Why film?

Sometimes I get asked why film? Surely digital is much easier, better, faster and although that is true, there is something special about film.

Digital is always consist, and always sharp sometimes to sharp.  Film can give you small inconsistencies and different film manufacturers, give different looks, Ilford Delta 400 is very different to Kodak T-Max 400, Lomography 100 to Portra 160 and this is one reason to shoot film. 

If you shoot 35mm the actual act of taking the image is the same whether digital or film, select your shutter speed and aperture, compose the shot, take the image but with film you have that waiting process to see whether the image is what you were looking for and this is half the fun of film the not knowing until the whole roll is developed.

And talking about developing, this is the part I enjoy the most. Mixing the chemicals, working on the timing for a the developed of a film and the process of turning it into images, I'm still amazed when I open up the tank and see the images for the first time.

Ondu Pinhole, FP4+ Negative 

Ondu Pinhole, FP4+

Another reason for film, is the different choices of not only film but cameras, from homemade pinhole cameras, 35mm, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, 5x4 the list goes on. For most of the year I have been shooting with a Coronet Superflash, which is a pretty basic camera, made c.1955.  It takes 120 roll film, the negatives are 6x9 and only get 8 images from it but the 1/100 shutter speed and 75mm lens still produces great results.

6x9 Coronet Superflash, Foampan 200

Another fun camera is the Lomography Sprocket Rocket this camera shoots 35mm film but gives a negative of 72mm x 33mm, so panoramic but its allows you shot into the sprockets and adds a little twist to the images.  You can allow double expose on the film and have the ability to wind the film backwards and forward to create unusually images. 

Sprocket Rocket 72x33mm Kodak 200

Sprocket Rocket without sprockets, accidental double exposure, Kodak 200

So that's the reason I shoot film.

Colour film

Continuing from the pervious post; B&W and Slide film processing is pretty easy, for B&W its normally just an invert and some minor adjustments to get the image looking good and the same with slide, although no Inverting is needed as its already a positive.

Colour film is whole different ballgame and can be very difficult to get a good colour positive, this is mainly because colour negatives have a orange mask to them, I can't say that I fully understand the reasoning behind it but this article helps to explain some of the reasons, with this is mind colour conversions are tricky.

Although over the last few years, software has been developed to help process good looking developed positive, software like Negative Lab Pro, Grain2Pixel and ColorPerfect, and although they all work well, the biggest problem for me, this they are only plug-ins for the likes of Lightroom or Photoshop, two software program I don't use.

There are some other programs out there, that can help to invert the colour negs like Darktable and RAWTherapee but I never find the workflow with them that intuitive. 

There was an app called FilmLab, for both iOS and Android but I find scanning with a tiny camera phone sensor not to give good results and ditched it.

This meant either scanning colour negs myself, which was a pain, to slow and the colours still didn't always scan correctly or have the film scanned at the lab and then send on to me, this proved to quite expensive especially for hi-res images, so it meant I stuck to B&W as I can develop, process and "scan" them at home and would only shoot the occasional roll of colour.

In the last few months FilmLab has come up with a new program and what is good about this is that; One it works on any desktop computer and two it's a standalone program, meaning I don't need any additionally software to use it.

Orange Mask, Colour Negative, DSLR Scanned

When it was first released it was subscription only, either monthly or yearly and having tried the trial version, I signed up for a year, although now you can pay a one off fee for a lifetime use.

So onto the actual software, the interface is quite basic but this is a good thing as personally I don't want to be changing lots of  slides and fiddling about with different settings.  When you first load the image into the program, it automatically converts to what it think the image should look like, and I have to say that most times its pretty correct and I usually go with that, sometimes it can be a little off and you have to go in and make minor adjustments.

FilmLab desktop

The program can handle colour negatives, B&W and Slide and can save the file as either 8-bit .TIFF, 16-bit .TIFF or a standard .JPG.

After conversion and saving the file, I then take it into PS Elements and do my final adjustments to get the image how I think it should look.

Final adjustments in PS Elements

Overall I'm pretty impressed with the program and love the fact it's a standalone program, the one and only issue I have had with it is, that when the first version was released 2.0.1 and installed it worked fine but a few weeks later, they updated to 2.0.2 and this was suppose to be an automatic update but mine never update, I did reach out to the developers and let they know and was told they would look into it but as yet I've not heard anything back, so this means the at present evertime I was to use the program I have to re-install from 2.0.1.  Now I don't know if this is because of my operating system or not but they have never asked about it or whether the problem is on their side. 

