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    Review: Canon Sureshot A1 (Autoboy D5)

    TLDR: Its a waterproof point and shoot that works very nicely

    I bought two Canon Sureshot cameras. The first has a broken battery door and a non-functioning mode select switch (it is permanently on auto). The second one is working perfectly, came with its original case and strap, and has already had a few rolls of film put through it without any issues. I ended up with two because I thought the first was a bargain (even if I did have to tape the battery door closed). It was a bargain, until I found the second which actually ended up costing me a little less than the first. The joy of online auctions. What this does mean is that I have a spare, and this is no bad thing if repairs ever rear their ugly head.

    The motivation to pick up an A1 is discussed here – I basically wanted something that I didn’t need to be worried about taking out in the glorious British weather, and whilst the Ricoh LX-33w did successfully fulfill the weatherproof requirement, the pictures it took were far from wonderful.

    When new, the camera cost 42000 yen (about £280 apparently), so no cheap and cheerful holiday shooter. It is fully waterproof (rather than just weatherproof), and multiple sources state that it was ‘the world’s smallest and lightest underwater camera’ back in 1994. None of these sources state where this assertion came from, but given how few fully waterproof cameras were about in 1994, it is not hard to believe.

    The camera puts 25 to 3200 iso film (DX coded) behind a 32mm f/3.5 lens, picking an appropriate shutter speed from 1/250 up to 2 seconds. Settings are minimal, with an auto mode, flash always on, flash always off, and the mode that is marked on the dial with a little fish icon. ‘Fish mode’ is actually a macro mode for things that fall into the 0.45 to 1 meter away from you category. Presumably this works as well on land as sea, but its clearly designed with taking pictures of fish in mind.

    Autofocus is quick, even in challenging conditions. Canon gives numbers for both land (0.45m to infinity) and underwater (1m to 3m); Macro: 1.5ft. to 3.3ft./0.45m to 1m. This is the first indication that Canon didn’t take a similar approach to Ricoh, and just take a regular point and shoot out of their Sureshot line, and add enough plastic and rubber to make it waterproof. There are a couple of other obvious clues: The body has chunkier ergonomics than most cameras, with a nice ridge on the right hand side to ensure you have a solid grip and it is beige, with red highlights, I guess so that if you drop if in the ocean you can retrieve it. The last, and for me biggest thing is the viewfinder. It is a big, bright viewfinder that you can use at a fair distance – Canon reckon the:

    Albada viewfinder has a long eye relief, making it easy to view even with a underwater face mask or ski goggles.

    It hadn’t even occurred to me that waterproof means snow safe, but the camera will definitely be coming skiing with me in the future. What the viewfinder means for me is that even on the dull, rainy days I want the camera for, it is still easy to compose an image. It compares favorably even to larger SLRs, even if it does have a big red surround.

    It has been said elsewhere, but the way this camera looks could be a positive or a negative for you. It is not understated, looks fairly toy-like (though far less so than the yellow Minolta cameras that form the rest of the waterproof 35mm offer), and its unlikely that too many people are going to be taking you too seriously if you pull this out of your camera bag. But, for street photography, which, with its quick auto-focus, this camera isn’t the worst choice for, its out-there appearance may help to put you into the ‘ridiculous tourist’ category that sometimes unlocks some great shots. I actually kind of the like the way it looks, but this is probably because it looks like something I would have wanted to use when I was eight (which was how old I was when it was released.

    The A1 does exactly what I want it to do – allow me to take photos of some sort of quality in bad weather.

    Review: Ricoh LX-33w

    TLDR: Its not wonderful, but its very cheap

    I wanted to pick up a camera with waterproofing, or at least weatherproofing. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first is that high humidity environments are the quick route to fungus infested lenses and rusty pieces of exposed metal, and one of the things I find most anxiety inducing is thinking about a steamed up camera going back into a bag or case. The second, perhaps less cerebral reason, is that it rains (on average), on over 100 of our 365 days in a year here in London, and I was getting frustrated with losing a third of my shooting days to weather – especially given that if (/when) it is going to rain here, you can guarantee it will be on the weekend.

    What is interesting is that whilst pretty much all higher end digital cameras released in the last few years have featured at least some degree of ‘ingress protection’, weatherproofing is far from widespread in the world of film. Options are pretty limited to super niche cameras designed for divers or disposable style things meant for kids to take in the pool on holiday. The former, meant for taking pictures of fish and shipwrecks were over-priced and over-kill for taking some pictures in the rain. They also look ridiculous (almost all are yellow). With promises of plastic lenses and pre-loaded unidentified film, the latter also didn’t inspire much confidence.

    Between these two ends of the weatherproof camera spectrum sit just a few other cameras, I bought two of them, and I think with that I am pretty much in a position to say I own a pretty large percentage of the offer in this space. First up is the Ricoh LX-33w.

    The W (which stands for weather resistant) is tacked onto the end of the model designation in the much the same way as the weatherproof itself is to the camera – the LX-33w is very much operating in the ‘take something cheap and functional, and stick on some rubber gaskets’ space. The camera takes 100 or 400 film (dx coded), puts it behind a f4.5 lens and automatically selects a shutter speed of 1/50 or 1/100 depending how it feels, and that is about it.

