Anyway, I’d like to write another post on The Impossible Project (or T.I.P. for brevity), the company that’s leading the crusade to resurrect instant film.  Well, instant film that is not for Instax cameras.  And that isn’t Type 100 film, or “pack” film.  So that leaves the biggest holes that Polaroid left behind, films for SX-70, 600, and Spectra System cameras.  T.I.P. has already produced a number of films, both in monochrome and color, that have effectively given Polaroid cameras a new lease on life.  In short, they’ve done what they set out to do when they formed.  And so, I wonder what their direction is going to be.

First off, Let me summarize what you get with T.I.P. films.  Each pack of film holds eight exposures, the requisite in-pack battery, and costs $22-$24 (that’s USD).  For monochrome film, you get a low-dynamic range print with charcoaled blacks and creamy whites.  For color film, you get a low-saturation print with a muted color pallete.

Quite obviously, the image is not like the old Polaroid film was, and that’s actually one of T.I.P.’s strongest selling points.  In my opinion, the best Polaroid exposures were ones made with film whose chemicals were starting to expire without drying out, causing shifts in the color palette away from perfection.  These films were originally formulated by a corporate powerhouse that could afford to perfect a product prior to release.  (Remember, of course, that Edwin Land only invented instant photography after he had built Polaroid as a thriving optics company.)  So for those who preferred the “expired Polaroid” look, T.I.P.’s films should be right up their alley.

There are, however, numerous drawbacks to the film.  Most notably, the prints remain photosensitive for a few minutes after the chemicals are spread across the film, meaning that care must be taken to shield them from light the instant a picture is taken.  The problem is so bad that T.I.P. released a few different light-blocking aids for use with Polaroid cameras, an SX-70 shade and longer “frog tongues” to keep the prints covered until you can put them in dark places.  In my opinion, both are decent solutions to a real problem.

Second, I know that T.I.P. have been building a reputation (or so it seems) for somewhat unreliable film packs.  Obviously, the colors of the prints should not be the subject of “customer service” claims, because T.I.P. seems to make quite clear what the films are capable of.  Nor should sharpness be a valid complaint, since the culprit is usually a crappy camera with a plastic lenses.  I’ve heard stories, though, of people getting packs with dead batteries, albeit that was a while ago and could have been an isolated factory incident.  The same could be said of the PX 70 images I have been getting from two packs I ordered back in August.  Many are included below, though a few have also been sacrificed to issues with my cameras, and some remain in the packs.  I’ve only lately been getting around to actually shooting the film, because it’s been far too easy to avoid picking up my cameras, scared off by the echoing voice in my head, chanting, “$3 a shot… $3 a shot…” You can see that in many of the pictures, the chemical spread is so poor that it detracts from the photograph, and in some, there were some bad pods, leading to awful color shifts.

Now then, T.I.P. is a somewhat secretive company, like all companies are to an extent, so I’m always wondering what they’re doing next.  I have heard through various outlets that among the things they’re working on are (1) an integral 8×10 film system for use with the old 8×10 Polaroid processors, and (2) a new camera design to work with T.I.P. films but to eliminate the in-pack battery.

Personally, if I were in charge of the direction of the company, I would have two different goals.  The first would be to improve the manufacturing processes so that technical issues (like poor chemical spreading and battery failures) become even less of an issue.  The second would be to reduce the per-shot cost of the film from the $2.75 – $3 that it currently is down to $2 per shot.  (Therefore, each pack of film would cost $15.99 for 8 exposures.)  I think that it’s a goal that’s just aggressive enough to stifle the complaints of people who complain that the film is too expensive.  As most of you know, I’m on a real budget, so while I do love the experience of shooting T.I.P. films, it’s just not a possibility on a regular basis.

All this is not to say that there’s anything wrong with T.I.P. as they are now.  There are two new, improved test-versions of PX 70 (color SX-70 film) and PX 100 (black-and-white SX-70 film) available to Pioneer members before their wide release.  Furthermore, T.I.P. are apparently pretty active on social networks, since they caught me complaining about price and sent me two free packs of PX 70 without question.  Though I don’t think they knew I was having any problems, this “bonus film” might help make up for the problems you see in the examples above, unless of course I discover that these packs exhibit the same problems.

In summary, what can I say?  The Impossible Project is a mysterious company. Mysterious in that you can never really be sure what’s  in their future.  Are they going to start building more and more improvements in their film? Will they be able to market to people other than hipsters artists? Will they unveil a new camera and/or 8×10 film in a few months? If so, will their new direction be perceived as a success or a flop? Whatever the answers to these questions, I think it’s remarkable that, in a few short years, despite some flaws and imperfections all around, The Impossible Project has achieved what everyone said was impossible.