 

Pixl-latr

Back in September 2018; I wrote a post talking about digitising my film and showed the set up I was using.

Two years on things have changed a bit and I thought I would show the set up now.

In that time the Pixl-latr finally arrived in August 2020, and for the last few months this has been the main piece of equipment I have used for holding the negatives flat and being able to scan them with a DSLR.

Pixl-latr. Frame, diffuser and gates

The Pixl-latr consists of a frame, diffuser and a series of gates that fit into the frame to give sizes from 35mm to 5x4 and many sizes in-between.

My set up still consists of a daylight balanced lightbox and a tripod but instead of the film carriers from an Epson scanner the Pixl-latr does the job of holding the film.  The gates are set to which size you are digitising and the film is slid in-between the frame and diffuser, finally a vertical gate is placed in to separate the individual frames.

Pixl-latr with 120 6x9

As far I have used it to digitise 35mm colour and black & white negatives, 120 roll film from 6x6 to 6x9, it really is quick and easy to snap a RAW file of the image and then slid along to the next image, I can easily do a 120 roll in about 3 minutes and a 35mm roll in about 5.

One camera I have been shooting a lot with recently is the Lomography Sprocket Rocket, this camera shoots panoramic images and shoots in and over the sprocket holes on 35mm film, the Pixl-latr works great with this as to allows the sprocket hole to been seen, unlike the film carriers from Espon scanners.

Sprocket Rocket

The Pixl-latr has certainly made the "scanning" of film a lot quicker than waiting for a scanner to scan 6 images at a time.

First Film (well almost)

I wrote this article back in April, during the lockdown, it was for a photography website but it seems as through they didn't decide to use it, so I thought I may as well just it on the blog.

Not all the images are posted here, as there are a few duplicates.

Over the years my negative files have been stored in many different places and in that time I have lost some of the negs. 

The first real camera was the family camera and this was a Zenit-E, which was bought sometimes in the early to mid 70s, although plenty of prints from this era survive, the negatives have long gone.

The first camera I owned outright was the Olympus OM10, which was bought for me as an 18th birthday present, it came with the standard 50mm f1.8 lens. 

This camera went with me everywhere trips to Europe, motorcycle meets, hiking, even on my honeymoon in 1984 but again all negatives from this time have disappeared. 

The first set of negatives I did find date from 1987/88, I can pinpoint these dates quite accurately as the American football match was played in September 1987 and the tour shirt was a Fairport Convention tour in the early part of 1988.

Now here comes the strange things, the images are on Ilford XP1 400, a film stock I never shot before or again, I don't even know why I would have bought this particular film. Back then I was developing my own B&W, so why would I buy a chromogenic film, as my go to B&W back then was HP5 and I didn't shoot it that often, as I did like a lot of people and had my colour films processed at the chemist and this always meant a free roll of colour film back. 

The other funny thing with these negatives is that no prints exist from them, so I'm thinking that this is possibly the first time they have been seen as positive images. 

As for the images 28/36 and just the general stuff I would shoot, holiday snaps, and friends just having fun. 

The OM10 is nowadays seen as a bit of a classic; for me it's always just been MY camera, its shot images from most of my life from late teens to late fifties, weddings, honeymoons, births and it's still my go to camera for capturing life forty years later.

Update time

I managed to shoot a second roll of 120 in the Coronet for February and surprisingly I got some better images, I think I'm starting get use to it and I even managed 8 images from this roll.

Tuba Player

Burn in Hell

Although you can seen some light leaks in the first image, I think was because the roll wasn't very tight when I finished the roll and I think light seeped in because of that.

The second month of shooting and I decided to shot with a Kodak Brownie Twin 20, this camera shots 120 film but on a 620 spool, so this meant either buying 620 re-rolled film (which is quite expensive) or try rolling some myself.

Kodak Brownie Twin-20

120/620

 The way I went about this was to roll a 120 film in the Coronet and then take that into a changing bag and roll back onto a 620 spool, this worked out fairly well but the two rolls I did this to did end up been a little fat, so I was expecting to get so light leaks.

As for the camera, it is a little strange in that it has a normal eye viewer and also a waist level viewer but to be honest I found it to small to be of any real use. This camera also has 3 zone focusing modes, 4-6ft, 6-12ft, 12-infinity it also has a switch marked 13,14, 15 which adjusts the aperture. Although for some reason with the switch to 13 (the widest aperture) the shutter speed was very slow, not quite bulb but around the 1 second mark, so I decided that leaving it on 14 would be the best option.