    It is a fixed focus camera, so there is really very little else going on when you take a shot, and this does mean that it does things very quickly. I reckon the chances of anything closer than about two meters being in focus are fairly low, and anything beyond that I wouldn’t put at the sharp end of the spectrum either. However, in good light, I did manage to take some ok pictures. I had a lot of issues with camera shake though, especially at the lower shutter speed.

    angel statue

    The biggest cause of this camera shake? Firing the shutter. This involves pushing a big, foamy feeling button. That is as about as unsatisfying as it sounds, and you have to push it hard enough that if shooting one handed you are liable to destabilize the whole camera as you do so.

    Two hands required then. However, for holiday pictures in sunlight the camera would definitely have a place in my pocket. And this is clearly where Ricoh felt like the camera was heading too, with a textbook example of a ‘put two black bars on my picture’ approach to a useless ‘panorama mode’, and a prominent red-eye reduction button. The sliding lens cover is its one killer feature as far as I am concerned, meaning it really can be thrown in a bag with no concerns for its safety. It is a camera for snap-shots, and at this it does well in the right conditions.

    Panorama

    The problem is, I bought the camera in the hope of using it in the wrong conditions – I’m not currently taking pictures of friends posing on some sun-drenched Roman ruins before heading to the beach – I wanted something for rainy days and misty walks, exactly the gloomy conditions the camera seems to hate.

    Hampstead Pond

    But then, perhaps I am expecting too much. I paid very little for the camera and as such, because I can see the day when I will take it out with me somewhere in our future, I don’t think its the worst value for money. Though plastic, the weight is confidence inspiring, it has the standard, exceptionally loud Ricoh carriage sound, and the lens is just about serviceable (and it has that cover). Pick one up if you see it for anything close to nothing, but just don’t expect to use it on a rainy day.

    Goodbye Ricoh GR1 (or, why you shouldn’t buy one)

    TLDR: My GR1 broke one too many times, learn from my mistake.

    I bought my GR1 specifically with the aim of having a small camera I could take anywhere, to take full-frame 35mm pictures with. It was amazing, I bought one got it repaired and took it on holiday – then wrote a review about how much I loved it.

    I sold what I am calling its ‘corpse’ a few weeks ago. The story of its demise is a good reminder of the dangers of buying old cameras – especially electric point and shoot cameras.

    So what went wrong? Well the critical part of the first paragraph here is ‘got it repaired’. As noted in my first review, its almost impossible to get hold of a fully working GR1, and that you should factor repair into the cost of purchase. I paid a fair amount to get the LCD and film advance mechanism on my camera repaired, and thought I was good at that point. What I wish I had done is asked myself one question before I bought: Ricoh isn’t making these cameras anymore, they are not repairing these cameras anymore, so where do the parts come from?

    The only answer, which now seems completely logical, but which I completely missed in the excitement of a new toy, is that the parts come from other broken GR1s. Repairs of this, and most other old cameras, are always going to rely on an ever decreasing set of parts cannibalized from other cameras. This is why these repairs are so costly, because you are paying for a small chunk of another camera.

    I am far from the first person to have this issue – especially with a camera like the GR1, prone to issues with small electrical parts, the rotation of working/repairable/repair donor cameras is more noticeable than with most.

    With my camera, it was working as well as could be expected (LCD semi-working, everything else good). I put it away for about six months whilst a global pandemic took hold (which was actually a prompt to take out my big EOS 5), and when I took it back out of the cupboard again, the shutter would no longer fire, and it semi-frequently didn’t turn on. No knocks, no dropping, no slow decline, just a few attempts to replace the battery to make sure, then acceptance that it wasn’t working.

    I had a choice, did I accept another expensive repair, which is the route I would have taken if I had not read about other peoples similar repair experiences, or did I let it go. And off it went into the ether of ebay for someone else to (probably) take apart and use to repair their own GR1.

    So I was basically back to square one, and looking for a replacement. I knew that whatever happens I am accepting that by buying an old camera, reliability is never going to be as good as if I was getting something new – but I did have a few options in terms of approach:

    Accept repairs: I have painted a slightly bleak picture of the repair options with these cameras. But its important to note that this really applies to these small electrical cameras. For larger SLRs, there are far more parts around, and once you get into the really rarefied air of Leicas etc. the costs of repairs are nominal compared to value of the camera. So option one was to go with another GR1 or similar, accepting that I’d have to set aside some money for repairs down the line, and enjoy whatever I bought whilst it lasted.

    Buy your own donors: The next option is to do a bit of research on price points for working/non-working cameras. With the GR1, where there are a couple of things that consistently go wrong, prices of broken cameras are still pretty high, but for some cameras you can pick up a good example for a fair price, and then pick up a broken camera for next to nothing. Here, if you find something with a broken lens (for instance), but working electrics, you can be confident that you can reduce the cost of any future repairs with your donor camera – always useful to have that insurance policy in your cupboard.

    Compromise: As noted, these repair issues are much less prevalent with fully manual cameras without the delicate electronics. These cameras also tend to be larger SLR cameras which are so common that repairs are much more affordable, or even (given that you can change your lens) replaceable for less.

