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| Island Cafe |
Last week I had a few days out shooting with the Canon eos500n and a Holga 120. In the Canon I had a roll of Tmax 400 and the Holga was a combination of Rollei 400 and Ilford hp5+. I was looking to start a new project, trying to capture some the of the hidden places in London, places that people won’t necessarily know about or walk pass without a second glance.
I was think about doing this project all on 120 film but wasn’t sure how well the Holga was going to work as I had only recently picked it up, so was covering it shooting with the Canon.
I ended up shooting 3 rolls on the Holga and just one roll of Tmax with the Canon. Not having any way to process the film at home, I needed to find somewhere to develop them.
I look at the local high street shops but I found snappy snaps to be to expensive and although Jessops could do develop only, on the 120 films for £5 it would take 2-3 weeks.
Looking online was a similar problem with prices ranging from £4 to over £10, eventually I picked out AG photographic in Birmingham who could develop the 120s and 35mm film for £3.99 each plus £3.50 return p&p, with freepost to send the films to them.
So on Tuesday I sent off one roll of 120 and the roll of 35mm, their turn round was pretty quick as I had my negs back by Friday.
The roll of 35mm was fine but the 120 from the Holga was a bit hit and miss, out of the 12 images about half were underexposed as they were shot in low light but I guess this is half the fun of shooting with a Holga. The images are not that sharp either in fact they are very soft, so the Holga may not be the camera for this project, I will have to see that the other 2 rolls are like when they come back next week.
Scan or digitised
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| My digitisation set up |
Up until recently I have been scanning my negatives on a cheap Epson flatbed scanner but the results have been mainly poor, fairly regularly I couldn’t get a sharp image and it would mean re-scanning with the film carrier set to a different height and to be honesty it was more trouble that it was worth.
A couple of weeks ago I bought a sigma 50mm macro lens for my digital Nikon, the lens is manual so gives me a lot of control when focusing in on the negs. The current setup is a daylight balanced lightbox I had from Jessops, a Nikon d5100 and the Sigma lens. F8 seems to be the best aperture when working on the negs and I shoot to RAW so I can make any adjustments in darktable.
So far I have digitised the one roll of black & white 35mm and one of 120 and the results are 100% better than the scanned images, and it takes a lot less time, as you only need to move the lightbox and re-frame, I also end up with 16 megapixel digital negs.
Below is the same image, the first is done via the Macro lens and digital camera, the second via the Epson scanner. Both have had no post production done to them and although the scanned one looks correctly balanced it is blurred. The digitised one is flat but this is the same for most RAW files.
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| Digitised |
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| Scanned |
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| Correctly balanced image |
I'm still looking forward to when the pixl-latr final shipping as this will hopefully help to keep the negatives flat, as I noticed that the 120 Rollei film was very curly.
The only problem I have had, with digitisation using the camera is with colour negs, no matter what I do with the negs in darktable I always end up with a colour cast which I can never seem to remove. I will have to keep working on the colour negs but for the time being I will be shooting black and white.
Update
I have now had the other 2 rolls of hp5+ 120 film developed, and although I've had a better return with images exposed correctly, I still ended up with some underexposed.
Also I'm not sure I really like the square format, so I think I'll be sticking with 35mm for the foreseeable future.
Previous I talked about getting print made up and looking into print swaps. This I've been luck to receive some prints this week from two Facebook groups, the first is Photography Print Swap hosted by Dustin Cogsdell, and my swap partner sent me a great street photography print and a wonderful booklet of his work. The other group is the Negative positives Facebook group and from my swap partner I receive 3 prints shots from the Caribbean.
If anyone is interested in joining The Photography Print Swap Group, have a search on Facebook or contact me and I will add you to the group.
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| Print Swap Prints |
