mean that, for the pretentious amateur (this guy), is the appeal of using c41 that you can get decent results without going to a pricier lab or DIY? or: you're going to get the same output from CVS or Walmart or the fancy pro lab, maybe? because that is definitely appealing

C-41 process is competely automated so yeah going to CVS/WAl-mart over a pro-lab would make no difference in the developing*

*well, you would probably get more fingerprints on CVS. wal-mart outsources to fuji and I've been happy with the stuff I've gotten back from wal-mart. CVS/drug stores et al probably have an in-house C-41 machine so a 16 yr old pimply faced dude is probably gonna be handling your negs afterwards.

as for scanning, not sure which would be better

Scanning varies from minilab to minilab, so I'd ask. I've heard of people getting very large files (20+ MBs) from some Walmart and CVS locations, but my Costco (using the standard Noritsu machine) supplies tiny files (800 pixels on the long end) with their scans.
Pro labs that do bulk roll scans are using similar minilab equipment, but the operators are more likely to know what they're doing (less dust, fewer scratches, less likely to have the scan be badly exposed) and you'll be guaranteed a larger file size.

(note: my Costco is just shitty in general - prints with visible dust all over them and negatives scratched to hell)

http://www.precision-camera.com/webmaster/forms/view.php?id=5

pretty good deal via Rangefinderforum for scanning from a pro place - free development, big scans for $12/roll

CVS developing + scans without prints is usually ~$3, IIRC

oh god, flashbacks to when I decided to try the local walgreens for some rolls. they had to call for a manager to determine what 'processing only' meant and whether they'd accommodate me, and when I picked em up the guy (yes pimply faced teenager) actually spilled out the cut negs on the floor and crawled around picking them up and stuffing them into the bag. bag wouldn't close over one of the strips so he folded it. none of it mattered because the chemistry was so off that the negs were unusable anyway. LESSONS.

so guys: filters??

I've never used 'em but say more

i dunno i thought that yellow/orange filters were kinda std ish for BW photography?

i've got a UV filter on my rollei sl35 that i just threw on my M6. apparently this is useful only for protecting the lens, but that's what i was after so

yeah uv filters are for lens protecting only

color filters change the tonality/contrast on B&W film. I think a lot of people prefer a yellow filter for B&W. maybe somebody else here would be more knowledgeable. caveat: I think using a filter results in a 1 stop decrease in light..

color filter, that is

not for leicas with ttl metering

or so I read

yellow makes the sky more contrasty iirc

IIRC, color filters block their color - so a green filter makes greens lighter, etc.

In B&W this increases contrast depending on the scene - yellow makes skies more dramatic and increases overall contrast, red is good for (white and Asian) skin tones, blue/green/etc. are more specialized.
I think there are levels of each color filter - light, standard, heavy - that will block different amounts of light, but I haven't used filters in years.

ansel adams was a pretty heavy user of filters. there are probably lots of websites that will show you the effects of filters. or you could probably do the same in lightroom/aperture in using the (digital) filters - run one of your color photos through it to see how different 'color' filters affect the result

hey soooo:
what happens to kodachrome, now that it can't be processed as kodachrome? is it cross-processed to any interesting/unusual effect, or is it just a write off, bleached and dulled by regular chemicals?

well this was interesting: http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?topic_id=23&msg_id=0027zU

you can process kodachrome with B&W chemicals to get B&W images, but there's this nasty chemical called 'rem jet' that can't be removed without hassle from the negs

yeah, b&w seemed to be what everyone was recommending, with a smaller fringe of photo-moonshine makers preparing to frankenstein some colour prints. interesting. from elsewhere in the expired film community, i hadn't realised agfa scala 200 was (long) expired, i like that a lot, & used to be able to get it cheaply.

I saw a Facebook link recently to someone in Australia who managed to develop Kodachrome at home. Looked like a one-off, though.

that person is probably dying of cancer right now

i think there is an ilx thread in which a few filmmakers discuss the dangers of home developing, in enclosed spaces, i found it pretty alarming

no joke I wear one of these

http://i.imgur.com/MZN2F.jpg

it's like one of those foam dome hats, but instead of having beer near your head you can easily access your vaseline and your concealer as they are stuck to your face

Got back that c41 bw film from cvs yesterday

results were...interesting. horrifically over-processed, so contrasty, highlights blown everywhere, but I might be able to salvage some stuff

hmm I dunno if c41 can be overprocessed if it was ran through a machine. might be your light meter?

do the negs just look really ... thick? in comparison to the clear sprocket hole parts

I meant digitlly processed really

o so the scanning you mean

yes :-/

Highly unlikely it's a problem with your negs. That sounds like standard bad minilab scan issues.

gbx i use that kodak bw400cn. my mom mails it to me.

this is what it looks like corner store scan untouched

ex 1
ex 2

I'll put up some samples from my rolls later today.

Rumor is that Ultramax 400 (Kodak's current cheapie) is consumer-grade Portra. Should be very nice at 200, I need to visit a Wal-mart soon.

consumer-grade? what's that mean?

where's the rumor from? I use ultra max 400 from time to time and don't see much similarity.
I'm guessing consumer grade means same chemistry or something, but lower quality control/no refrigeration etc.?

in the old days it was assumed that a lot pro and consumer grade films were similar or identical formulations but pro had higher quality control and more stringent expiration dates
could all be BS, but Ultramax does seem to look more muted than Gold 400 did

I'd like to reassure you that I am manically rescanning ultramax 400 negatives with my portra setting now. will report on results.

got 8 rolls of 24-exposure Superia 400 @ Wal-mart.
I've got to find a local place that develops cheap without shitting all over the negatives, paying mail-order prices for 24-exposure rolls would eat up the savings

wal-mart! they subcontract it out to fuji, at least on the east coast.

got back a few rolls of film, not feeling any of it

Starting to think that I should sell my stores of traditional B&W and shoot all C-41. I'm not feeling gung-ho about developing myself, sounds like Wal-Mart is good processing+cheap, I'm probably never setting foot in a darkroom again and I can convert to B&W when I want to...