    The money from the GR1 ultimately stretched to not one, but three replacement cameras (another reason to reconsider a GR1 purchase, they might be slightly over priced at this point). There was one overarching thing that tied these purchases together – a lot of research. The main thing I wanted to do was make sure I didn’t buy anything without first knowing what I was getting into in terms of reliability, usability, build, longevity.

    This meant not just reading reviews from when the camera was new, but also the (probably) ten to fifteen years of other peoples experiences with the camera. I have said this before, but it is worth reiterating – one of the best things about film photography is that very little is completely ‘new’, and even for the least widely used stuff, there is usually at least a few people talking on forums about their experiences. I paid attention to these this time, and I hope, ended up with some good stuff.

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    Test strippin’ – dark-room gadgets for lazy people?

    TLDR: Neither of these test strip makers are worth buying.

    Dark-room processes – given that they have been around for basically forever you’d think that every possible innovation must long ago have been made. To find out if this is true, in this post I’ll be exploring two (not especially) new innovations that might make the whole process simpler. Is a new era of efficiency upon us, or should all just accept that life in the dark-room will never change and make like Ansel Adams it for the rest of our lives?

    This all began when I came across a couple of tools designed to make that most critical of dark-room processes a little simpler – they are ‘test-strip makers’ – little gadgets designed to help make the process of making test strips a bit more precise.

    The first of these promises to really turn the whole process on its head. It’s a little piece of translucent plastic with a graded pie on it, it is pretty self-explanatory:

    Print Projection Calculator Scale

    With its grandiose promises of saving me ‘time, money AND chemistry’, I picked one up and headed to the darkroom. Diligently following instructions, I exposed for a minute:

    test-strip example

    So apparently all I needed to do now was choose the piece of the pie that I thought looked best, and expose for the length of time suggested.

    Cornwall

    It wasn’t entirely successful – in theory the section of the pie I chose, and the final image should match. I actually chose the 32 second exposure, even though this ‘felt’ like it was going to be too long. Those suspicions were confirmed, and the resulting image came out darker even than the 48 second segment. I was fairly confident that I had been diligent about the rest of the process, making sure that the only thing that was changing was my exposure times. There were some issues with the negative I was using for this experiment, (which you can read about here), and I wanted to give the tool a fair shout, so I had a few more tries, and ended up with the same problem each time, massively over exposed images.

    I think the degree of over exposure was consistent, I think it may be possible to spend some time with it and re-calibrate the suggested times down to where they might work properly. However, given that I was promised time saving, this didn’t seem like something I wanted to do.

    As for the other two claims, that it would save me chemistry and money, I don’t really understand how this would work, given that I still need to process my exposed ‘pie’ sheet in exactly the same way that I would a test-strip. Equally, the size of the test exposure is bigger, meaning that more paper is used, actually costing more money. But for these claims of time/money/chemistry savings I could almost forgive the ‘test-strip maker’ it’s questionable performance if it was sold as something that might help you get around having a really accurate exposure timer, or even as something to help people who might struggle with making a traditional test-strip for whatever reason.

    And so, I moved on to the second test-strip making tool I had bought along to the dark-room – the ‘Paterson Test Strip Printer’.

    Test strip maker

    I slightly take issue with the use of the term ‘printer’ in that whilst this thing aims to help create a regular test strip in a slightly more controlled way, but it certainly doesn’t ‘print’ it for you. The instructions do a pretty good job of explaining how it is used:

    Paterson test strip printer instructions

    As you can see, it’s potentially a nice way to get a good even test strip without having to move a piece of card. However, you will still have to put your strip though the same chemistry as usual, and you’ll still have to stand around flipping down those flippy things every three seconds, so it’s not really going to save you any time. That said, Paterson don’t make any claims about this thing – it is sold as a test-strip printer, that’s all it claims to do!

    In use the Paterson Test Strip Printer is a bit of a nightmare. The first issue is that you have to have a very specifically sized piece of paper, which fits into its ‘grooves’. Anything too big bows up in the middle, and anything smaller doesn’t stay in place.

    The other issues relate to getting your image in focus on the test strip. Unless you work out some sort of system to hold the thing in place under the enlarger (I am thinking blue tack) it is going to move around a bit as you flip down its flippers. Likewise, it raises your test-strip paper up slightly, meaning that unless it is exactly the same size as your easel, you are going to have to re-focus the image when you are done making the test-strip and have moved the tool out of the way. Obviously, it is not critical that your test-strip is super sharp, but it’s important that it is clear enough for you to determine the correct exposure time. My attempt looked like this:

    Cornwall0002

    In conclusion, neither of my wonder-tools for test-strip making turned out to either save me time, or make a better product than I would have got using an old piece of card. Neither were they any more fun/intuitive/easy to use than the old piece of card method either.

    This is not to trash the companies that make these products for trying, and there might even be a place for them for some photographers process, but it has become clear throughout my experimentation that these innovations fall very much into the category of ‘if it aint broke’. I know there are some cool dark-room innovations out there, which I will definitely be exploring in the future, but most of them seem like were developed home-brew style to solve creative problems, rather than trying to refine a process that is already pretty tight. Sticking with the cardboard method yields acceptable results.

