Today, I proudly present a blog of a friend of mine who calls himself “a Linux sysadmin at day and photographer at night (and vice-versa).” The address is www.filmetc.org He is indeed a very talented photographer and if Mathias does Read more…
I cleaned up my camera cabinet yesterday and stumbled upon my Action sampler camera where I remembered I shot some film with already. My Action sampler is a no name model, but is better than the one from Lomography in so many Read more…
I went to a Photo fair the other weekend and bought another, small camera that I always had an eye on: The Olympus XA. It is in excellent condition, came with the A11 Flash and a small bag. It had already batteries installed and as I always carry a Film canister with some film with me, it was obvious to put it in: 2007 expired Kodak Porta 160 NC. A wonderful color film, that comes out great in caffenol. The XA has only full ISO stops, so I dialed in ISO 200 and began shooting.
Yes, the title of this post looks confusing, because of course scanning is an input process and printing is an output process. Ad it’s even more confusing, as the print needs to be scanned as well… But first things first. Read more…
f you read a bit about caffenol development or development in general, you will quickly learn phrases like “my negatives came out very dense” or “negatives where thin, but scanned fine”. So what does all that mean?
If you develop color films in caffenol, most likely you will get dense negatives (dense meaning you cannot see through the film in this case), positive films and High ISO films will be denser then low ISO films. These negatives are not very good to produce prints on paper, as contrast is quite low and they have an orange mask. High ISO B&W Films will most likely come out very thin and will look like underdeveloped negatives. Both types will scan fine and with a small amount of Post Processing (Level adjustments) they will look good on a screen.
A friend of mine recently told me about Diafine, a quite famous dual solution developer that is said to push mid tones by 1 stop. Diafine is a compensating developer, meaning you put in Solution A, let the film rest for 4 minutes with maybe 1 slow agitation per minute, pour out Solution A (both solutions can be reused) and then put in Solution B and let it develop further 4 minutes with agitation that is specific to the used film.
I was amazed about the tonality that the developer brings, and because I like experimenting, I thought why not try out something like that with Caffenol. Of course I knew that it will most probably not push the mids, and I cannot reuse the Caffenol mix, but it was fun for the experiment.A friend of mine recently told me about Diafine, a quite famous dual solution developer that is said to push mid tones by 1 stop. Diafine is a compensating developer, meaning you put in Solution A, let the film rest for 4 minutes with maybe 1 slow agitation per minute, pour out Solution A (both solutions can be reused) and then put in Solution B and let it develop further 4 minutes with agitation that is specific to the used film.
I was amazed about the tonality that the developer brings, and because I like experimenting, I thought why not try out something like that with Caffenol. Of course I knew that it will most probably not push the mids, and I cannot reuse the Caffenol mix, but it was fun for the experiment.
Some may be surprised that it took me so long to try out Kodak TMAX 400 in caffenol, but that’s how I am, always wanting to try out something new, something different. A friend of mine gave me a roll of TMAX 400 because he said he really likes it. It’s a Tabular-grain-film like the Delta films from Ilford where the silver halide crystals are more flat and tabular.
Kodak says it is the sharpest, fined grained ISO 400 film and it pushes up to EI 1600. So why not taking it to the Construction of the Oktoberfest in Munich and shoot at dusk with a slow Lens, a Tamron 28-80 f3.5-5.6
Developed in the Delta recipe with doubled amount of Vitamin-C
Recently someone gave me two rolls of ORWO PAN 100, a panchromatic Black and White film, made here in Germany. ORWO still sells it as medium speed surveillance film, but I don’t know if the emulsion nowadays is the same as the one from the film that I’ve got. This panchromatic film has the characteristic to be sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light, producing a very realistic image.
hen I started analogue photography, I wanted to shoot on grainy high speed films primarily, preferable at night. So far I have not managed to do a grainy night shooting, but did buy a lot of different films just to see, how they look in caffenol. So this week I tried Ilford Pan F 50, a panchromatic ISO 50 film. And as I currently have an Olympus OM4-Ti, it was just perfect to try out the spot metering features of it.
Small, black, fast. This is how you can describe the Revue 35CC. The camera was also sold as Chinon Bellami and has a very unique opening mechanism using the advance lever. Some people call it a ‘barn door’ camera, as Read more…