If you pay attention, there’s a lot of “film versus digital” talk out there in the photography world.  The digital camp seems pretty adamant about trying to kill off the film medium, for whatever reason.  Maybe they are imagining (or observing) some sort of external criticism of their medium and are therefore trying to argue for a default superiority.  And I don’t mean to generalize.  Some digital shooters are simply working in the format as a choice, for whatever reason, and are entirely non-confrontational about it.  But continuing with my generalizations that I don’t really want to make, their preference is probably driven by supposed cost savings and volume.  The classic argument is that photos have suddenly become free.  That you have unlimited film.  That your only limit to your creativity and shooting ability is the size of your hard drive.To be frank, I don’t like digital photography, but I’ve tried to avoid confrontation on the matter.  I’ve always stated that this comes down to my own personal preferences, and that digital photos are a perfectly legitimate way to photograph.  But I also fear that this claim means that film and digital are equivalent, and that’s just not true.

Let’s start by noting two obvious differences in the processes.  First, with film, there’s an added degree of separation between you and the results of your work.  With the LCD review screens of digital cameras, you have more opportunities to instantly review and correct your work after a shot.  This does two things.  First, it devalues the mistakes you make, so that you’re rapidly throwing darts at a bulls-eye you’re eventually sure to get by the law of averages, rather than taking careful aim with each of your three darts that are all the rules of the game say you’re getting.  Second, it repeatedly severs the connection you’re trying to make with your subject, whether it’s scenery or another human being.

Secondly, and perhaps more effective at driving my point home, loading film takes some sort of time and effort, whether it’s loading a new roll of 35mm in a motor-driven camera, or taking a minute to load each individual sheet of film in a large format holder, then making notes as to which holder has which emulsion in it.  There is a self-imposed window of opportunity before your work gets interrupted by the need to change your film.  To be fair, this boundary exists in digital, but you usually can’t fill a memory card these days before your shooting is done.

Once you start placing this boundary on your work, you have to impose limits on yourself.  Every shutter click is another step closer to having to change your film roll, or you could even have to change your film holder after every exposure.  You’re now invested in some degree in every single shot.  And I’m being careful to frame this investment in terms of your roll of film rather than the way most do, which is by the price of film.  I could run through the numbers of how, by looking at total costs, digital and film photography could cost you similar amounts of money.  Or, I could frame it in terms of how much each individual exposure costs in dollars and cents.  I don’t want to do that, though, because before long, you start just buying film at certain intervals to keep a properly stocked refrigerator, and you start watching your frame counter much more than your wallet.

Furthermore, your investment doesn’t stop at the camera itself.  Though it’s probably not a conscious thought at the time, the exposures you make on film are only part of a much larger process.  To make a photograph, I have to decide which film I want to use for my subject, load this film into the camera, make the exposure, remove the film, set it aside until I’m ready to process it (perhaps forgetting its content in this time), load it into a light-tight contraption, stand over the sink with it while I subject it to a series of chemicals, hang it to dry, load it into a different contraption, and then either scan it, or—even better—throw it into an entirely new machine that will enlarge the image onto photo paper whose fate it is to be subjected to even more chemistry and ultimately be displayed (or stored) in a very real physical space for all eternity.  Granted, working on a select digital image in Photoshop and defining its location in the sea of similar bytes of data is also real and necessary work, but to me this work is tedious and very impersonal.  Having your fingertips on a keyboard and mouse is decidedly not the same as having your fingertips handle the edges of a piece of film.

To be fair, there are photographs that I’ve made that I would not have made had I been shooting film.  This shot is a prime example:

I made about twelve rapid-fire exposures to get this perfect moment where Mao was yawning.  I could have done the same thing with some film, but I wouldn’t have wanted to devote an entire third of a roll just to get a cat photograph that was unlikely to succeed anyway.  I was also very free to alter the tones of the photo, since there was no negative to which I felt I had to be faithful.

Contrast that photo with this one:

I only had two rolls of 120 film with me, so I had to choose at most twenty-four moments to represent the entire night.  Light was low, so I knew I was going to have to push the film in processing, so I was going to have higher-contrast images with less shadow detail.  To this day, I’m not a master at focusing my Hasselblad, especially with any sort of speed.  The entire experience was, to some degree, a gamble.  However, I consider the photograph to be much more of a personal success.  I believe that the personal connection and investment in the photograph is forever linked with the result, leading to an ultimately more pleasing effect.