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    Accidentally over exposing Lumography Lady Grey by four stops

    TLDR: I over exposed a film by a huge amount, but it turned out ok.

    Whenever possible, I get my film supplies from Parallax in Brixton – they are wonderful, knowledgeable, and the pricing is competitive. They are also not open over the holidays. So, with precious few days remaining before jetting (metaphorically, in reality we drove) off to sunny Cornwall for a few days, I needed to find somewhere else to get a few rolls of film.

    I ventured out with no particular place in mind, but aware that if all was lost I could stop at snappy-snaps and pay £8 for a roll of HP5. On my journey I walked past the Lumography store in Soho and wandered in. I have never considered purchasing anything from lumo (I am not sure about spending that much money on a camera made of plastic that makes your film look like an Instagram filter). I ended up purchasing three rolls of ‘Lady Grey’ for what I believed to be the not completely unreasonable price of £16. Some internet searching later reveals that Lumography Lady Grey is re-labelled Fomapan 400, so £16 is completely unreasonable. Thoughts about the plastic camera shop confirmed.

    The story really begins with the realisation that Lady Grey is not DX coded, no surprises there given that the Foma isn’t either, although it is beyond me as to why anyone is making film without DX coding. My camera assumed an ISO of 100 for non-dx coded film, so loading the 400 ISO should simply have involved setting the exposure compensation down two stops to make sure everything was going to work correctly.

    However, holiday over excitement led to me doing the exact opposite, and accidently setting the exposure compensation to +2. Now my camera was not only exposing for a 100 ISO film, it was adding another two stops of exposure. I didn’t notice anything amiss until I got towards the end of the film and the day began to become darker – then the noticeable amount of time the shutter was open for each shot became apparent. By this time though I only had a couple more frames to shoot, so I left everything as it was and decided to see what happened when I developed the film.

    The result really should be massively over exposed images. Developing the film normally would be an extremely risky strategy – pulling a couple of stops, no problem, but pulling so many that I am not actually sure what ISO the camera was shooting for (something less than 25?) would require a different approach. As the developing time for 400 films is relatively short anyway, reducing this didn’t seem viable, so I decided to do a stand development with a reduced amount of developer. So I mixed up a 1/100 dilution of Rodinol then left the film swimming for about half an hour. This was entirely unscientifically based on dividing the 120 minutes that ISO 400 would take at 1/100 by four.

    Amazingly, it worked. My negatives are not perfect, there are a couple of frames where I think the developer has given up, they are quite flat and the pictures I took in the middle of the day are still, definitely, over exposed.

    This gallery has some examples with no post processing.

    What is kind of amazing though is the tolerance the film has to over exposure, and even with a completely experimental development process, how forgiving the film has been. There are at least a few frames of perfectly usable images – I took the whole roll to the darkroom yesterday and there is still more than enough detail left to make some nice prints. What is perhaps helpful is that some of my favourite images were shot in some lovely hazy weather, into some ‘sort of’ sunshine. Perhaps the print I got from the frame below isn’t perfect, but it is certainly evocative. You can buy a copy if you like.

    In conclusion – Lady Gray – it’s an ok film in an emergency, though it costs  more per roll than Foma 400. Check your camera settings carefully before you start shooting. Don’t give up hope on something that hasn’t been shot as it should be, it’s a perfect opportunity to try out something new in the development process.

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    Review: Ricoh GR1

    TLDR: The GR1 is almost perfect, but you’ll need deep pockets to find one in working order.

    Update: I sold the GR1

    In the process of selling all of my digital gear, it became apparent that I needed a 35mm camera to replace my old Olympus Pen, which was small enough to fit in a pocket, light enough to go anywhere, and took great pictures.

    The only way I was going to get down to the sort of size I needed was with a compact camera, and with an eye to lens quality, it had to be a fixed length premium compact camera – of which only a few really exist.

    I was looking at the Leica Minilux, the Contax T3, or the Ricoh GR1 that I eventually bought. The T3 was way out of my price range, and I am not about to join the red dot brigade with a Minilux (I am waiting for the lottery win, so I can go with something really stupidly overpriced).

    Before we even get to what the camera is like to use, we need to address the biggest issue you’ll experience with the GR1: it is (nearly) impossible to get hold of one in fully working condition. I had to accept that whatever I was are paying, I’d have to probably double it in repairs.

    This is for two reasons, the first is that no one sells mint condition GR1s, because no one wants to part with them, and second, because the notoriously fragile LCD display will be broken on any one you buy. All the screen does is tell you how many shots you have left on the roll, and which shooting mode you are in, but it won’t work, and you’ll have to pay to get it replaced.

    The camera I eventually bought was sold as ‘in perfect condition’ which in reality meant that everything worked except the LCD, and the motor, which sounded like a motorbike revving up every-time I took a shot, and the lens sometimes didn’t extend. These things may be possible to solve with a trip to the repair shop (and are apparently so common that people are fully set up on ebay just to do these specific repairs if you trust sending your camera off to the unknown). If they are solvable, they are not cheap.

