More Kodak 2238

Last weekend was a nice bright and sunny day, so I took a trip into London to shoot the second roll of Kodak 2238 black & white film.

This time I wanted to shot more street stuff and the first person I captured was Melvin, a street dancer in Leicester Square.

Street dancer Olmpus OM10 50mm 1.8

The film is really great for portraits, as the above image shows, along with the Olympus 50mm 1.8 the subject really pops and there is great bokeh.  I managed to capture a couple of other portraits but one problem shooting wide open I did miss focus a few times.

I thought that shooting on the streets with this film might be a problem with it being so slow but on a bright day I was able to have reasonable shutter speeds and set the aperture to around F4-5.6 the one of the Hen party was shot at this setting.

Hen Party

One place that can really mess up shutter speed and cause problems is the book market under Waterloo Bridge, its pretty dark under there but again the film worked well and managed to capture the images I was after.

Book browsing. Under Waterloo bridge

I really like the tones I seem to get from the film and I like the high-ish contrast the images produce.

I'm on the look out for somewhere to buy more of it, in either the U.K. or Europe as so far it only seems to be available in the U.S.

There is also talk of a zine being produce from images from all the photographers involved in the project. 

In the last post I mentioned the fine grain in the film, below is a 100% crop and as you can see the grain is pretty hard to see.

What; No Grain!

Kodak 2238 Project

Back in April, I was lucky enough to join in with a group of film photographers on Facebook, who were trying out a colour separation film. This film is ment for backing up movie film and not as a film for shooting photographs.

The film is black & white 35mm and rated at between 6 and 25 ISO. With such a low ISO, I needed a camera and lens with a good wide aperture, so I went with my Olympus OM10 and the 50mm 1.8 an a 28mm 2.8

As very few people have shot images with this, it was going to be interesting to see what the the images would be like and how to go about developing the rolls of film.

Once I received my two rolls, I was keen to get out and shoot the first images with it. I'm not one to usually shoot cars but I have seen this VW beetle around in the last few week and wanted to shoot it and this seemed like a good opportunity to shot both it and this film.

I rated the roll at ISO 25 and went of looking for the VW. I not only found the VW but also a Chevy van that had been stripped back to the bare metal and ended up shooting the whole roll on these two cars.

VW Beetle

Stripped Chevy

As this isn't a normal film, there isn't any real information about development films, so people within the group are working on using different developers and times.  I went with Rodinal for 16 minutes and mixed at 1:50.

As it is a low ISO there is very little grain in the images.

I hope to shot the second roll on either some street scenes or maybe some street portraits.

Scan or Digitise

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

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.

Digitised 

Scanned

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.

Print Swap Prints