hating an entire 'roll' is less depressing with digital

haha I feel the opposite

I'm wired for sunk costs. Since I already own the camera, it doesn't feel like it cost me anything when a bunch of shots don't work out. Whereas (with the current system) I've got a $2.50 roll of Arista 400 Premium, plus $10 developing/shipping.
Totally irrational looking at the overall cost, I know.

kinda sad that it's going to take at least a week to get back my first rolls from the Pentax 645N. For some reason (maybe the big THWACK mirror sound and motor drive combined) it's the most fun camera I've ever owned.

moving into an apartment with a bathroom by myself, maybe I'll wait and develop my own B&W for a while and see if the extra control bucks me up

haha - I've mentioned before how I view film costs like groceries or something. it's healthier for my mind that way.

my experience with digital used to be - oh man, it looks totally great when I chimp at it - or when I chimp, I take 500 photos of a scene and chimp and think they all look great - and when I go home and put them on the computer, none of them look that great and I realized that I probably missed the angle that I really wanted or maybe there was some imperceptible motion blur that I couldn't see on the camera screen.

highly recommended to all: Polaroid Pro-Pack camera (packfilm camera that looks like a plastic version of an old press camera, complete with big flashgun) and Fuji FP-100C and FP-3000B. I paid $25 apiece for two and keep one kind of film in each.

Let my friend's daughters (~5 and 8) play with the 100C and they thought Polaroid peel-apart film was magic. I wish I had the portraits they took of each other, but they took them back to Louisiana to show their friends.

my experience with digital used to be - oh man, it looks totally great when I chimp at it - or when I chimp, I take 500 photos of a scene and chimp and think they all look great - and when I go home and put them on the computer, none of them look that great and I realized that I probably missed the angle that I really wanted or maybe there was some imperceptible motion blur that I couldn't see on the camera screen.

― dayo, Thursday, 19 April 2012 02:26 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think when i first read that eggleston thing about just taking one shot of something, because it's easier/prevents confusion, it seemed like some sort of zen master challenge, but it's way more practical than that, & makes a lot of sense. getting a bad roll back makes me want to hang up my camera or go digital or stop goofing around with newly invented theories about what will make photos good, but that's fortunately a different impulse from the feeling-compelled-to-take-a-camera-out-&-photograph-stuff, so.

also i found a new (old) camera store in my town. i squinted through the window & saw that they sold extra colour film, which I like, & so maybe also sell a bunch of other stuff (like portra) that I can't get here. excited. some inevitable new old musky camera guy to tolerate my questions.

got film back from Wal-Mart:
e-6 120 - $5/roll, came back in plastic rolled inside of a tube
c-41 120 - $1/roll!!!!!, came back cut inside of plastic
c-41 35mm - guess they couldn't do dev only, $10 for developing and 4x6 prints, negs are loose in the paper envelope

makes me want to shoot a lot more medium format color neg

yeah I've tried to write DEVELOP ONLY on 35mm rolls I get developed at wal-mart, they just ignore it (on one, they put the price sticker over my instructions)

http://news.doddleme.com/news-room/and-so-it-begins-20th-century-fox-to-end-film-distribution/

you gotta think that this was a big source of revenue for film copmanies. yuk

hey so look at this:

http://varial-artworks.com/projects/view/?page=12

finding it v useful - like i am making mental notes to buy some Ilford PAN 400 to push to 800 - but pretty beguiling at the same time

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/scannnnnn1.jpg
http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/scannnnnn2.jpg

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/scannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnner333.jpg

sorry. i just thought it looked cool.

looks cool

I really like those.

Stuck some Ekta 100 in to be developed last week - first film in ages. I'd been shooting for a few days with my EOS 10 because my 40D was in for repair (actually, I baulked at the cost of getting the whole shutter release replaced and just got them to clean it; in the process they put the superimpose screen back in wrong, and I needed to make another trip to Sendean to get it tweaked... and the free tweak mostly fixed my shutter problem...). On the way from Sendean to Jessops I took a photo of an apple core in a bus shelter (just autofocus testing really) and got verbally abused for five minutes by two meatheads! They threw the apple at me! I don't even do street photography FFS!

Anyway, midway through a roll of Neopan 400 B&W now, though I somehow failed to shoot any film with my hired 85L over the weekend (wedding shoot, borrowed 5D2 and 40D). Did take some EOS 10 shots with a borrowed 17-40L though. Wiiiiiide.

what in god's name was the reason the two guys gave for being upset?? I can't even begin to comprehend.

by the way, after a Miami trip, I dropped off 19 (!) rolls of film this morning. and the black and white rolls are still in my fridge.

"Ain't half some stupid c***s in the world, eh? Who takes a picture of a fackin' apple? Fackin' c***." Etc etc, a few feet behind me as I walked down New Oxford Street. I didn't react, but waited until they passed me at Bloomsbury St and glared witheringly at them as they turned back to me. The more stupid looking of the two actually looked confused. Like, "why didn't you try to fight me?" Marvellous, eh? And this is why I try not to just flagrantly wave an SLR around in central London. I rather hoped it was some extended Derek'n'Clive tribute but, nah, they were for real.

I'm so glad I hardly ever get any reactions at all. That's the kind of thing that would really shake me up. I could count the number of people who've ever acted even remotely upset with me on one hand.

A work colleague has just put 3 x 120 E6 rolls in for processing / hi-res scanning at Snappy Snaps. Total? £72. SEVENTY-TWO QUID. £14 for processing each roll, £10 each for the 15MB scans. He used to work at Jessops and refuses to use them for film processing as a result (they wouldn't be much cheaper).