    However, a broken LCD, and apparently even the nosiest motor in the world had precisely zero impact on my use of the camera I bought. I shot three rolls with it in this condition, and all came out perfectly. I had no idea how many shots I had left, and I couldn’t touch the mode dial, but the lens on this camera is so good that as long as you can (no matter how noisily) get some film behind it, good photographs emerge.

    In terms of negatives, there are really only a couple more to mention: The viewfinder is tiny (but then so is the camera). It only sets ISO with DX, (if you care that much buy the next model up, or save yourself some money and get some DX labels).

    So on to the positives. Remember how I said I had still got great results out of the GR1 even without the LCD screen working? This is because since I have had the camera I have touched the ‘mode’ button about once. It’s a fixed length 28mm lens, so there really isn’t a great deal that a mode button can do. One mode sets the focus to infinity for pictures of far-away things, another sets the focus to pretty close, for pictures of things that are close. You get the picture. I have used absolutely none of these, mostly because the focus is extremely fast and accurate anyway, but also because with a 28mm lens, you’d be hard pressed to get anything that is more than a few meters away from you out of focus.

    The second positive is that it’s the smallest camera I have ever held, smaller even than most disposable 35mm cameras.  There is absolutely no way you’d ever get a digital camera with a full frame sensor this size, even with the latest technology. It fits in a pocket with room to spare and is light enough that you can easily forget that you are even carrying it. It has stayed in my bag since I have got it, and never once thought ‘I am going to save some weight and leave that out’. Its size means it’s always with you and never a burden. If the best camera really is the one you have with you, then it’s the best camera is probably the GR1.

    The final positive is really why people like this camera so much – it has a small but sharp fixed focal length lens that outperforms some cheaper prime lenses. It is wide, but doesn’t distort at the edges, and opens right up to 2.8 without anything too dramatic going on. Generally, all there is to say about this lens is that if you told me it was twice the size I’d still be saying it takes good photographs. Aperture can be left alone in programme mode, but for those that want to there is the option to set from 2.8 up to 22. The camera does a great job with exposure but that little dial does mean you have a good deal of flexibility at your fingertips.

    Given its diminutive size, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were not getting much for your (not inconsiderable amounts of) money with the GR1, but in reality you are getting a brilliant little photo-machine, that you’ll want to carry with you all the time.

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    The Bathroom 35mm Developing Kit Shopping List

    When I started using film I knew I wanted to develop it myself, but I also wanted to avoid spending a great deal of money on equipment that I might only use a couple of times. I have also always quite liked the DIY ethic of putting a developing kit together for as little money as possible. Fast forward a few years, and through a mixture of ebay, freecycle and other people being generous with their old kit, I basically have a pretty great home development setup. However I still get asked fairly regularly what I use, and if it is expensive. 

    So I put together ‘The Bathroom 35mm Developing Kit Shopping List’. Full disclosure, I put this together a couple of years ago, but I think all of the prices are still pretty much accurate. What the list does is outlines everything you’d need to develop black and white film at home in your bathroom. There are three parts – one column gives you everything you could possibly need (the total is £141), another gives you some cheaper/free alternatives if you want to get started for as little money as possible. This comes out at £56.60 – not bad if you are on a budget. Finally, the last column gives an overview of what the item is/is for. 

    You can download the list as a PDF here: The Bathroom 35mm Developing Kit Shopping List

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    Selling all my digital gear

    TLDR: I like film more than digital

    Initially, using 35mm was a fun experiment – something that felt a bit more involved and thoughtful than digital. Then, I started to use 35mm more extensively, bought different cameras, and acquired everything I needed to develop film at home. After this I also gained access to a dark room and learned how to print my pictures, slowly realising that I was taking pictures that were absolutely on par, in terms of how much I liked to look at them, as those I was taking with my digital camera.

    At this point I would say I was using film about half of the time, but digital was reserved for holidays, when I felt like I would be taking a lot of pictures. Then came an experiment in Scotland, where I took nothing but an old, fully manual 35mm camera, and three 36 exposure rolls for a one-week trip. After this I decided, I didn’t feel like digital was adding a great deal to my life.

    There are a number of more pragmatic reasons for this. I have acquired a Ricoh GR1, which I will write about after using it a little more, which is absolutely tiny (far tinier than any remotely capable digital camera), and is still full frame though. Equally, after my Scotland holiday I picked out some of my favourite images, did absolutely zero post-processing, and put them in a book. They were covered in dust where I had left them for a couple of weeks before scanning them, and on one of the rolls I had used a lens hood meant for a longer lens – so they have a big vignette. They look like something that could have been shot on an Arctic expedition. This was the first time I had done anything at all with pictures taken on holiday, and it was purely because I had shot them on film.

    But more than all of this, the most important reason to own and use a film camera, is simply because it is more fun. Taking a picture on 35mm film is a mechanical, chemical process – you create a tangible, irreversible change that, if treated well, will last for the rest of your life. You are limited by the amount of film you want to carry, and so you think about what you want to record. And finally, developing and printing your pictures is like magic. You’ll never get the thrill of pulling a roll out of the developing tank, or seeing your image appear in the dark room by plugging in your USB cable and clicking through your images.

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    End Points: Half way thoughts

    If this blog is a little incoherent, it is because I am writing it on the train home from Upminster, the station at the East end of the District line.

