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.

How much film?

Instax

I seem to have built up a supply of analogue film. I recently bought a Instax Square to go with the wide and mini cameras, along with 40 shots for the square and 30 for the mini, luckily these have a fairly long expiry date so I wouldn't have to shoot though it all yet.

As for 35mm film; I have been gifted 5 rolls of the stuff and it all ranges from Kodak Gold 200 to Colorama 200. The Colorama is the free film's, you use to get back from the chemist when you'd had a roll developed by them.

The rolls range in date from 2007 to 2010, so pretty well expired, it with be interesting to see what results come back once they are processed.  I have already started shooting with the 1st roll for 2007, which I shot on a film photowalk, yesterday in North London.

5 rolls of expired 35mm film

Although the film is rated at ISO200, I have been told its best to shoot it at ISO100, so that does mean that brighter days will be better.

If the results come back OK-ish, I do have a possible project to use the remaining 4 rolls on.

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.

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.