I sent him a link to the place in Birmingham I used to use (unless they failed to do a scan I'd paid for and didn't respond to emails). Through them the same job would've been £31.70.

by the way, after a Miami trip, I dropped off 19 (!) rolls of film this morning. and the black and white rolls are still in my fridge.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, 29 May 2012 13:50 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

going places is just too much, i went to paris for a few days a while ago & was shooting a couple of rolls a day. this time of year is photo-happy anyway. i can't imagine going to pick up nineteen rolls of film though! what a great subsequent evening.

what was the place in birmingham, out of curiosity, Michael? i miss living somewhere that doesn't have a good lab (there was a great place in manchester called something like colorprint i used to go to, where they really knew their shit). jessopps lost a roll of my film, once, so i can't go there, but if not i'd probably not be so picky about dropping off somewhere.

man I got a lil overwhelmed with a mere four rolls from montana, I still haven't gone into them for any work aside from a minor crop or two

http://www.metrocolourlab.com/

Really not a very good website - you basically have to load some of the printable order forms to found out what some of the prices are and even then they're slightly contradictory.

Oh, the Jessops horror stories my work pal tells me. The retired couple who came back from a month in Hawaii with 25 rolls of E6 and 19 of them were then basically destroyed by the off-site processing (they can only do C41 in-store) - that was a good conversation for him to have.

oh man. yeah. i think i hesitated before ever mailing any film; to shoot some & then wrap it up and just leave it to the chance of royal mail just felt insane. & to take your film to somewhere that might not cherish it & treat it under the photographic oath of neurotic hypervigilant care unnerves me. dropping stuff off at a lab i try to check the negatives to see that they were all even printed, which doesn't always happen on account of scanners, &c. but going somewhere nice is reassuring.

on another note, however, 35mm film is 3 for 2 at jessops, at the moment. i'm still fussing around about what film to use & trying to find solutions to getting hold of something nice, whether it's expired or bought in bulk or whatever. & you can go buy a few, varied rolls of ilford B&W for £4 a roll, so it works for something.

how many of you have like a dedicated film fridge?

Nah, it's all in there with the cheese and beer and what-have-you.

how many of you have like a dedicated film fridge?

― catbus otm (gbx), Friday, 1 June 2012 18:09 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't refrigerate my films. i think because i always shared a fridge that i imagined could end up in buttery films. i should probably start refrigerating them?

I only refrigerate the stuff that's meant to be stored below 10C - yr E6 stuff and so on.

I've taken to putting my film in the fridge, though very little of it is particularly "special", mostly just cheap stuff. I got a big plastic tub with clip lid to store it in to minimise the chance of mishap, though! (http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaellambert/7218261068/)

I've been using Asda for dev-only processing as it's cheap and the opening hours are convenient for me, otherwise my local option is Jessops. I have access to a darkroom for B+W through my girlfriend, will be attempting to develop my first ever roll tonight! Have previously done a couple of prints.

I pop it in the fridge, because, why not? And sometimes I've got a lot of film sitting around, and we keep the apartment mostly un-airconditioned.
good luck on the the black and white development, btw!

yeah good goin, michael! i'm thinking about starting developing B&W too, would love to know what your learning curve's like. my friend - who i think possibly used to print colour phots, so this is a whole other thing - was talking about how much money she'd spend on equipment so that she could keep playing with an image, keep printing variations. but i still wanna do it.

will maybe put all of my slide &c film in the fridge. thanks ILP.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7245/7331389542_28b769ae53_z.jpg

A fairly nondescript image from the roll I developed, pleased it actually worked - was quite exciting taking the film out and seeing the images on the negative. Happy that the process is pretty straightforward, I think sometimes that reading about a practical process instead of trying it makes things seem more complicated.

On a tangent, Poundland in the UK are now selling Agfa Vista Plus 200, apparently re-branded Fuji. Picked up half a dozen rolls today, will see how I get on. Off to put them in the fridge...

On a tangent, Poundland in the UK are now selling Agfa Vista Plus 200, apparently re-branded Fuji. Picked up half a dozen rolls today, will see how I get on. Off to put them in the fridge...

ty so much for this!
& your phot's nice. geometric. photographic negatives are so beautiful. i don't routinely handle them - like they're always in a sheet or whatever, & sometimes i take them out and it's a real moment.

Hopefully on topic, I created a group on Flickr for live music/gigs shot using film:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/livemusiconfilm/

Ok, Jessops, you don't get any more of my Ektachrome 100...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7077/7163023109_da1f77db1a_z.jpg

Had to crush the blacks on the JPG to get any kind of contrast but it just looks like a bad processing job to me. Yeah, it's well past expiry, but I've not seen such results with expired fine-grain slide film before. It looks like ISO 1600. The colour shifts may well be down to the chemicals going off.

Ok, the light is completely different here (and Lulu is two years younger!) but this is Ekta 100, decently processed, I think:

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3645/3599652131_9350eb0e15_z.jpg%3Fzz%3D1

Hmm, is that not showing up?

Trying again:
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3645/3599652131_9350eb0e15_z.jpg%3Fzz%3D1

Oh, forget it.

getting decent development of chromes is a huge pain. maybe it was once easier, but hardly anyone does it anymore, with most places mailing out to one of a few local labs. I messed around with some ektachrome and provia recently, and it turned out not to be worth it for the added cost, and the lousy looking results. I think the slides themselves actually looked pretty ok, but the scans were horrible. like absolutely bonkers atrocious, with bizarre cropping, completely out of focus, blown out everywhere. never seen anything worse. and the scans I got from duane's weren't great either. aaaand the scans that I can make at home aren't great either (scanning positives is a whole 'nother matter from scanning negatives). there's probably some place in nyc that will do a good job, but I don't care to spend the time/money trying to find it.
so I opt out.

plus developing/scanning costs a total of $20! crazy. a roll of negatives, from purchasing the film to taking home the developed roll costs me under $6.