    I travelled to Upminster as part of End Points – a project to take pictures at the ends of all of the London underground lines. It is as much about the journey as the photographs – I wanted to get out into the bits of London (and beyond) that I would have no real reason to go to otherwise, discover new places, and wander around them for a few hours taking pictures (and usually getting something to eat). It is not explicitly an ethnographic study, but the places that we live are interesting, and I like to explore. Importantly, it has never been the aim to ‘capture’ these places in a photograph, or boil them down in some way to a few images – the project is all about my responses to the places I visit, and then, hopefully, getting some nice pictures.

    Upminster is significant because it marks the half way point of the project – I have been heading to stations in no particular order, this one just happens to be the one I picked today. However, I thought, as we’re half way there, it might be a good time to reflect on the project, and what I have learned so far.

    Learning 1: What is interesting?

    What I hadn’t banked on is that I’d have to drastically re-evaluate what makes an interesting picture. Some of the places I have visited so far with End Points have been, subjectively, boring! I started the project with Chesham – ‘village like’, green, cute, nice graveyard, then Brixton – vibrant, graffiti’d, busy and exciting. After these, Morden seems lifeless. There is no graffiti in Morden, the streets are quiet on a Sunday morning and you only need walk for five minutes and you are into roads with seemingly identical houses for miles.

    However, if (and it is an if) miles and miles of suburban houses really is all that Morden is, then this is what I should have been taking pictures of – just because I have thought pictures of people, markets and shops, trees and gravestones are cool elsewhere, this isn’t what makes a picture interesting, and it is certainly not what captures my responses to Morden.

    Learning 2: It is important to wander

    One of my favourite pictures from Morden is a set of tumbledown lock up garages. I liked it because it could be anywhere – the overgrown road feels like it is in some rural village. The picture was taken almost directly behind the train station, down a tiny alleyway with a sign asking people not to use it as a toilet, and past some kids hanging out of a window asking what I was taking pictures of. I didn’t have to wander far, but I did have to leave the high-street and venture down an unpromising looking alleyway to discover the picture.

    End Points picture of Morden Copyright Timothy Whittlesea

    I have not set any rules for myself about wandering – keeping vaguely close to the station is important, but some of the places I have visited are so small that finding 36 interesting photographs could be quite a challenge without walking a fair distance to see what I discover.

    Learning 3: Prepare to be unprepared

    Most of the places I have visited have taken a fairly significant amount of time to get to, more than enough time to do a little preparation – perhaps look up some significant buildings, see what the locals recommend, maybe even decide where to get some food. However, I didn’t do this with my first station, and I have decided I won’t do it for any of them. Somehow, being completely unprepared feels right. Sure, I might be missing some amazing photographs, I am sure that I have been just one more turn away from something special. But the project is about experiencing a place as it is – not through the lens of trip-advisor, yelp or Instagram. As a consequence, the pictures are representative of my time in that place, rather than someone else’s – and what I thought was interesting was what I came across on that day.

    Learning 4: How many ends are ends?

    I set out my end points at the start of the project. The issue was with lines that have more than one branch, so, technically, have more than one end point. In this situation I have chosen to travel to the station at the end of the furthest point from central London. As I see how significant the differences are across all of the places I have visited though, I am beginning to think this might do a disservice to the branch lines, and the stations at the end of them. It would be a much larger undertaking (I’d be perhaps a quarter of the way through now, rather than half) to visit the end of every line on the over-ground network (which I have assumed is one single line) and the DLR, however, it might be what makes the project feel like something that is really complete.

    For now, I think I am going to finish the initial list – then I will make a decision about where to head next.

     

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    Film Comparison: Kentmere 400 Vs Fomapan 400

    TLDR: Differences are minimal, both are cheap, Kentmere very very slightly better.

    I have been using Kentmere 400 for years now, primarily because its comes in at the cheaper (cheapest?) end of the spectrum compared to Ilford and Kodak offerings, but also because I think it performs better than its price point. I guess that having used it for so long is also a factor, but I have a lot of confidence in Kentmere 400.

    I decided to give Fomapan 400 a try after discovering that it is exactly the same price as Kentmere 400. Why experiment with something new when I am comfortable with Kentmere? Well because as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, ‘Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you are doing”. 

    The experiment started by shooting a roll of Kentmere 400 and a roll of Fomapan 400. The only concession I made to scientific method was shooting them both on the same day, so there were similar lighting conditions. But, as might have become evident at this point, my film choices are not exactly highly informed, I wasn’t about to shoot test targets or anything ridiculous like that – I just used both films as I usually would, then developed them according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Some have noted that the foma offering doesn’t perform well at box speed, whereas there seems to be a fair amount of confidence in the Kentmere film working at 400. I shot both films at box speed, and didn’t experience any issues. 

    Lets talk grain. I developed both films with rodinol, so a good deal of grain was to be expected. I chose the images below specifically because they have some big chunks of sky.


    Fomapan 400


    Kentmere 400

    Excuse the scanner artefacts – looking directly at the negatives, there is perhaps a very small difference in the darker areas of the sky, but this is marginal, so marginal in fact that I am not really sure you can call a winner. 