So now, despite the fact that I don’t have unlimited shots at my disposal and I can’t correct my settings on the fly, I ultimately consider myself a better photographer who is more in touch with the art form than I ever would have been had I never diverged from digital.

First off, fellow film photographer Adam Elkins gave me a great idea that could potentially curb my desire for film camera gear as well as benefit readers of the blog – a camera loaner program. Basically, the idea would be that you, as a reader, could contact me to discuss your personal camera collection, and we could work out a deal of some sort. Basically, you’d send me one of your cameras for about a month or so, giving me ample time to use and review it for the benefit of my own curiosity and the curiosity of others who read this blog. Maybe that would be enough, or maybe I could send you one of my “lesser” cameras to try out on your own in exchange. Other than shipping costs, this strategy eliminates the involvement of money, which is an especially troubling subject since it’s in such short supply these days. Interested parties should contact me through the comment section of this blog, or any other means you know how to contact me, and we can get the ball rolling. (I’m not going to post my email address for fear of spam.)

Alright, so for those of you who are anxiously awaiting some results from my pinhole camera experiment, I will give you a little bit of an update. There are two problems with the camera as of now. First, the 1/4″x20 nuts that I put in to accept a tripod screw will not fully tighten. I will have to look into how I might be able to adjust this so that when the camera is fully tightened to the tripod, it will not rotate. I’ve only looked at this momentarily, because every time I am putting the camera on the tripod, it’s so bitchingly cold that I just want to make the exposure and get away.

The second problem is a lot more troublesome, and it’s light leaks. Below, you will find my first sample of a pinhole photo, taken on a paper negative. The sides exhibit a lot of light leaks, and I’m unsure whether it’s the camera’s fault or the 8×10 film holders, which are an old eBay acquisition. I applied some extra preventative measures, but I have yet to test with an exposure, since it decided to turn so damn cold once I actually modified the camera to shield light.

This year, I have completely revamped my personal budget, meaning that I no longer have the funds to invest in equipment that I did previously.  I am thinking of looking into soliciting donations for a “cameras and film” fund.  Basically, the idea would be to allow readers to send some donations my way for me to invest in a camera or film stock that I’ve been looking to try out.  Any stuff I would buy would then be reviewed here on the blog, with pictures (and if I can make a good one, some video).  I’m not sure if I could use Paypal to do this, since it seems that they may only work with nonprofit organizations.  (If anyone has any experience doing something similar, let me know.)  Then there are issues like choosing what to purchase (for example, would the world really need another Canon AE-1 review?) that would have to get worked out…

An example of this philosophy in action would be as follows.  Back when I got the idea for this pinhole project I’m documenting (still working on it, by the way) I could have tapped a donation account to make purchases for the supplies like wood, spray paint, and the laser-drilled pinhole.

So what do you guys think?  Is this too obviously a greedy and selfish attempt to satisfy a personal case of Gear Acquisition Syndrome, or do you think that there would actually be a benefit for the readers of this blog in seeing me (enthusiastic and innovative photographic tinkerer who lives on grad student wage) try out new things with film photography?

Anyway, I gave myself a new idea on how to fix that pinhole camera’s light leak issue, so be patient while I wait for the chance to try out some new ideas…

First off, I had to make the box. I had six pieces of 12″x12″x1/4″ craft plywood to work with, and I knew that I wanted my “focal length” to be 8 inches (I trust my international listeners to be able to do some conversions, but for reference, I had 254 mm square wood panels and a desired focal length of 203 mm. Those are your freebies.)  Again, I’m putting “focal length” in quotes since it’s the distance from the aperture (i.e., pinhole) to the film plane; there’s not really a focus method.  I wanted to get the distance as close as possible to 8 inches, so I cut all the sides of my box to be a hair under 8 inches – there is a tiny bit more distance to cover thanks to the structure of the film holder.

It’s important to make a few notes here… When working with wood, you have to take the thickness of the wood into account. For example, my camera is 8.5 inches thick, but the internal distance (pinhole to film plane) is pretty close to 8 inches.  Also, I started off with having an 8×10 film holder that I could use as a guide.  The front and back of the camera were cut to fit the film holder exactly; I didn’t even make measurements with a ruler.