Wal-mart is the best option for E-6 (as noted by Dayo above), everything is run through Fuji or Dwayne's lab and comes back for $5-6. They have a scanning service too, I think.

have a couple of rolls of ektar 100 to run through... is it usually p.good?

ektar is real nice. take pictures of some red stuff.

dumb q that i could google but you guys know better: what is the best way to buy film in bulk? the BW stuff i've been getting has been from my local CVS, but lately they haven't had it reliably, and the substantially-closer of the last two camera/film stores in mpls closed up shop a while ago.

also my one and only photog buddy (and an actual ~pro~, who has the most insanely charmed existence of anyone i know) is planning on setting up one of his rooms in his new apartment as a developing (but not printing) space, and said I could use it anytime. he also has a nice flatbed scanner, but given the time-consuming nature of scanning (right?) i'd rather do it at home.

plus all yr talk about shitty scans is making me wonder how different all my film pics would look with better scanning (they're all low-rez, for starters, none larger than 1900px in any dimension i think, which is basically half what my gf1 (languishing in the glove box of my car) gets. like what's the point of lugging around m lenses if you can't pull the detail, amirite

*haven't had it reliably AND never have more than two in stock

-BHPhoto or freestylephoto.biz, I have started using Kentmere 400, which apparently is Ilford's low-cost version of HP5. you can also trawl craigslist, or eBay for expired film. if you're really ~serious~, you can buy film in 100 foot reels and load it yourself with a bulkloader. you save about 25-30 cents a roll with this method iirc. some guy near me is selling a bunch of bulk film, I am thinking about biting...probably more of a hassle than anything tbh.

-your negs may very well look much better with better scans

unfortunately they only have the 24 exposure version, but adorama carries fuji superia 400 at $1.79 a roll. that's pretty much as cheap as it ever gets: http://www.adorama.com/FJCHSP24.html
B&H has the 36 exposure version for $3.19.

Kodak gold 400 is under 3 a roll iirc at bhphoto

awesome dudes, thanks

q: can superia be developed at any old place? walmart, cvs, etc?

totally. completely normal stuff.

I think I've mentioned before too, for a cheapo consumer film, it's surprisingly fine grained. best if over-exposed by a stop.

soooo shoot it at 200, then?

yeah, I always set it at least a stop over, so for an auto-exposing camera, I'd rate it at 200. when walking around, I'll shoot in daylight at 1/250 at f11, so even two stops then. but one stop over and you can't go wrong.

you really can't 'blow out' highlights in negatives the same as in slides or digital. the lab you use might blow out highlights in the scan, but if you were to rescan yourself you'd probably find they were still there all along.
I had an example from a while back when I first got my scanner of a lab scan where the sky and many highlights were pure white, but when I rescanned at home, I found plenty of blue with clouds and all still there.

maybe a dumb q, but: if u set the film speed to 200, and shoot in daylight at f11 + 1/250, isn't that three stops over?

400 --> 200
f16 --> f11
1/500 --> 1/250

? this stuff is confusing :-?

right, here it is.
lab scan:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/labscan.jpg

home scan:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/homescan.jpg

and even still, I'd get more detail from the home scan today, since I know what I'm doing a little better (you can still see blown highlights on the house in the background, which I would know how to avoid now).

you only need to either open up the aperture or slow the shutter speed, not both, to move one stop from 400 to 200

f11 at 250 would be the 100 ISO setting since you opened up two stops

xpost: if you're setting the speed and f-stop manually, then it doesn't matter how you've rated the film. so for sunlight the rule usually is (for 400 speed film) 1/500 at f/16. slow down a stop to 1/250 and open up a stop to f/11 and that's two stops total.
so in your equation the 400 --> 200 step only makes a difference if the camera is calculating exposure. but if you switch over to manual it doesn't affect anything.

my head hurts

per sunny 16, metering 400 film in daylight would give f16 + 1/500. setting the film speed to 200 would make that same meter give f16 + 1/250. one stop. f11, two stops.

ok i get it now, duh

I just
think about everything in stops. increase a stop = double the light. decrease a stop = half the light.

the good news is that film is forgiving. err on the side of overexposure and everything will be cool. just not with slides!!!

I started shooting my B&W film at 200, then developing at -20% time from 400. oh my god! amazing.

negative scans or it didn't happen

& what was the box speed of the film?

negative scans or it didn't happen

haha board motto

hi dere

http://distilleryimage3.s3.amazonaws.com/cc4a3632b5ba11e1a39b1231381b7ba1_7.jpg

I have a similar bag I just purchased! adorama is the best

& what was the box speed of the film?

― blossom smulch (schlump), Wednesday, June 13, 2012 7:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

400!

remember talking about blowing highlights on neg film earlier, the latest 'series' on bremser explores that

http://bremser.tumblr.com/

looks nice to me, idk

I bought a 10 pack of Fomapan 400 off eBay recently (35mm B+W), was wondering if anyone else had any experience of it? I'd read some mixed/negative things about it online, and I feel I'm struggling to get the best out of it. Unfortunately there's a lot of variables in the chain - my inexperience of shooting b+w, the fact that I've developed both rolls I've shot myself (still a novice at this) and then whether or not I could have done better at the scanning stage. It's grainy, but so far also lifeless, like a photocopy. I'd be delighted to see significantly better efforts with it from any of you guys!

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7109/7443680256_46cc7c782e_c.jpg

never shot it - eastern european film, right?

I shot some efke, once - iirc, for those soft eastern european films, don't use a stopbath, use an old school developer like rodinal or d-76, be very careful in handling

Hi, thanks. It is indeed Eastern European. I'm using Ilfosol 3 at the moment, might get some D-76 and give that a go.

i just want like a thousand rolls of extra color, & some kind of terrible bumbag/holster allowing me to never be without some

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/08/kodak-to-sell-film-and-paper-business.html

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/.a/6a00df351e888f8834017c3170c76a970b-800wi

^ my heart

just arrived: plustek 7400

we'll see about this

scanning is hard?

esp when g-d cvs cuts your negatives MID FRAME

srsly these things have been butchered, prob lost 30% of each roll

aw :/
i have never tried piecing together two distinct anythings in photoshop, but i don't suppose that's an option? at least so you have something.

i am gonna play w/a negative scanner this week, i've never tried before.

