Remember way way back I was excited about the Leica M9. Well I was and I still am – sort of. If I have a need for something like a Leica but I must have digital output for some reason I will probably consider an M9. I am glad that it exists in the world. If I was a PJ and had to get images out right now I would definitely use one for a lot of my work. I am not so I decided that before I went...
I posted a brief note on my follies searching for an 8×10 sheet film that was “cheaper” than my favorites from Kodak. I was testing Efke R100/PL100 due to the fact that I can get it for about half what I pay for Kodak. I started with the 120 R100 and also have a small box of 50 sheets of 4×5 PL100. I was not going to shell out $100 just to test. So here is what I have found. The Efke 100 is workable but I am not going...
I had a reader ask me a question about film development. Specifically what my development times were for a particular film/developer combination. The reason he asked was he “liked” the way one of my images looked but he had issues with a development time/temp he got from “The Massive Development Chart”. Hmmmm…. well that depends on a lot of things. The most gigantic thing is YOU and YOUR process and how tight YOUR controls are and… To a much much lesser extent it has to do with water quality....
Way way way back I wrote a blurb that had a digital photograph of a medium format negative on a light table. You may remember it, I think it was called Photographers and Their tools or something like that. Anyway, after posting that I decided to ask a question over at APUG.com about not that specific negative but why Kodak Plus-X pan had a blue base. I still do not have an answer to that question but I did get some interesting info – depending on your process the...
I had a very interesting conversation on a discussion board over at APUG this week. I chucked up a couple of images that I shot while walking around. The shots were of stairs. Yep you heard that right – stairs. You see I for reasons unknown to me have some really strange compulsion to shoot stairs of all shapes and sizes. I have never made a “real” project out of it and am usually ill equipped to shoot them. Even without making it a concerted effort I have about...
Someone was seeking some advice regarding the Leica M9 and shooting his kids in one of the post comments a while back. I thought I would share some of the images from that last roll of eight year old Kodak Tri-X that I developed a couple of days ago. The images in the original post and these were some of the the images on that roll. Personally I believe that shooting your kids, your brother’s, sister’s, and neighbor’s kids is probably one of the most “important” and “valuable” things...
A quick update on my commitment to shoot film with my M6 prior to springing for an M9. Well, I finally got the kinks worked out of my development process and tools, so I am ready to go. Remember the first two rolls I sent through? Almost decade old TMZ and TRI-X? I found the answer of what was going wrong – it wasn’t me. The tank I was using had developed a crack that was invisible for the most part but not invisible to the film. I did...
This film was one of the few modern black and white triumphs of Kodak. It is actually unbelievable. I have shot a ton of this stuff in both 35mm and medium format. I really was not that interested in the TMAX line when it appeared on the scene. Of course I did some cursory tests of TMX and it’s siblings to get a feel for it but I never really dove in until availability of Agfa APX 25 started to become a problem in the states and ultimately disappeared....
Just a real quick post on my long overdue shooting film series, since I have been so big on shooting an M series film camera prior to taking the $9000 plunge for an M9 and meager Leica lens. Here is an old favorite of mine, always appropriate, renders skin tones well – a little too blue sensitive but hey that is what yellow filters were made for. Good ol’ Kodak Plus-X Pan. This example happens to have been developed in Kodak XTOL, a wunder-developer of the moment a decade...
Remember my ill fated new camera scheme back at the beginning of the summer? If you don’t here it is in a nutshell. Sell my relatively new stuff while the resale value is still high and buy a D700 and a D3x. Well I sold my stuff and in the short time that I was without it I realized my old stuff, my really old stuff like my D2 series stuff was just fine. There was no way I was now going to drop $10,000, even if most of...