Anyway, with all the pieces cut to size I started gluing them together to make a wooden box.  I used one of the most awesome adhesives around, Gorilla Glue.  It’s an expanding polyurethane glue, and it’s strong as hell.  Of course, it’s got some special instructions to make it work the way you want to, so make sure you read them carefully.  I used some scrap wood to thin out the glue that I had squeezed out, and I used some 90-degree clamps to hold things in place while the glue cured.

Before you knew it, I had a complete box with one side left free where the film holder would go.  In the front, I drilled a relatively wide hole so that the pinhole had access to a very wide-angle cone of view.  That is, if the wood is too thick or the hole is too small, the pinhole would suffer from “tunnel vision.”  I’m guessing that my hole offers 90 degrees or more for the pinhole, which is plenty for my fairly long (for pinhole, anyway) 8 inch focal length.  Finally, I spray-painted the entire interior of the camera a non-glossy black.  You really want to kill the light as much as you can.

The fine folks at Lenox Laser shipped the pinhole in a very neat, well-sealed plastic square holder. Rather than try to tape the fragile pinhole to the inside of the camera, I just drilled a hole in one half of this plastic holder and used it as a mount.  I was therefore able to tape the whole thing to the inside of the camera with gaffers tape without even touching the pinhole (not counting removing it so I could drill that hole).  I also (after my first test with the camera) put some gaffer’s tape around all the seams to cut down on light leaks from the edge of the box.

With the interior all prepared, the trickiest thing was to actually get the film holders to stay in place.  For my first test, I was way too giddy and anxious, so I held the holder and back (a simple piece of wood) on with painter’s tape.  Definitely not a long-term solution, even if the tape wasn’t the primary cause of my light leaks.  I wanted some sort of “spring” back, so I got the ingenious idea of getting some black waistband elastic and making some loops that I could just strap around the camera to hold everything together.  Of course, what I failed to remember was that I’d be setting the camera up on its side, and gravity would make the back sag, to the point of letting light in.

Fortunately, there was some scrap wood laying around (wood that had even been used to test a router, so it was rounded on one edge), so I cut three stop blocks.  Thus, the back couldn’t slide around in any of the three directions I didn’t want it to.  It can still move towards the “top” of the camera (the side where you pull darkslides out) and it can also fall out, but the elastic prevents that from happening.  The downside is that now I can’t set the camera easily on the ground or a table, but I imagine that wouldn’t make for very good photographs.

The last thing to include was a pair of tripod mounts (one for landscape orientation, one for portrait), which simply involved putting 1/4″ x 20 nuts in a pre-drilled hole and securing the edge with Gorilla Glue.

After a simple staining and polyurethaning (yes, it’s apparently a word), I considered the camera complete.  But how would it fare out in the field?

(That’s my poor attempt at a cliffhanger ending, btw)

I’ve been thinking, what’s the big deal?  All I want is a sturdy wooden box that will take an 8×10 film holder on one side and hold a pinhole at the other side.  So, I decided that maybe building my own quality pinhole camera could be an option.  But then, there’s that word: “quality.”  Everything that I like about these cameras I’ve listed is their wonderful sharp (relatively speaking) quality.  You can get a fantastic image from the cameras I’ve mentioned, while all the DIY cameras I’ve seen have left a lot to be desired.  It frequently turns into a competition of who can build a pinhole camera out of the wackiest materials, rather than taking a look at how to perfect a design.  So, this is my goal:

Design and fabricate a wooden pinhole camera that will make as perfect an image as possible on 8×10 film in an appropriate film holder.

Now, you need to understand a tiny bit of optics to get pinhole design.  By restricting the aperture of a hole down so far, you’re only using light rays that are bouncing straight off the subject and onto the film plane in a direct path.  (see Wikipedia for example)  However, if the hole is too small, you start getting too much diffraction due to the way light bends.  I feel unqualified to explain further, but suffice to say that we need an optimum pinhole diameter.  Lord Rayleigh, acoustics genius, came up with an awesomely simple formula,

pinhole diameter = 1.9 * square root(focal length * light wavelength)

which will give an optimum pinhole diameter.  Also, there are a number of simple online calculators such as this one which will just spit out a number, using both inches and mm.  So, it’s decision time.  How far away is the pinhole going to be?  I decided to start by looking at view angle

As far as view angle is concerned, I love my Nikon 24mm lens.  A 24mm lens on a 35mm camera gives you a diagonal angle of view of 84 degrees.  28mm, another great focal length, gives you 75 degrees.  So, by my thinking, if I can keep the angle of view around this size, I should have a nice image without too much distortion of perspective.  I made a spreadsheet and found that, for 8×10 film, a “focal length” of 8 inches (I use quotes, because no focusing is going on in pinhole photography) gives a diagonal angle of view of 77.35 degrees.  Equivalent to 26mm on a 35mm camera.  Perfect – gives me a wide angle without going into “weirdness” territory.