also how do I shot sharpness and noise reduction? these things are as grainy (digital) as all get out

I don't apply any sharpening at all when scanning. and then I do just a little color noise reduction.
before downsizing and uploading, if anything, I do a little *unsharpening*

is b/w scanning easier?

it's easier because you don't have to worry about color balance issues, but I think the plustek handles color negs better maybe?
are you using silverfast?

sorta: the version the scanner shipped with isn't compatible with 10.8, so i'm using a demo of the latest version (with its stupid watermarking...good for learning, though)

if it's the full version (demo or not), I find it very helpful to use it in "expert mode," which gives you greater freedom to scan beyond the light and dark values that the automatic mode would suggest.
it's a little hard to explain, but expert mode brings up a series of levels (red, blue, and green channels) with sliders to set the range that is scanned. I bring up a film profile (negafix) suitable to whichever film I'm scanning, set those slider values for the whole roll and generally leave them alone, and then can scan an entire roll without doing any cropping (if you try to scan uncropped negatives when you aren't in expert mode, the auto adjustments are fooled by the unexposed space around the picture).
even still I end up with scans that are tinted kinda off a lot of the time, but this process gets me close.

I also find that a lot of the included "negafixes" (those profiles for different films) are sorta off. some have a magenta tint, etc. so I've ended up making duplications of them and adjusting them bit by bit until I finally end up with some profiles that *generally* work pretty well for me.
silverfast is honestly sort of a total pain, but as far as I can figure it's still pretty much the best option. I have vuescan too, but can't get it to give me anything other than garbage. it does really weird stuff with clipping highlights and producing a greenish cast on everything.

too-grey black & white photography is maybe my least favourite thing to look at in the whole world

what's too gray?

kinda "washed out"? I'm reluctant to posit that hardcore-technical standard, about pictures needing to contain absolute blacks & whites. but there are spectrums of grey that almost depress me. a bleariness, a quality of being unlit, my exposure skills having failed to make a dark area dark. it's the thing i remember about when i started taking b&w photos when i was young.

i got a roll of acros back recently, which i'd asked the developer to push a stop, & the outside stuff is okay. but the indoor stuff has this greyness. ex. just comparing it to other b&w stuff (ex) that's comparatively 'spectral', the sort of flatter, muted, lighter i-guess-failed b&w stuff i get occasionally bums me out. i really like thinking about the abstraction involved in shooting in B&W, & its like this grey stuff is evidence of some purgatory between representational colour & abstract B&W, somehow carrying this sad unatmospheric realness of colour across into monochrome.

I gotcha. Kind of a squeezed dynamic range, which in this case looks like it's the result of underexposure.
As I mention over and over I love grays and mids, but that example is pretty unsatisfying to me too. I think too-gray can look good sometimes though, like in this Robert Adams: http://artgallery.yale.edu/adams/slide.php?id=9069&s=105281 which is very gray and has no true black or white point, but still holds a lot of detail.
I think it's an exposure issue. That room was probably darker than you thought!

ha. yeah sure. that adams shot is a really persuasive illustration, also for uniform, undifferentiated grey space serving a function (i just got some slides scanned, too, & the blank skies are a lil frustrating). the other example i included above was from eating dinner at some friends' place, which wasn't so light, using hp5, pushed a stop, & everything came out really nicely, so i think i maybe just got a little comfortable with my recipe for atmospheric indoor b&w shots. i am definitely pro-midtones but more in a context where they're like visibly the middle of a spectrum.

does anyone here have strong feelings either way about portra (i guess outside of "it's expensive")? i think because the box has a lilac streak on it i want to like it, but i can't remember getting anything good out of the roll i tried, & flickring around none of the tones are v exciting to me. i am going through a nice, gratifying stage of using super-cheap agfa vista film at the moment, & getting a lot out of it, & portra was going to be the occasional thing i bought myself to maybe have loaded now it's getting darker. but it all just looks super boring, whether pushed or w/e. i've been looking at the 800, & afaik 800 speed colour film is generally not so exciting, but i'd be interested if anyone has portra smarts.

portra can look nice but it's not worth the money imo. I stick with the cheap stuff, and especially swear by fuji superia 400 (most of my color photos)

I feel like people who buy a lot of portra (and other nice pricey films) have their priorities out of whack

or they're wedding photographers

i have probably changed my mind about this twice, & argued w/you about it once, but yeah i am off superia at the moment. i think you're right about it having the potential to be really nice if well used (& yr examples always corroborate this; i actually just checked & was knocked out by yr recent IHKH shit) but i - as a lazy or to be more generous 'quick' photographer - don't usually expose well enough to get the best out of it, & it has a kind of drab flat muted quality when i do stuff wrong. also i am feeling the critique of its skin tones. for cheap colour film i go for agfa 200, which is grainy and/but nice (also nice pushed); & for nice colour film i'd go for ektar, which is so nice i think it's worth the extra couple of bucks. like it's so nice.

portra idk i think it's just 'yellow and lilac box' sending signals to my brain about how nice it's going to turn out. it looks like it works p well in low light, &c, but it is not grabbing me.

xp ha. yeah. also people who take lots of soft focus shots of individual shot glasses at bars. guys this is a shitty photograph stop doing it.

well I couldn't say anything about agfa anything since it's not really common here. at least not that I've seen.
and I think I know what you're talking about with the drab look. I had a lot of disappointing superia shots in the past, but I found it really depended on the lab I used to do the scans. once I went on home scanning it was all cool. now I've got my technique down and am pretty good with that film! and it really can be pretty low grain too, if that's your thing.

and ektar is nice, but kind of haaard for me to scan. for some reason. plus I'm really used to having 400 speed film in my camera, and can't get the shutter speed/aperture combos I like with slower films.

i think i like the way portra can look super saturated and juicy!

the first time i bought it was because it didn't have a price on it and when the cashier rang up the total, i decided it must be worth it.

the second time i bought it, the roll of portra in the pearl river on the other thread, it was to impress a girl while shopping at leo's on granville in vancouver. and it did hurt to fuck it up (overexposed and somehow wildly underexposed for two of the 12 shots), considering the cost.