    I am interested in contrast in less than optimal conditions, and the detail we’re able to pull out of specifically the darker areas of the image. Both of the images below are lower contrast than anything I’d ever print, but as you can see, whilst we still have some detail in the shadows on the Kentmere image, our Fomapan has some pretty fine detail right across the image. It is nice to know that detail is there, especially if I was thinking of taking this negative to the dark room and might want to pull it out in some of those areas:


    Fomapan 400


    Kentmere 400

    I take most of my photos outside in standard British weather, and I need a film that can be under or over exposed occasionally and still give results that I can get acceptable images from. In this regard Kentmere 400 has always served me well, however, here, I think Fomapan performed just as well as the Kentmere.

    Now we have a dilemma, my one roll experiment seems to be telling me that the Fomapan 400 is not a bad film for my taste – the issue comes that reviews of this film are absolutely all over the place. Some people love it, some hate it. This really seems to centre around people getting very variable results in different developers, the sense that you’ll get excessive grain (especially in Rodinol), and that the film doesn’t shoot well at box speed.

    So which is the better film? I can definitely see that whereas the Kentmere 400 is tried and tested, seems to give consistent results, as I have personally found, and is generally quite well respected as a cheaper 400 film, the Fomapan 400 is divisive. It is a bit of a marmite film that gives some very different results depending on the use case.

    I absolutely understand that for someone looking for a lower grain and more of a modern look the Fomapan emulsion isn’t going to work, but then, I am not really sure that the Kentmere 400 would meet this requirement either – neither of these films wins in that department. Personally though, as someone who accepts, even likes grain, and isn’t averse to the look that you’ll get out of both of these films in Rodinol I am definitely thinking that the Fomapan offering will get a few more chances to impress.

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    Is 35mm film really that expensive?

    TLDR: Not really.

    Is shooting film really as expensive as everyone thinks it is? ‘Expensive’ is pretty subjective, so here we’ll be measuring the cost of shooting film against the one thing that is universally agreed upon as ‘how much?!’ expensive’ – A pint of beer in London. Apparently, the average pint in the capital costs £4.20 – we all know this average is bought down purely by Weatherspoons and boozers that no normal human would want to set foot in, so I am going to go with what I expect to pay for a pint at any self-respecting London pub: £5.

    I am going to look at my own process, from shooting a roll of film to having a physical print in my hand. There are other ways to do pretty much every stage of this process, but I think I have honed pretty much the cheapest.

    So, with our yard-stick in place, let’s start looking at the cost. There are five things you’ll need to buy before you start – non-consumables. These are a camera, a lens, a film developing tank, a changing bag and a film scanner. We’re basically going to ignore all of these here, because everyone that complains that film is expensive is shooting with a digital camera, and you can pick up everything on that list for significantly less than a vaguely good digital camera (probably about £200 for everything unless you are going all out). The good thing about this is that the camera and lens you’ll be picking up for next to nothing at the second-hand camera store is likely to be, optically, significantly better than anything but a high end DSLR, and in some cases it might use the same lenses anyway.

    So we’re ready to shoot some film. The film I use the most is Kentmere 400, this costs me £3.70 for a roll of 36, or close to 10p a photo.

    When we’re done we head home, crack open our film canister in our changing bag, roll it into our film developing tank, and pour in our developer. There are heaps of different developers out there, but I rarely stray away from tried and tested Rodinol. Rodinol costs about £12 a bottle, and its single use. Sounds expensive right? Well, its mixed into a solution with water before use, and to develop a single film, you’ll probably not be using more than about (I use just over) 10 millilitres (obviously this depends on the size of your developing tank). So out of one 500ml bottle of Rodinol you’ll get about 50 rolls of film, that’s 1800 pictures – in financial terms, less than a penny a picture, or 24 pence a roll.

    The next phase of the process is a stop bath, which is another ‘one bottle will make an awful lot of stop bath’ situation. More importantly though, a few washes with water will achieve the same goal, and this is even cheaper.

    Next up, fixer. The same as Rodinol, fixer is mixed into a solution before you use it. It costs about £10 a bottle, and you can mix up perhaps four or five solutions per bottle (we’ll say four to keep the math simple). Unlike Rodinol though, fixer can be used more than once, and I will usually wait until I have a few films to develop before I mix up a batch. So again, to keep the math simple we’ll assume I run only four films through the fixer, we’re looking at 62 pence per roll of film, or close to two pence a picture.


    Now you are pretty much done – you might want to rinse your film in some wetting agent, but a litre bottle of that makes up 201 litres of solution, so it will basically last you forever. Because we don’t want to get into the math of adding on fractions of a penny I am adding it to the start-up costs and forgetting about it.

    Negatives are dry and we have got them scanned into the computer. We are at the same point as we would be with a digital camera and we have spent around £4.50 on our roll, or 12 pence a picture. Yes, we have spent more than the zero pounds that shooting with a digital camera costs, but we have still spent less than the price of a pint.

    We also have our negatives, something physical for all of our effort. However, I stipulated at the start that we’d be looking at the cost of 35mm from taking the shot right through to having the picture, as a physical print, in our hand. You have two options here:

    The first option is to scan the negatives and get them printed. The service I use charges 9 pence (though there are often offers that make it much less than this) for a 6” by 4” print. Obviously, because I have digitised my negatives, this would be exactly the same regardless of whether you used a film or digital camera – there is no cost benefit to digital over film here.