Having settled on a third dimension for the camera, I got two calculations of the optimal pinhole size.  Rayleigh’s formula says I should have a pinhole of 635 microns (or 10^-6 meters) at 8 inches away, while the “Mr. Pinhole” calculator at the earlier link suggests 601 microns.  I erred on the slightly smaller side and ordered a 600-micron pinhole from Lenox Laser in Maryland.  Apparently the tolerances are smaller than 5%, so I should be getting something worlds better than if I tried punching my own hole through a thin bit of brass.  As an added bonus, I know that my camera will be permanently set to f/339.

So, having ordered a pinhole, I’ve started cutting up six pieces of wood I bought at the local craft store.  I’ve decided to just glue some tabs on the back piece (the film holder side) as well as the two side pieces, then use elastic on these tabs to hold the back in place.  It’s a poor man’s spring back, essentially.  I’ll also try things like putting two 1/4×20 nuts in two sides, so that I’ll have a tripod mount for both a horizontal and landscape orientation.  If preliminary tests go well, I’ll try my hand at installing a rotating shutter, much like you can find on the Lensless cameras.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Once I get home, I’ll take some snapshots to show you the woodwork before I start using Gorilla Glue (honestly some of the best adhesive around) to put the box together.  Unfortunately, the glue requires a lot of clamping force and a long time to dry, so I’ll probably be gluing one edge at a time for a few days.  I might even get my pinhole in the mail before I’m ready to install it.

Anyway, I’m hoping that this whole project will generate plenty of content for a blog that I feel has been neglected for far too long.

Since I would like to explore the world of carbon printing—and other alternative processes of printing—I need negatives that are going to be the size of the final print.  Virtually all alternative processes require UV light and contact printing.  There are traditionally three ways to do this:

1. Shoot on 8×10 or ultra large format film.  Talk to Mat Marrash if you’d like to learn more, but have your bank statements handy.  It ain’t cheap.
    
2. Scan your film (or if you shoot digital, open up your file) and make an inkjet print to transparency material.
    
3. Enlarge to a 8×10 or larger piece of film (which will produce a positive transparency), then contact print that to make a negative.

What most people nowadays seem to be doing is number 2—printing on a professional printer and making “digital negatives.”  There are a few reasons why this is a poor option for me.  First off, you really need to have a pro printer, whereas I have an all-in-one HP.  Apparently Epson is the way to go for anything serious, because Epson inks are the best for blocking UV light. (Remember that UV light is the only light we’re interested in for the purposes of alternative processes.)  Furthermore, they have like seven or eight different inks, and you can calibrate your system to find an ink combination that will give you just the right contrast and tonal scale.

I could just ignore all this and try making digital negatives with my HP printer, but even then, the price of ink is insane.  And I’ve never been good at printing out images to my printer – something always seems to go wrong and I waste far more material getting a print of a digital image using my own printer than if I were to use a service such as Mpix.  Unfortunately, I haven’t found a source for “farming out” my digital negatives to some other 3rd party in the same way, and I doubt I will unless alternative process printing takes off in a huge way.  Even then, there’s probably a lot of time I’m going to have to spend in Photoshop (ugh) to prepare a scan for uploading and printing.

Needless to say, I’m not going to spend the bucks on a professional Epson printer just so I can make digital negatives.  It’s not like I’d use it for traditional inkjet prints.  I hate spending time in Photoshop and Lightroom anyway, so I just do the bare minimum in those programs to make something presentable to Mpix whenever I need a print of my color photos.

For the longest time, I was convinced that option 3—enlarging to a piece of film—was not an option.  First off, there are problems with “traditional” 8×10 films.  They’re too sensitive, and they’re very expensive.  For example, some 8×10 Ilford film works out to be $4.40 per sheet.  There used to be some techniques that you could do with what was known as “Ortho Lith” film, which was used for lithography processes.  Sadly, though, it’s no longer produced, and even Freestyle, who was the last vendor to carry it, has run out of material.

