I have been toting the M6 and a lens or two around with me just about everywhere. I was even inspired to start a couple of longer term projects with it. I have shot only black and white so far and have used a mishmash of old 7 or 8 year old film I had laying around. Tri-X, TMAX3200 TMZ, etc. I have liked it so much that I actually put in a big film order for 35mm film last week. It cost me about $170 this will probably hold me off on “needing” an M9 for a long time.

The camera is great – having it with me is great – being “limited” to 35mm and 50mm is great. It is a freeing experience. I forgot what it is like to travel light. The film I have shot so far has it’s flaws. The biggest one is me but I am sure I will get back in shape in another month or two. The other flaws are that the TMZ is almost useless after 8 years. You have not seen fog like this. It’s bad. The Tri-X is useable but still fogged a bit. That is why I got new film. Point is it is cheap and it is fun and on top of that I get fantastic results – at least by my definition.

I also noticed that people are still voting on my Leica M9 poll. The results have cooled off a lot since the introduction. Far more people are not considering it as a purchase now. I wonder if the same demographic decided to make a future investment in something else or just decided they don’t really need a new camera? I hope it is the latter.

The image at the top was shot on my Leica M6 with a 35mm Summicron wide open or thereabouts. Really slow shutter speed – like 1/8th-ish, hand held in very very low light – very low backlight. A nightmare of an exposure situation when you need to shoot quickly. I kind of like the image  - it is interesting to me. Yea I know that everything is not in focus that is what happens when you shoot about wide open and close. Yea I know there is a little flare – that is what happens when you shoot into your light source in a big big way wide open. Yea I know there is subject motion. It is still interesting to me – I love the expressions on each of there faces – this was the moment when the wedding planner let the bride and her best friends know 5 minutes before the wedding was supposed to start that A) The flowers were not here and could not be located and B) The best man was not here with another one of the ushers and could not be located. Priceless and a great example of why you do not want me as your wedding photographer.

RB

I did order a replacement small batch tank and a bunch of fresh film. I ordered some fresh stuff in both medium format and 35mm. I figured if I am going to fire up the wet process there was no reason to just shoot with the M series. I will give my medium format film stuff some exercise as well. This is actually fun. The images included with the post are two frames from the beginning of that last roll that didn’t have any obvious faults. Again 7 or 8 year old TRI-X that I had never processed. There are actually a bunch of frames that have some potential. I wonder why I chucked this roll to the side way back when? Most likely I got busy with commercial stuff and didn’t have a slot for the the film type/developer for it and forgot about it.

For anybody that is remotely curious the developer that I have been using is Pyrocat HD in glycol. I have a bit of experience with it in the past and now that it comes premixed in glycol it should keep extremely well – the glycol doesn’t do anything but preserve the stock solutions better than water but that is important if I am not going to be doing high volume work. The liquid kit cost about $30 and makes 50 liters of working solution. For my uses that is about 100 rolls of film. I could probably double that if I change my process a bit but 500 ml is about the practical limit for a single roll of film in my setup. So I guess the price is about 30¢ a roll – not too extravagant.

The fresh films that I ordered are Kodak TRI-X 400 (TX), TRI-X 320 (TXP), TMAX 100 (TMX), TMAX 400 (TMY), and Efke R100. For the uninitiated, the TX and TXP are completely different films – both wonderful – but Kodak should have probably named them something completely different. The only thing they have in common is spectral response. The TMX is one of my go to films, the TMY is the new version that I have never tried so I am going to calibrate it and see what I think – just in case TRI-X goes away or maybe I will be surprised and find that I love it for some reason. The R100 is to see if this is actually the same really old style stuff that gives me results like Veripan – I tried some of it a long time ago and it had a really nice scale so we will see.

RB

To warm up the old darkroom skills I figured that I would round up a bunch of old unprocessed film that I seem to have accumulated. Don’t ask – there are a million reasons that I have unprocessed rolls of film laying around. I started with one that I knew would be a bear. TMZ shot at 1600 in 2002 – at least that is when I wrote the date on it. The results were absolutely horrible, probably the worst thing that has ever come out of the tank. That includes worse than my very first roll of film developed when I was like 13 years old in the parents basement. I did figure out why this roll was not ever processed, which at least satisfies my curiosity.