The camera also is designed to stop you taking double exposures, so when take a picture you have to roll on, to re-set the shutter. Now I don't know whether it was because I re-rolled the film but after shot 3 the numbers in the red window show and it was always slightly out of sync.

After shooting the first roll, I realise that either the camera wasn't all that sharp or I'm not very good at shooting at slow shutter speed as most images were blurred or at least very soft.

Street shooting with slow shutter speeds

Pods

Between the first and second roll, C-virus hit, so this has put a limit on where I was shooting.

Although I like the form factor of this camera, small and discrete, I not sure I will use it again, as I'm not overly happy will the images it produces.

Box Cameras, ghosts and zines

So it a month since I posted and I said I was going to post more often, well that hasn't worked.

I wouldn't mind if I haven't been up to anything but I have, I've been out near enough weekend shooting something, two weekends shooting ghost signs and one on a photowalk with londoncamerproject.

I think the biggest issue, is actually shooting film.  I presently have 3 cameras all with various degrees of film partly used in them and as that mean I have nothing to show, and with this being a photography blog images are a big part of it.

I managed to finish one roll from the box camera and again instead of 8 shots I only got 7 and from the 7 only 2 were any good, as again I keep forgetting to adjust the lens distance scale but as its a year long project I might remember to change it by the end of the year.

Alley, Coronet Super Flash, Fomapan 200

Portrait

As you can see from the second image I forget to change the focus, which is annoying as I think this would of been a good image.

The ghost signs project is coming along really well and so far I have around 35 images, which is more than enough for a zine but every time, I go out I find new favourites and want to add them to it, at this rate the zine could end up being over 100 pages. I will need to trim this down, as I was only think of about 28 pages or maybe I will have to produce a volume II.

I haven't posted any thing from the ghost signs (other than the one image in the previous post) as I want to keep them fresh and hopefully if the zine works out, people will only see them for the first time there.

That didn't take long!

17 days into the new year and I have already bought my first bit of  'new' equipment, although it is an oldie.

There was a post over on Facebook about a new project starting and running for a year, I have tried year long projects before, a 365 which lasted about 10 days before I ran out of ideas and a 52 week project which lasted a couple of month but again ran out of steam.

I like to make my images mean sometime to me,  not just random shots of things like 'what I had for dinner'

Anyway back on the subject, this project this to shoot a minimum of one roll of film a month, starting on the 1st February. The difference is that its to be shot on a Box Camera but not having a box camera I needed to get on Ebay and buy one,  I also know nothing about box cameras and assumed they all took 120 film, this isn't true.

Not only is there is 120, but 620 and 127; 620 and 127 can still be got but are really expensive because of the way they are produced. So I was on the lookout for a 120 camera and again not knowing whats what, I went for a camera I liked the look of.

Coronet Super-Flash

I eventually bought a Coronet Super-Flash that takes 120 and again I thought that box camera all shot in 2 1/4 square format, again not true, this camera shoots 6x9 negatives so nice and big but this mean that you only get 8 shots per roll, which is fine with me, I think I can shoot 8 shoots in a month.

The camera is pretty basic, a shutter sped of around 1/40-1/60 + bulb, and a zone focus switch of either 1m-3m or 3m-infinity, it also has a built-in yellow filter which I guess is for very bright days and works like a ND filter.

I ran a roll of Fomapan 200 through it to make sure everything was working O.K. and it was, no light leaks and the film advances O.k although the  roll at the end was a little 'fat' and I thought is may allow light in but it didn't.

6x9 negative 

There is a dedicated Instagram account for the images shot by the group, which I think totals 22 members and can be seen at @projectboxcamera 

New year, new projects

So we are already into the new year and I have been thinking about the possibly of starting a new project and resurrecting an old one.

The old one is one I started last year but never really got to grips with how to go about it.  The idea was to photograph London streets after dark, this idea isn't new I have seen it done before but just wanted to have a go for myself.

So I have made start on it again and see how far I get this time.

London, After Dark

The Second project has to do with Ghost Signs, these are hand painted signs that have been preserved on the side of buildings for an extended period of time and have begun to fade.  Its strange how these signs seem to be all over the place but I've hardly noticed.

Ghost Sign, Old Vs New

With both these projects I would ideally like to turn them into a limited zine run.