But as luck would have it, I stumbled on to what could be a miracle – Ultrafine Continuous-tone Duplicating Film.  From the description, it seems that this is what I need…  ”Can be used for copying continuous-tone B&W pictures.”  ”Permits the making of either same-sized duplicates, or enlarged negatives.” “Most widely used in platinium, palladium, gelatine and gum bichromate printing, and print-out paper applications.” Score!  And even in a low-quantity package, it works out to $0.79 per sheet. Relatively speaking, that’s an amazing value.

So last night, I tried my first tests of the film.  I treated it like a paper, complete with the last of my PQ Universal developer.  It was advertised as being ISO 4, which sounded close to what people use for rating paper in pinhole cameras, so I figured that it should have a rating similar to all these papers I’ve been messing around with.  I tried developing a test strip of an enlarged “blank” negative with 3-second exposure increments.  A pretty basic paper test to determine the minimum time to reproduce maximum black.  To my surprise, the film turned out completely black.  No steps or different tones at all.  I then tried 1-second steps, figuring that I had somehow overexposed everything.  Again, black!

This is when I started to worry.  I cut two small pieces of the film, then I threw one straight into the fixer and the other one straight into the developer.  The results were strange… The fixed-out piece was orange, of all things.  The developed-and-fixed piece was a somewhat-transparent black, just like all the test strips.  Confused by the colors, I took out another scrap piece and just looked at it in the room light.  The emulsion was orange, like a C-41 film, and the back was colored dark.

I was utterly confused, and was about to call it quits for the rest of the night.  But then I realized that I had a nice, fully exposed piece of film in my hands, and I hadn’t tried developing it yet.  So, I ran it through the developer, stop and fixer.

It came out blue. Fairly transparent, actually, when compared to my previous “black” test strips. Very strange, since I was expecting something even blacker.  Clearly, though, something was up, and I needed to find out what.  I finally decided to throw a negative in the carrier and just enlarge it with my trusty Kodak Projection Print Scale.  You never can tell, maybe I’d get an image yet.  Lo and behold, when I exposed for 60 seconds at f/8, I could actually see an image!  It was faint, though, so I decided to go all out, yank out my contrast filter to bump up the light and expose for the same time at f/4.  The result was a lot better, because I was getting a great blue-and-black negative.

Wait a minute, negative?  Did my eyes deceive me?  Sure enough, I was getting a negative image, despite projecting a negative onto the easel.  Whatever bizarre process this was, I was getting a positive result.  If this actually works, then that would mean I wouldn’t need to make an intermediate positive for making my enlarged negative.  That means it would take half as much film as I originally thought to make my negatives for alternative processes!

Sadly, it was getting late, so I was unable to experiment further, instead choosing to bottle up my excitement and save it for the next session in the darkroom.  But, needless to say, I’m getting pretty optimistic about producing large negatives for contact printing.  Eat it, Epson!

(I’m not being egotistical, though… comments are pretty much my only means of gauging that this blog is worth my time and is reaching people who care about what I try to discuss.)

Anyway, here’s what December 2011 has me engaged in:

Printing Galore

I’ve finally switched to fiber paper for all the printing that I’m doing that isn’t test strips or contact sheets.  I’m getting decent results by making just one test print with my old Kodak projection print scale (which I bought from a former Kodak employee, btw)  I’m working with some Ilford Multigrade paper as well as some cheaper Ultrafine Paper.  Not only is the Ultrafine cheaper, but it has a cooler tone than the Ilford, which I’m a huge fan of.  I take my test strips and just apply a correction of a certain number of stops and I can get fairly consistent results.  Of course, with fiber taking so long, I’ve made a handful of prints, all tests of two images.  I haven’t even gotten around to enlarging any medium format yet.

Once I get around to it, I’m also going to start toning in Selenium.  I’ve got a bottle of stock solution just waiting for me to get around to it.

Testing Film

On our way back from the latest Film Photography Podcast recording session, I was surprised to hear that Mat didn’t think of Rodinal as a general-purpose developer.  He’d only heard of it being used for stand-developing.  This made me realize that, while I have four developers in my closet, I never compared them side by side.  In this spirit, I took my Hasselblad and a few rolls of HP5+ to the Military museum for some film testing.  Hopefully very soon, you’ll see the first round of results from my test of HC-110, Pyrocat HD, Rodinal, and Xtol. This is probably the one thing I’m most heavily involved in at the moment, since everything else is darkroom-heavy.

Home E-6 Development

Seriously, it’s easy.  Here’s the kit.