I do think portra has a bit more tolerance for over/underexposure, so that's a plus. I've just found that the advantage it gives doesn't seem proportional to the increased cost.

fuji superia, at under $3 a roll:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8177/8045008886_e09a90b2c7_z.jpg

i heard really good things in the past about agfa, generally, that their film was really good to cross-process (idk which stock exactly, though i know the vista 200 isn't only processable in c-41), but could never really find any, & then a while ago it was for sale in pound-shops in the UK, so i had a bunch. their (discontinued) B&W scala film is the bomb, also, if you ever see any expired kicking around.

kinda comforted to know you had some difficulties w/superia also; i think i'm maybe thinking about when i've used it quickly, or in motion? i think the stuff it worked best on for me was for the well-lit, outdoor, taking-photos-of-stuff-on-the-ground shots i take. it's interesting you mentioning it enabling the aperture/shutter speed combos you prefer - i don't really think that way but it's v true, & having 400 speed b&w film (especially pushed to 800) feels very freeing to me, like i'm pretty casual about shooting anything without too much fussing. low grain isn't super exciting to me, but, since we are arguing, if it is a plus it is super-pronounced w/ektar (check the threads, here). i am scanning a roll of ektar while typing this & it really knocks me out, the colours are just so pretty and measured & - & i guess this is a grain thing - pure & bold.

re: portra idk i just haven't seen it looking saturated & juicy. someone on a forum mentioned a street photographer who shoots the 400 @ 1600, which was kinda zingy. actually this guy has it pretty nice. but i feel like it's way more subdued whenever i see it, like its tonal detail comes at the expense of richness or something. gonna wait til i need to impress someone before i pick some up.

oh without a doubt ektar is super low-grain. the king of smoothness. and I kinda like it and it's not even really that expensive.
I just always have to remind myself that I will be taking pictures in a different way than I normally do.

switching up is really fun for me. i am going to adorama at the end of the month, to load up on stock, & i am just gonna get a little of everything. using the bunch of agfa i had i was pretty much varying something every time - pushing it one or two stops or shooting at night/shooting in the day, &c.

were you getting the agfa at adorama?

a nice sounding question

isn't it. but nuh-uh. i was getting it at poundland. they were selling colorplus & vista. i am going to try routinely hitting dollar stores here to see if any of them do that kinda thing.

but re: adorama i just can't believe how cheap it is, like tri-x is a few bucks or whatever (maybe pre-tax, i forget). so i'm gonna buy a whole bunch.

btw the hivemind of flickr discussion boards mentions, re: agfa 200, "It's Fuji C200 by another name", which who knows but there we go

also (sorry i am just in a film rabbit hole online, now) apparently all of kodak's extra color slide film has been discontinued. it is maybe my fav. so sad.

so p3200 is gone, I have a few rolls in the freezer, have never really had an occasion to shoot it tho

also kentmere 400 has been out of stock for months

kentmere's the cheap kinda-ilford thing, right?
3200 speed b&w is a slightly less harrowing discontinuation to me, because there are a couple of other really nice alternatives. though i've never used any & if it's as singular as tri-x then it sucks bad.

end times.

am going to continue to use this thread as a liveblog of my inner monologue; i feel like this wouldn't have real authentic Photography Internet Forum credentials if a guy wasn't dryly, methodically chronicling his process with supporting examples demonstrating grain textures:

i was looking around some more, re: portra, & the few things i've found that i really like the look of seem to all be things that were shot w/portra 400, rated at 800 or higher but not pushed (a bunch of examples). quite often when i shoot slide film i feel like it's best at the very limit of its latitude, the edge of its range or w/e, like shooting it with just enough light for it to work yields the best stuff. i'm kinda nervous about basically underexposing & not treating a whole roll of film, though, so. maybe even nicer still is the guy who's shooting 800 at 400, which i can't even do the math for. i guess it's a flexible film but i feel like i am gonna overexposed and somehow wildly underexposed for two of the 12 shots. gonna go experiment.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/10/how-to-shoot-ilford-xp2-super.html

probably applies to bw400cn as well

thanks for that, looking forward to reading
i almost kinda like the leeway cn-41 BW film gives you, in getting the film back & being able to blame it for not being as perfect as it could be were it the real thing

i was looking around some more, re: portra, & the few things i've found that i really like the look of seem to all be things that were shot w/portra 400, rated at 800 or higher but not pushed (a bunch of examples). quite often when i shoot slide film i feel like it's best at the very limit of its latitude, the edge of its range or w/e, like shooting it with just enough light for it to work yields the best stuff. i'm kinda nervous about basically underexposing & not treating a whole roll of film, though, so. maybe even nicer still is the guy who's shooting 800 at 400, which i can't even do the math for. i guess it's a flexible film but i feel like i am gonna overexposed and somehow wildly underexposed for two of the 12 shots. gonna go experiment.

i thought about all of this stuff as soon as i loaded the film i bought & felt so goofy; it's like whenever i am shooting black & white when it's bright out: i feel like i would have to do a lot wrong to screw it up. over- or under-exposing 800 speed film a stop in either direction doesn't seem so dramatic, but, fwiw, & w/the confusing caveat that obv some of this is indoors & some outdoors:

800 rated at 400: 1, 2
800 rated at 1600: 1, 2

the science in the c-41 B&W article is really illuminating, btw: knowing about how grain sorta 'accumulates' at the other end of the spectrum from trad B&W is really interesting.

http://i.imgur.com/FqsKp.png

uh oh

i know that bluish cast is fucked

I got super bummed out because I thought I had lost a roll of film because I only had 9 rolls of arista shot instead of 10, and I always shoot in multiples of 5 rolls, but then I ralized I traded a roll for agfa! so all is well

got my agfa back from the "lost batch" last weekend, and just uploaded a photo from it:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8197/8227682489_268c9bd9b7_c.jpg

I'm going to shoot more film in 2013, particular medium format. I had such a reaction to this shot on Facebook recently, especially from my film-toting friends, that I should dust the Bronica off and start working through the rolls of 120...