The reason that this particular roll was not processed was that it is fairly obvious that I opened the camera while there was still film in the camera – ooooops. I am sentimental, I kept it so that I could process it when I wasn’t so backed up with “real” photographic work just to see. Well that was seven years after. The list of issues goes on from there.  The fog is so bad that you can’t even see through the film – it is now “frosted’ instead of transparent. It has grain that nobody could love – either that or the coating has reticulation from some abuse over the last 7 years that I forgot about it or I screwed the pooch with temp control and shocked it into reticulation. In any case I am not at all deterred. Well I am a little deterred, namely I am not going to shoot any of the expired TMZ that I have – that is headed for posterity labeled “DO NOT SHOOT – IT WILL LOOK HORRIBLE”.

I will keep you up to date on the M series quest – I am going to shoot the M at least as much as I shoot digital for the rest of the year to make sure that I really really want a digital M.

RB

To answer a whole category of questions in one fell swoop – Yes I like pyro developers and have found PMK to be very consistent. Yes I do think that some pyro developers have some unique properties that act differently than other developers on a particular film. Yes I am will be glad to post some more films/pyro developer combinations. No I am not going to post specific development times/temps/agitations etc. Not because I am stingy, it just goes against my philosophy what is valuable and what is not. I will be glad to write a little bit more about some general findings regarding dilutions, etc.. If anyone is having an issue or has a very specific question regarding film development, email me and I will be glad to share specific experiences and opinions with you.

I guess I confused a lot of people with what appear to be contradictory posts regarding pyro based developers. In the post on Ilford HP5 plus and PMK pyro I said that the combination is one of my favorites and has some very special properties that make it useful and beautiful even though HP5 plus is not one of my favorite films overall. In fact it is not my favorite film for pyro development either. In the 80% of everything is nonsense post I used an example of two very different films in two very different developers, one being PMK pyro, both calibrated to show how similar the results were. Both sets of comments are absolutely true and completely independent. The point I was trying to make but came off looking like I did not thing PMK was worthwhile was that a lot of information and observations out there regarding a film/developer/etc. are anecdotal with no control over the variables. For instance person #1 uses film A and developer B, then tries something else completely. Different film, different developer, different scene, some random processing times/temps/methods and likes the result “better” than what he was getting before. Wow now there is some great and useful information (not). This is the kind of stuff that gets communicated most of the time. Even by professional photographers. Useless.

Hope that clears things up. Oh one other thing – Yes I shoot Tri-X, in fact Tri-X is probably my desert island film. I will get around to posting some experiences with it and some samples using various developers as well – that might take a few posts to the shooting film series.

On a final note just to reinforce that you need to try things on your own, make your own judgements. The images included in this post are probably one of the least likely combinations of film and film developer that you will find. I kind of remember a lot of people who “knew” what they were talking about recommending against it way back in the day. To be fair my first couple of tries and guesses were a disaster. I figured out what I thought went way wrong, made some corrections, tried again, lather, rinse, repeat. Long story short this is TMAX 3200P (TMZ) shot at ISO 3200 developed in PMK pyro. No shit.

RB

RB

Maybe I am a bit old fashioned but even my very first digital body looked fantastic at ISO 200 compared to film of a similar format at similar enlargement sizes. At ISO 1600 it sort of looked like 800 speed film at similar format and enlargement sizes. I was much more interested in how well it differentiated tones and color rendition and handling. Maybe that is why I never really chimed in and ranted and raved about noise. Maybe that is why I really liked the Nikon D2H.

Anyway for those that have not shot film and never care to I thought I would give you just a little bit of perspective. The shot at the top of the post was on 35mm TMZ, TMAX 3200P for you non-film people, shot at ISO 1600 developed in XTOL 1+2. The scan has no image sharpening and a real quick levels adjustment to get it to display like a print on grade 2 Ilford Gallarie (the only print of that neg I have laying around). The scan was 4000 dpi on a Nikon 8000ED scanner. As a note real black and white film is not the best stuff to scan in the world and you are looking at a completely neutral 8bit JPG, meaning you can only see 256 tones in this image. That doesn’t even come close to the tonality of a real print of this negative. What you can see is the image noise.

Here is a 100% crop to give you a better idea of what 35mm ISO 1600 film looks like:

Here is another one to give you a better sense of it:

Does the “noise” have anything to do with wheather this is a good image?

RB

Ps. Yes I did actually shoot a couple of weddings in my day.