Enlarging Negatives

Remember that Ultrafine paper I told you about?  Well, Ultrafine also makes some duplication film, meaning that I can enlarge to an 8×10 transparency.  I have yet to even open the box, but this could be the first step in making enlarged negatives for the purposes of contact printing.  Since I haven’t tried out the process, all I can do is cross my fingers for now, but if I can come up with a good negative, I should be able to start making some awesome alternative-process prints.

What I really need to so is to sit down to write out what my testing procedure should be. I have precious few sheets to work with (25) so I need to come up with a procedure that is repeatable and consistent.  But it sure as hell beats the alternative, which would be to buy an Epson printer for the sole purpose of producing large-format digital negatives.  I have been told (by Freestyle) that something like an HP printer (i.e., my printer) wouldn’t have the consistency in the inks to block UV light.  Not to mention that I hate the idea of doing test prints with expensive inks.  I mean, duplication film is also expensive, but at least I feel more comfortable with it.

Carbon Printing

Of course, my first foray into the alternative process world is going to be carbon printing.  Fortunately, thanks to John Milleker, I already have some carbon tissue to work with, so that’s one less variable for me to screw up in the preliminary stages.  This video, brought to my attention by Mat, highlights why I want to make carbon prints.  Not only do they give you a perfect tonal reproduction, but their stability and archival quality easily surpasses all these silver prints I’m working with.  Whereas you have to jump through hoops to make silver stable, carbon prints are as stable as the pigment you put in the gelatin.

Of course, the downside is all the work you have to put into the process, including the enlargement of negatives that I discussed

Super 8

Yep, with the release of the LomoKino camera in recent history, I got renewed interest in Super 8 movie film.  This is definitely a back-burner project, since I haven’t even bothered to order a test roll of film yet, but I did get a Canon 514XL camera and restored it to working (I think) order.  What’s holding me back is money (as always), as well as a lack of projector or cheap telecine options.  A big thanks to Nate Matos, though, for helping me get this far.

Anyway, that’s about it.  I’d type a better outro, but I’ve got to get to one of my last classes, and then I’ve got to figure out which of these things I want to waste my time on for the rest of the day.

First off, there are several recipes of Caffenol, and they get progressively complex. This is helpful, since we can learn something about the chemical processes involved, then go to the next level by adding another chemical while asking ourselves why we need it.

Caffeic Acid – The Developer

Here’s the deal – instant coffee is a complex mixture of chemicals. The one you’re probably most familiar with is caffeine, so it’s easy to make the assumption that it’s what’s doing the developing. But actually, while it’s possible that caffeine might be some sort of developing agent, it’s more likely that it’s the caffeic acid (C9H8O4 – same chemical formula as Aspirin) that is doing the work. It’s a phenol whose structure is similar to that of catechol, a key component of the “PyroCat” film developer, among others. It’s going to be this molecule that reduces the exposed silver halide salts to metallic silver, the material that leaves “density” on your negative.

Sodium Carbonate – The Accelerator

The cruel joke of photographic developing agents is that they suck when they exist in an acidic environment. Coffee, as I hope you know, is an acidic (low-pH) solution. So something has to raise the pH of the solution so that the caffeic acid has a chance to work on the exposed silver halide (the photosensitive stuff in the film emulsion.) It should be common knowledge that a lot of “soapy” or “cleaning” products are basic (i.e., non-acidic) and have a high pH. After all, the most dangerous base there is is probably sodium hydroxide, or lye, which is an old-school drain cleaner. Sodium carbonate by itself is fairly alkaline, driving the pH up to over 11 if it’s in a 5% solution. (Don’t worry, it’s not too high. Soapy water has a pH of 12.) By the way, it’s recommended that you dissolve the sodium carbonate first before adding the coffee. The thing that annoys me is that I’m not sure why this is.

Well, with a developing agent and an alkaline (pH over 7) environment, you’ve got all you need for development. Indeed, there are many people who can use just these two powders and be totally happy with their home-brew developer. But then there are people like me who just love to tinker with things.

Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C) – The Second Developer

One of the problems with the two-component recipe is that it can take a while. This of course leads to excess staining and fogging, as well as maybe some excess graininess. In order to shorten the time, reduce graininess and make the developer more effective, you can add ascorbic acid (C6H8O6, also known as vitamin C) to serve as a second developing agent. In fact, many developer recipes use two developing agents. Most of them use hydroquinone and either metol or phenidone. (In that case, the two components actually work together and work much better than you would think. But superadditivity is a topic for another day.) Vitamin C also has antioxidant qualities, so there’s a possibility that it acts as a preservative. Most developers require a preservative because otherwise the developing agent would oxidize and become ineffective before development is even complete.