(This is from April 2011; Bronica SQ-A, Zenzanon-S 150mm f/3.5, Fuji Provia 400F)

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6135/6012022920_396ca3a884_z.jpg

(Weirdly-framed light leak and all).

(It's just occurred to me that the Provia 400F was depicted in my original post on this thread! Part of my free haul of expired film).

I'm getting frustrated with my terrible film developing technique, but still tempted to get a proper medium format camera (i have a Holga).

i am still thinking about a membership to the mpls photo center, but i kinda just want these 20+ rolls developed and developed NOW

are they color or B+W

bout 50/50

also i lied, it's only about 16 rolls

let me develop your films

gonna give a shoutout also to my hometown comp http://www.philadelphiaphotographics.com/

they do a really professional job and they take mail order. think returnin shipping is $9 but if it's spread out over so many rolls shouldn't make that much of a diff

color is all superia (except for some weird old agfa 200 thing that i extracted from my SL35 and must be 10+ yrs old?), BW is a mix of stuff---ilford, tri-x, kentmere

i also need to get organized, and start putting these negs in a binder or something---i've got several rolls i haven't scanned/looked at, and i think they're likely to be lost to my desk's horrible clutter if i don't act soon

trying not to think about organising negs. feel like i'll just wait til i have like a hundred swirled plastic coils of film & then just turn them into some kind of artistic commentary on media redundancy.

i just revived this grousy old thread How has getting photos developed become such a racket? but maybe it's better suited to ILP really - - - in NYC, rolling my eyes at prices and terrible service/confusion from the places I've called so far. How would YOU go about clearing the decks of around 90 rolls of color 35mm stuff? (Short of setting them on fire.) Realistically, what am I looking at $-wise to get them all develop+scanned (in non-bullshit quality) from a place (local, mail order, road trip, pony express) that I can have some confidence isn't going to feed my film to their dog?

correction, 88 rolls of film. I wonder what all of this stuff is. 47 are on Kodak Gold, 31 on Fuji, 10 on Kodacolor. Do these correspond to different trips I was on, or was I buying emergency stock-up film while traveling? I actually have a large-ish digital backlog to deal with before I even practically should be worrying about this, but the Christmas present mystery factor is just so alluring. What treasures there might be in these rolls!

gonna give a shoutout also to my hometown comp http://www.philadelphiaphotographics.com/

they do a really professional job and they take mail order. think returnin shipping is $9 but if it's spread out over so many rolls shouldn't make that much of a diff

― 乒乓, Saturday, February 16, 2013 12:40 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

Hmmmmm, price is a little steep but I believe you that they do good work...what's the size/resolution of the scans? Some places really seem to hem and haw around this and then it boils down to 4x6 at 300dpi which is fine as far as it goes, I guess.

These people http://photoplaceonline.com/film-developing.html claim to do 8x12 300dpi for $10 a roll - and knock 20% off bulk orders which could be a huge deal. But I haven't been able to find much in the way of reviews, and obviously "8x12 300 dpi" means nothing if they're using, like, a flatbed scanner or something.

I never got anything scanned by them, but the processing is 1st rate

you should call htem and ask about their scanning equipment

I've been to the physical location and they've def got some pro equipment at least for printing

people on RFF have used this (forum sponsor) before and have reported on the results: http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=98700

Oh nice! Those are nice looking samples in that thread. Bookmarked! Thanks.

kentmere 400 is nice

I've been using Lucky 100, it's ok. Only developed one roll so far, survived being pushed a couple of stops in D76.

pro tip for lucky 100 is to not use an acid stop, rinse with only water between dev and fix

Ok. Any reason?

My method, rightly or wrongly, is currently dev > quick rinse in water > stop > quick rinse > fix > full rinse.

the emulsion on lucky (or was it shanghai gp3? either wya) is p fragile... acid stop mottled my emulsion and gave me bad results

if youre using stop you prob dont need to rinse w/ water first, stop is p impervious to dev iirc

i can't recall what you can replace the stop bath with, something like 30 seconds of water, or maybe 2 changes of water with a few inversions, or something

May try that. Had thrown in the quick rinses just to try and avoid cross contamination of the solutions i re-use, though it likely makes little difference.

you reuse dev?

it's okay to get a lil stop bath into your fixer iirc, i don't think fixer is too ph-sensitive

i just re-use stop and fix. Though i have re-used dev once or twice when experimenting with developing colour films in b&w chems, though the re-use was straight after initial use.

Like i say, no real reason i do the extra water washes.

not really an emulsion thing but a film-specific query i think

i was wondering
as somebody who has always outsourced printing to the lab
what are the options for really printing photographs. i have photographs i like that i have taken, & i wonder sometimes whether if, if i wanted a good quality print of one, something comparable to a lovingly framed silver gelatin- gallery print, what would i do? is that entirely in the realm of people printing their own photographs on good paper, &c, or is it outsourced? i am not exactly keen to live in an apartment cluttered with memorials to my photographic talent or anything but there are some that i would like to nicely print rather than have on matte drugstore paper, or just curled up in a box of negatives.

did you guys ever elevate your photos to this level?

Does this

http://cl.ly/image/2X303m0U3Q2K/000030.jpg

look like a foam seal issue to you guys, or something that happened at the lab? It looks like it's come from the sprockets, right? I've had three or four colour films come out fine, and the tail end of this roll of HP5 is the first I've seen it happen..

Yeah could definitely be a light leak? Is it on multiple frames? Did you leave that frame in the chamber for a long time?

Way to be sure would be to shine a flashlight around the camera on your next roll, possibly towards the end

Could maybe be due to rushed processing, poorly drying chemicals maybe? I've had some b&w processing come back w splotches. But yeah try the flashlight test.

