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. 

 

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.

Odds & Sods

I haven't been up to much over the last couple of months but in the last couple of week's I've started getting out and photographing again.

The first thing to happen was that the Kodak 2238 project, I was part of had a zine printed for all the photographers taking part, I think in total there was 30 people involved and we each got to have 2 images in the final zine.  I call it a zine but to be honest its more like a book, it is perfect bound and has around 56 pages.

Kodak 2238 Project

Through October we have had the Extinction Rebellion going on in London and I managed to get along to Trafalgar Square and capture some images of the protesters.

The Red Brigade in black & white 

One of the film podcasts I listen to is the Sunny 16 podcast and over the last few months, the hosts have been doing assignments, and encourage listenersto join in, the last one was to photograph Day into Night and I thought I would have a go at this one.

I decide that for me, the easiest way for me to achieve this was to take a series of images over a set time (a bit like a time lapse) and then blend them in photoshop.  I decided that the best palce to get this shot was from the Southbank looking back across to the City of London, with its high rise building and hopefully the lights from the building. 

I worked out what time sunset would be and thought I would start shooting about an hour before that and take an image around every 20 minutes or so and shot for about 3 hours to cover a good period from before sunset until dark.

Things started out well until the rains arrived 2 hours into the shoot, although I didn't get as many images as iI would of liked, I did get enough to produce something that worked out O.K.

I sent the final image into the sunny 16 podcast and it got a good response from the hosts, if you'd like to listen it is on Episode 176

Day into Night

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

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.

Keeping up to date

I really try to keep this blog up to date but life gets in the way.

Since the last post; I have managed to get a place on Photo24, so the end of June will see me tramping the streets of London.

Pop that spot

I made a trip to Dublin but didn't shoot a great deal, mainly because it was a family holiday and the weather wasn't that great.

I also had another try at 'Workshops', this time over on Google+.  There are a great many photographers on G+ and some have banded together to form what is called the The G+ mentorship program for photographers. The mentorship I was on was called finding your vision: street photography.

The way it works is that a community is set up and each week for a period of eight weeks, you are given assignments by the teacher who has experience of that particular genre. For each week you then post a selection of images and then receive feedback.

As we all know most people don't like to be critical of others images, so  feedback can be a bit skewed. I don't want to bash this like the other 'workshop' I did, as I did get something out of this one, and it was free and the people running it give up they time freely.

I just think I'm not cutout for doing workshops, I'm not even sure that street photographers need workshops, did Cartier-Besson, Winogrand, Erwitt, Friedlander, Leiter, Meyerowitz, Arbus, Levitt the list is endless, ever go on street photography workshops.

NOT a double exposure, reflections in a window

Also for a bit of fun I have joined in was a film challenge, its a double exposure challenge, there are about 14 people involved.  The idea is that you are paired up with another photographer and you both shoot on the same roll of film.  I have already shot my 36 exposures and have send the roll to my partner, I'm just waiting on him to shoot his and then get the roll developed.