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.

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

Photo24

I'm writing this on Monday 2nd July roughly 2 days after photo24, I'm still feeling the effects of being up for nearly 24 hours. I guess I did around 18 or the 24. My scanner is working away in the background, scanner the negatives from the roll of cinestill 800 I shot, over the 24 hours. 

 

I had some technical issues with my digital camera, which I'll go into, so I ended up relying more on my film camera and shot through the cinestill a lot quicker than I imagined.

I also used a roll of lomo 400 colour film, which I had to push 2 stop to 1600 as I was be now shooting in very low light.

The lomo film will probably have to be sent away because I don't think snappy snaps or Jessops can do pushed film, so I'll have to look into finding somewhere to send that away too.

The cinestill images look to be pretty good, I shot about half the roll on the steampunk people in banksy tunnel along with some of the graffiti down there and later in the evening photographing people spinning fire down on the Thames close to the Oxo tower. The lomo film has the tail end of the fire spinners but it maybe a couple of weeks before I see the results of the particular film.

Stempunk, Cinestill 800

Fire spinner Oxo Tower beach

The issue I had with my digital camera was that the batteries for it are not that powerful and so I usually carry 4 with me.  Which when all fully charge I probably get a couple of days shooting with, but for some reason 2 of the batteries didn't seem to charge, which I didn't find out until I was a few hours into photo24 so this only left me with 2 batteries which I more or less burnt through by 11 o clock in the evening.

Luckily enough I live close enough to London that I was able to get the last train home and manager to get the batteries charged over the next few hours. And I was able to to get back on into London for about 6 the next morning.

The heat was a major problem as it just seemed to be hot all the time, even in the late evening, I was glad I had decide to only take one digital camera and one film camera and the minimum amount of equipment I needed. There did seem to  be a lot of people carrying big heavy packs and a lot of equipment which did seem to weigh them down.

During the 24 hours there was an hourly challenge, each hour there was a theme set and the images were to be uploaded to the photo24 Facebook page, I did enter a few images in some of the categories as there was the chance to win £1500 worth of Fujifilm equipment. Unfortunately none of my images made the shortlist.  There are 2 more competitions with are best street scene and best london scene, I can enter up to 6 images in both but as yet I haven't decided if I have anything worth entering yet but again both of these have a chance of winning £1500 of Fujifilm equipment.

Legs

The event ended at a hotel on the Southbank with the announcement of the 24 hours challenge winner and all the people who finished got a t-shirt. 

The whole experience of photo24 was quite good, I got to meet some new people to shot along with and although I never stay with anyone in particular it was good bumping into other photographers and having a chat while out and about. I will definitely think about doing it again next year, if selected and now know how things work I'll probably do things a little differently.

So that's the end of my photo24 for this year, I know I said I would try to record some pieces while out but there was so much going on that I just didn't have time.

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.

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. 

What I did on a day off

Yesterday I popped into Central London to pick up some film, for my OM10 and look for a roll of 120 for an old camera I found.

The film was bought at The Photographers Gallery; which has Wim Wenders, Instant Stories on at the moment a collect of 200 Polaroids.  I didn't fancy looking at that many small images but its on until February so plenty of chances to see it.

As usually I had my RX100m2 with me but I couldn't really see anything worthwhile shooting, this tends to happen to me when I haven't been out shooting for a while.

Crossing over to the Southbank didn't improve things, as the undercoft was devoid of any skateboarders (not surprising on a weekday).

Next stop was the Tate Modern, the Turbine Hall is filled with lots of three seated swings and lent itself to some images of adults on swings.

1-2-3 Swing!

Not having really having explored the Tate since the Summer of last year, I had a wander around to see if there was anything of interest to me.

The first thing was a giant print by Daido Moriyama called Memory 2012

Memory 2012

Nowadays we all seem to worry about super sharp images without any noise or grain in them, this image goes to to show the great images don't have to be all about sharpness.

Next up was Stephen Shore's American Surfaces, this is a collect of 72 prints form Shore's road trip across America in 1972., the idea was to explore the country as an everyday tourist.  All the images were shoot on a Rollei 35 and Shore shot hundreds of rolls of film, which were then developed and processed in Kodak labs across New Jersey.

