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

One Film

Beer Porn

Yesterday I joined up with the One Film Facebook group.  The premise of one film is, to go out and shoot one roll of film on a given subject (yesterday's was Dusk) get the film developed at a 1 hour processing lab then pick your best three images to be judged with all the other participants. 

Yesterday started at 3pm at Charing Cross and was to end at 6pm and meet at Brewdog Soho for the judging.

There were roughly 20 people on this meet but unlike a photowalk, everybody goes their separate ways, some when to the Southbank, one even make their way out to Canary Wharf.

I decided to stay in the centre and went around the usual spots, Soho, Chinatown and the West End.

As this was a last minute decision for me to go, I didn't have a great deal of choice of that film I would use, so it was a 24 exposure ISO 200, poundland film.  As it would be dark for most of the shoot I took my Olympus XA3 mainly because this is the only camera I had that has a flash, not that it helps as I was reluctant to use it (I'm not a lover of flash).  The XA3 is full automatic so this meant a lot of slow shutter speeds as the light dropped and a lot of blurry images.

Horizontals and Verticals 

   

I ♥ London

Dinner for two

The real fun and social aspect comes once everybody meets up again in the Pub. It's the usual chat about where everybody has been and what they think they may have captured, its a nervous hour waiting to see what is going to come back from the lab.

Once all the films are in, everybody chooses their best three (mine are the three above) and David the organiser collects them and numbers each in a random order then lays them out for the judging to being.  The judging is via an app on the Facebook group and everybody gets to choose their favourite three, the one with the highest percentage of votes is the winner.

60+ images ready for judging. Red glow from the Beer Porn sign.

This was enjoyable event and definitely something I will attend again, though next time I will make sure I'm better prepared. 

Swap Crazy

Since my last post, it seems as print swapping is becoming a bit of a crazy.

Along with the Magnum one, which has now closed; there are two others that have appeared online.

The first is Photography on a postcard which will give the winners a change to be displayed along side artists like, Martin Parr, Dougie Wallace, Homer Sykes and many more well known artists.

Entry is free, and up to images can be entered, and with a shortlist of 200 being exhibited in October. Although not actual a print swap, the public will have a change to buy a ticket which will guarantee a photograph.

The second is part of Hoxton Mini Press' Street London Symposium, The Symposium is a three event over the 18-20 August and part of this is a Print Swap. This one allows up to 5 images to be entered and again a shortlist of 200 will be chosen.

Full details of both events can be found on their websites.

 Joel Meyerowitz exhibition at Beetles+Huxley

Fairs, prints and zines

Ed Templeton @71a London

For the majority of this year. I have felt pretty uninspired when taking pictures. Nothing felt new or interesting, I even started a project to try to make me to go out and shoot images, this has help but is now on hold for a few months but some other inspiring things have come along which I hope will help me to feel good about photography again.

The first of these was the Deadbeat Club's exhibition at 71a London.  The thing I liked was the down and dirty aspect of it, no fancy frames just images either pinned to a wall or hung with bulldog clips. It was all so grungy, so far removed from the usual stuff we would see at Beetles and Huxley or the Photographers gallery. Their whole ethos seems to be go and enjoy the taking of images but also support each other when the time comes.

This is alien to me, as I find photography quite a solitary pastime, I have shot with others but can find this counterproductive as we can spend more time talking than shooting and outside support is only from likes on social media. I am usually happy at looking at my own images and deciding what is good or bad (some may say the're all bad) but sometimes it would be nice to have a second option from people that shoot is the same genre, and have an understand of what you are trying to convey.

Offprint London

The second was Offprint London, an independent and self-publisher book fair held in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Along with some high end book by the likes of Daido Moriyama, there were loads of small self published works covering art, writing and especially photography.  There were some pretty random stuff along with run of the mills photo essays, which again got me thinking that there would be no reason for me, not to have a try at producing a small run photozine.

I feel as though images should be more than just 1s and 0s on a computer screen and the best way forward with this is either as prints or zines.

A collection of zines

Prints

My final piece of inspiration comes from a post on the Magnum website about swapping prints with other photographers. Now I know the article is talking about well-known high end photographers and we normal's don't have a chance to swap with them.

But surely within our own social media group this is a possibility, I have read that like click don't really mean that much but surely a like means you like that particular and if offered the change of a print of it, wouldn't you take it?

Print swaps may already be going on and I have join the party later than all the rest.