Potassium Bromide – the Restrainer

With the three ingredients previously mentioned, you’ve got a batch of “Caffenol C,” which is a faster-acting, finer-grained version of plain old Caffenol—or so I’m told. I’ve actually never experimented with a recipe without vitamin C, so I’m wondering if anyone can confirm the differences. Anyway, Caffenol C was the first Caffenol developer I mixed, and the result was just too dense. I got a fine dynamic range for printing and scanning, but printing times were much longer due to the density of the “film base + fog” being so high.

This is where a wee bit of potassium bromide can help. Actually, it’s the bromide that matters, not the potassium. The concept is very simple, actually. The developer converts the silver bromide in the emulsion into metallic silver and bromide ions. If this takes place in an environment where there are already bromide ions floating around (like when you’ve already dissolved some potassium bromide), that reaction goes a lot slower. The result, then, is that the development process doesn’t go out of control to the point where it’s giving you extra density where there shouldn’t be any (i.e., the unexposed bits of film.)

Well, there you have it. Like I said, I may have messed up some explanations due to the fact that I’m presenting my own interpretations of what’s going on at the molecular level. I’ve actually begun investigating some real photochemistry textbooks, and let me just say that there are not a lot to choose from. Please check the comments and any revisions to the page for corrections as I discover them. In the meantime, here are some Caffenol C-L images:

I follow a lot of photographers in a lot of different ways. There are the contacts I’ve made through the Film Photography Podcast, photographers I follow on Google+, Twitter feeds, APUG profiles, etc. etc. A lot of photographers these days have blogs, and so I subscribe to a lot of their RSS feeds. Fifty feeds, last time I checked. Every few hours, there’s some more content for me to read or view that’s photography-related, and more often than not, it’s related to film photography.

I think if you’ve read this blog for any significant period of time, then you know that I’m a big fan of Garry Winogrand, one of the all-time greatest street photographers who ever lived, and if there was anyone in human history who was addicted to shutter-snapping, it was him. It was also obvious that the taking of the photograph was more important than the subsequent processing and printing. The man died with thousands of unprocessed rolls of film, and thousands of unprinted negatives. Even for those that were fully processed, there were hundreds of thousands that still needed editing.

Back in May, thanks to our local summer used book sale in State College, I found a copy (at a real steal, by the way) of Figments from the Real World, a compilation book published by the Museum of Modern Art that features all of Winogrand’s photographs that were published in his books, as well as some material that was never published until after his death. At 260 pages, it’s a huge book, but I shudder to think about what an infinitesimally small fraction of his photographs it really contains.

Also consider the recent Hallmark-movie-esque story of Vivian Maier, an immensely talented street photographer from Chicago. Her thousands of rolls of film were purchased sight-unseen at an auction by one John Maloof, who has subsequently embarked on an immense project to gradually process, edit, and release them to the world. Similarly to Winogrand’s work, we have only seen but a small bit of what she actually shot.

Our world is a vastly different one. Neither Winogrand nor Maier had a blog to update while they were taking photos. Furthermore, photography was nowhere near as democratic as it is today. Many people had cameras, but most photos taken were the snapshot, and those who worked as professionals only did so after thoroughly learning their tools. Actually getting work seen was a huge deal, because it meant publication in print or exhibition in a gallery. There were people who stood between the artist and the art seeing the light of day. As photographers in a world that is used to everyone having a steady stream of content, we feel the need to pick our latest and greatest photos, then (most likely) upload them to a site like Flickr. The worst photographers (really, people who own cameras) do very little editing and upload 50 or so photos at a time. Most of us who are trying to moderate ourselves still might come out with the equivalent of a photo every day or so.

You might have noticed that this blog transformed from a carbon copy of my Flickr photostream into a forum where I mostly talk about photography, both in general and through my personal endeavours. I haven’t necessarily shot less (OK, not true… the weather has really sucked lately) but I am trying to edit myself more. (I have 800 Flickr photos, and that sickens me.) If I want to be a great photographer, a huge part of that is going to be not letting you, the viewer, see everything I do, because even edited, it’s not all the best it can be. It takes time to come up with enough content to put together a portfolio or collection that can even hope to compare to one of the greats.

So in the end, I’m locked in a struggle to share enough of my photographs to become somewhat appreciated for all the photographing I’m doing (as well as learn from other people’s perspectives on my work), while at the same time not putting out so much that it becomes boring or even valueless, especially when the time comes for me to put on my artist hat and try getting a gallery show or published book going.