Shore's work shows us the a snapshot of life in America in the early 70s, the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday life of motel rooms, grotty lavatories, food on tables, odd people and shop fronts.  This series by Shore helps to elevate colour photography to a  fine art level, which had up until then the preserve of black & white photography.

Stephen Shore's American Surfaces

One thing I didn't know when I saw these images in their frames and matted in the Tate; that when Shore first exhibited them, he wanted people to know that they were snapshots and they were just stuck to the wall, so that people could see that they were Kodak snaps and he felt it made they a cultural object.

Workshops; Are they worth it?

On Saturday I did something I thought, I'd never do and that was to go on a street photography workshop. The reason I never thought I'd go on one is because I was never sure that I would learn anything from one.

Now there are probably hundreds if not thousands of these workshops going on, they seem to be quite popular with a lot of people running them as well as attending them.

The one I was on had twelve attendees plus two 'instructors'.  My reason for attending was that I felt my photography had stalled and I felt I needed help to move forward.

 

The workshop was centred around Soho which is an area I am quite familiar with.

We were separated into two groups to go and do some street exercises,  which was basically walking up and down Gerrard and Lisle Street (Chinatown) acting more like a tourist than a street photographer.  The exercise to me felt pretty pointless and didn't really add anything to the way I would shoot or like to shoot. 

Endless Love
Could I have captured this image without a workshop?
Answer: Yes

This went on for about an hour, and with very little feedback from the instructors after this we broke for lunch which was in Costa, with such a big group, it wasn't easy to chat to the instructors unless you were sitting close to them and they didn't seen to be talking that much anyway.

I spent more time talking to a couple of the other attendees, mainly about cameras and the different workshops they had been on, for some this was they third or four different workshop!

After lunch we moved into Trafalgar Square and was shown a few examples of abstract street photography and told to a find similar things, this time we were told to just wander around and more or less left to our own devices.

There was some kind of demonstration going on, in the top part of the square so this was easy to pick up shots around here, but again nothing that I wouldn't normally shoot on a Saturday in London. 

We were give around an hour to 'work' in the square, I shot some stuff but have to admit the square isn't one of my favourite places to shoot, its to open and as silly as it sounds, there are to many tourists.

I spent a fair bit of time talking to another attendee, who didn't think it was a good workshop, his comment was 'it was more like a sponsored photowalk'.

Red Hat
Ok; not a great image but no better or worse for being on a workshop

While walking around I did bump into one of the instructors but he didn't ask how things were going or pass on any advise on where or what to look for.

Next we move on to Soho and again there was some vague instructions about light coming into the streets and how to use it. 

Again Soho is a regular shooting area and  I know the streets well and where to look for shots and good light and again we were left to ourselves to wander around and to met up again in a hour.

So I just walked the usual route of Berwick St, Broadwick St, Carnaby St, Brewer St and Wardour St.  By now the light was starting to fade, so it was a quick trip back to Chinatown and a quick walkthrough what we had 'learnt during the day'.  

Silhouette
Not difficult when you know where to look

A few of us swapped instagram handles and there was talk of a hashtag to attach to any images uploaded but as yet, neither of the instructors have acknowledged anything I have posted.  I never had a real chance to ask any of the others what they thought of it but not sure that this is the done thing.

I tend to be quite obsessive with any thing I do, be it music, books, collecting memorabilia and will consume vast amount of information on a given subject, I can honestly say that I have learnt more watching youtube than I did on this workshop. 

Over the last few years I have put on photowalks, and have always tried to make them interesting, mainly because its something I want to do.  Usually it is just a core group of people I called friends but sometimes an acquaintance will come along and I try to help them with as much information as I can to help them enjoy a trip to London.

These are my thoughts a week after the workshop and I'm still not it 100% sure how I feel. I don't think the workshop was worth the money, there wasn't enough interaction with us (the attendees) the structure of the workshop was quite flimsy and personally I think there were to many people attending.