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.

Yodica Films

Yodica Films - Atlas

My latest journey out on the streets was down in Brighton for Brighton Pride and this time I was shooting with film but not any old film stock but one call Yodica.

I first heard of Yodica films on the Sunny 16 podcast and was intrigued by the concept of the film.

Yodica is part of the growing trend in pre-exposed film, this is film that has already been exposed to either a light source or some other way of exposing the film, I have see films with aliens and UFOs or light leaks exposed on to them.

Yodica have 7 different film types out already, all with a range of bright saturated colours, the ones that grabbed my attention were Atlas and Pegasus, both of these have a rainbow effect to them but with Atlas being more random, unfortunately when I went to buy a roll of each both Analogue Wonderland and The Photographers Galley were out of Pegasus so I bought 2 rolls of the Atlas.

The film cannister and plastic cannister are wrap with a representation of how the colours look and is rated at ISO400 but if you peel back the wrap, you can see the original film is Kodak 200.

I'm not an expert on double exposure or film in general but have been told that 400 for the first exposure and 400 for the second will equal 200. 

I shot both roll in my Canon eos500n and as the film wasn't DX coded set the camera manually to ISO400.

Brighton Pride was a good day out, with temperatures in the high 20s and very sunny.

I shot a roll and a half of the Atlas, and though and hoped I had some goood images.

I had to wait a week to use up the rest of the second roll and then get them processed, this was a bit of a palava as my new local Snappy Snaps wanted to charge almost £20. 

So I ended up waiting another week and getting them processed at Jessops for £11.

Once I got the negs back and looked at them I was surprised how they looked. Scanning them revealed that although the Yodica colours were there and coming through, my images looked muddy and underexposed in a lot of the shots, in fact they looked about 1 stop under. I ended up with a lot of processing in camera RAW to try and get the images half decent. 

The best result I could achieve from this frame 

The images that I managed to get to look OK, were pretty interesting but some that were shot I just couldn't get anything out of them and a lot seemed very hit and miss.

Another one that I struggled with

I'm reviewing all this about 4 days after doing the scanning and I think I may know what the problem could have been with the images looking so underexposed.

Mr Gold

That Vintage Look

Unlike digital there is no exif data,so this is only a theory, the film is rated iso200 but both the pre-exposed and my shots were shot at iso400 to balance out the double exposure.

Now when I shot on the street, I use aperture mode and normal set between f5.6 to f8 and let the camera go with a shutter speed, as I said it was hot and sunny and I think the maybe the shutter speeds were to high, I remember a couple of times seeing 1/1500 and 1/2000 of a second. It could be that at these high shutter speeds I was underexposing even more and that would explain why some frames look OK and others don't.

Like I said I'm not an expert so this is all conjecture on my part.

So what do I think of this film stock?

Well it is a bit gimmicky and I think some of the purists in analogue photography may look at it as a film for the Instagram generation, but that doesn't bother me I think it's a fun film. If I could nail down the second exposure's better, maybe shutter speeds in the 1/125 to 1/500 would work then I think I would use it more especially for events were the added colour adds to the image. Images like Mr Gold and That vintage look worked really well.

I'm not sure whether Yodica films will get to read this post but if they do and would be interested in sending a couple of rolls to let me test out my theory, that would be much appreciated.

If you fancy trying Yodica films it can be purchased from either Analogue Wonderland or if in London the Photographer's Gallery.