Xpost: I've gotten pretty nice prints from adorama! I think if you go to a professional lab in your area they can provide nice and large prints that aren't too pricey... You should try!

Better than the drugstore

Yep, multiple frames with different patterns but all variations on a theme (ie bands of light coming up from the bottom) - only starts about halfway through the roll. I shot the whole lot in one afternoon, so it wasn't sitting in the camera for a long time. Will try the flashlight tip. Thanks!

people on RFF have used this (forum sponsor) before and have reported on the results: http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=98700

― 乒乓, Friday, March 15, 2013 1:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so i did in fact finally do this, after a lot of false starts and tests. it's not 100% the smoothest procedure in the world, and i imagine if you're willing to go a little more expensive with one of the super-duper professional type places (like the ones hyped by Ken Rockwell here http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/labs.htm) you might get slightly more attentive customer care. Not that anyone's been rude or anything, just that thing where you can perceive that the system isn't really set up to smoothly serve this type of customer or this type of need. In any case, though, and more to the point of the thread, it's thrilling to have the film back and developed and, most of it, looking pretty good. It's also daunting as hell, and of course I'm making it worse for myself since, while I was waiting for the dozens of rolls to come back to me, I finally got the needed adapter for my film scanner and started laying into some developed-and-never-scanned negatives and, oh, lord, I just see the future ratcheting out ahead of me, soundtracked by the whirring of the scanner and the click of the mouse as I futz with stuff in Lightroom.

I stopped shooting film at the end of 2011 - god, time flies - so it's kinda just nice to be back in this look-and-feel. Lots of fairly grainy and not that sexy consumer-grade Fuji 400 and stuff. And it turns out some of the stuff I was shooting in early 2010 wasn't that attractive or well-lit in the first place. But still, some of these are making me happy.

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/659/20604950259_b0d1931b7d_z.jpg

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/780/20553796818_84c7bffc6c_z.jpg

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5777/20528647060_03c15bc135_z.jpg

Top one there also an experiment in applying Lightroom's like-magic "vertical" tool, which naturally plays wayyyy better with RAW files from cameras where it knows the lens, to film shots. Wish I could figure out how to get it correct lens profiles for the film lenses I did have. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the way those work, but just for it to know what transformation it should apply to fix barrel distortion would be pretty cool; I use those all the time for digital stuff.

Also, there really should be a word for the nagging, but unprovable, feeling that you must have lost a roll of film in a drawer somewhere. I really can't have taken so little in the way of personal/party candid shots between Fall 2010 and June 2011, I just can't have. Adding further confusion: one roll that I apparently developed at Target (!?!?!) somewhere in that time, where half the roll appears to be replaced with somebody else's pictures. I have no idea why I was getting film developed at Target, but I'm trying to comfort myself with the logic that, at the time, I would have noticed this strange development and taken action, unless I had some reason not to care (like it was a short roll anyway). But why wouldn't I have tried to return the other person's negatives? It makes no sense.

that's awesome, dr c
those are happy-making, esp <3 3rd one
incomparable experience to get old rolls developed, to scan old negs
you remind me, have some v v old disposable camera rolls inexplicably never developed; prob ruined by now but obv worth processing anyway
also many negs from middle/high school (!!!), most prints long lost, never scanned
don’t know why i keep postponing likely proustian experience

there really should be a word for the nagging, but unprovable, feeling that you must have lost a roll of film in a drawer somewhere
so otm

one roll that I apparently developed at Target (!?!?!) somewhere in that time, where half the roll appears to be replaced with somebody else's pictures
that reminds me of roll i once took to be developed, which lab lost or mixed up with someone else’s roll (b&w, so lab outsourced to another lab)
anyway, roll was never found
this happened like decade ago; i’m still haunted by that lost roll
vividly remember when/where i took those pictures— long rambling walk on melancholy overcast late afternoon in place with fraught associations when i was in v particular/inarticulable state of mind
maybe the vividness of the memory is due to (& worth) the loss of the photographs

aww, thanks a bunch. much more to come on flickr of course. btw i realized i may have been confusing above - none of these are from the big batch i got developed/scanned through those people (just me with my buddy the coolscan), so don't take them as samples of their work.

do the disposable cameras sooner rather than later! you seriously never know. IMO if there's one precious memory great shot buried in there it's so worth it.

i scanned a big bunch of high school negs the other week, not sure when i'll get around to processing them or what i'll do with them. i think all i had then was disposables. they're none of them "great photos" but definitely the kind of thing that folks on facebook may get a kick out of, might bring a smile to some people's faces, etc. that's a worthy thing. but only so many hours in the day. maybe i'll save them for twenty years out from graduation or something.

my other great "lost roll" - only one that's ever come back blank, crushingly - was from the end of summer 2008, mostly goofing around at coney island with a couple of good pals. i would love, love to see what was on that. sigh. really interesting to think that the memories of the day are heightened by taking but not having the photos. normally i think of photos as memory-prompts, gradually the days that were photographed come to call up (but also to stand in for) many other days and times. but perhaps a day that one THINKS about having photographed can actually work the same way. that's really interesting.

cool stuff doctor casino

Man, that makes me want to get a film camera and shoot. Are they still doing $12 all in plus shipping for the scans?

thanks y'all!

Yeah! I think you do have to be a registered RFF member and click through from their ad there, otherwise you won't find that item to add to your cart.

i've realized i should probably use a service like precision.

i had some developed negatives and went to a semiserious developing place today and got a price of 99 cents per frame for scanning to cd at "good" resolution, a buck something per exposure for "excellent" resolution ???? it's considerably cheaper if a develop/scan package for whatever reason (maybe there's a good reason that i'm unaware of).

Well, it's a LOT simpler to feed film into a scanner before it's been cut and sleeved. That's probably the biggest reason, assuming it's not like a drug store deal where the sacns happen (as I understand it) in the same machine as developing (?).

I should revise up my Precision comments a bit - in the end they came through, clearly tried hard to unravel some crossed wires, and insisted on a partial refund even when I was like ahhh, whatever, it's fine.