    Where film starts to work out cheaper though is when you are looking at larger prints. You can often use the same chemicals that you used to develop your film to make a print in the dark-room. Yes, you’ll pay for paper, but on a per-print basis this is significantly cheaper than buying larger prints of digital photos. For example, 25 sheets of 8” by 10” paper will set you back about £17 – 68 pence per sheet, whereas to get a digital print of the same size will cost you £1.25. The difference of 57 pence is more than enough to cover our 12 pence per photo cost of developing, and the same again to make up all the chemistry you’d need to develop paper prints (even assuming we’ll be making up more to fill up trays).

    There you have it – shooting a roll of film costs less than a pint, and, in the very specific case of wanting an 8” by 10” print its cheaper than digital. On top of this you have all of the benefits of 35mm, here I am talking about top notch equipment that costs next to nothing, full frame, archival storage of your work, beautiful pictures etc. etc. but that is beside the point – just remember, every time you hit the shutter on your 35mm camera you are spending about 12 pence, about the equivalent of taking a sip of beer.

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    Canon 500, 50E & 5 EOS – Consumer Vs…

    TLDR: More expensive is better, but not much better.

    When we speak about a 35mm SLR camera body, we are basically talking about a light proof box with a hole in it, and a way of mounting the important part of the whole thing, the lens, in front of some film. Someone with some tape and some cardboard could, in theory, create a camera body that produced images of identical quality to those out of a camera that costs many thousands of pounds (looking at you red dot fetishists).

    With that in mind, when we’re reviewing 35mm cameras without taking into consideration the lens, we’re basically reviewing usability. And usability, unlike image quality, is entirely subjective.

    We’re looking at Canons EOS series, the 5, the 50E and the 500. For anyone unfamiliar with the Canon numbering system, the lower the number the ‘better’ the camera, but because the series has been around for a long time, (well into the digital age Canon simply put a ‘D’ on the end of the numbers now) differing release dates mean that a more recently released camera with a higher number might be ‘better’ than an older one with a lower number.

    The 5, the 50 and the 500 represent a spectrum of EOS cameras, from something like entry level with the 500, a camera for the more serious photographer with the 50, and the 5 representing a semi-professional, or ‘prosumer’ model. Canon call these ‘entry level’, ‘enthusiast’ and ‘professional’ levels. Our 5 and 50 are in the ‘enthusiast’ class, and the 500 is ‘entry level’. These days they can all be picked up for less than £50 without lenses, but when they were released the price difference between the 500 and the 5 was significant.

    Having all three cameras at once meant that I was able to explore what an ‘enthusiast’ gets that a regular human doesn’t, and see whether it makes any difference at all to me as a camera user in 2018.

    The biggest difference is the size and weight of these cameras, the more you are paying, the more you are getting, literally. The 5 is a heavy lug with a lens attached, whereas the 500 is much smaller and lighter. I shoot primarily with a 40mm lens, and whilst the body of the 5 dwarfs this pancake, it looks right at home on the 500. None of these cameras are going to fit in your pocket though, and if you are investing in a good quality strap the additional weight of the 5 isn’t a huge issue.

    That extra weight on the 5 and 50 means extra features. Note here that all three cameras have aperture priority, shutter priority and full manual modes – basically all anyone should ever need – so any other ‘features’ are all really just part of the process of convincing us that these cameras are not just boxes with square holes. An example of this is ‘eye control’ – a feature that was introduced on the 5, then left with the 50. This mode lets you select a focus point just by looking at it. It’s very cool – I have no idea how it works but the camera knows where you are looking in the viewfinder, highlights the nearest focussing point, then focusses there! Its magic, and the first time you use it you’ll feel like you are in blade runner. Then you turn it off and never use it again. Same with the many other features the 50 and 5 have over the 500. There is only one custom feature I have turned on which is available only on the 5, and that is to leave a small section of film outside of the canister to make home-development simpler.

    Frame rate is also fun to compare, the 500 has a frame rate of 1 – you point your camera at something and it takes a picture. The 50 betters this with a frame rate of 2.5. This means you can hold your finger on the shutter button and take a series of shots in quick succession, more than two a second. The 5 though is ridiculous – it has a frame rate of 5 per second. This means you can burn through a standard 36 frame film in less than eight seconds. This is a faster frame rate than some modern digital cameras, and remember this camera isn’t just opening the shutter, it also has to move the film along for every shot. The 5 also has some insane shutter speeds (8000th of a second!) – like everything else, unless you are doing some extremely specialist photography you are never going to use these features.

    Why is the 5 my go to camera then? I could take out the 500 and save some weight. It’s all about the autofocus and metering. Let’s get the boring one out the way first – the 500 does some tricky things with its metering designed to make it as easy as possible for anyone to take well metered shots, it involves weighting and averaging the light across the frame in a way I don’t understand. The 50 gives you more control, with 6 zone evaluative metering, and the 5 does better with 16 zone evaluative metering. The upshot is that with the 500 I have found that shots are less likely to be correctly exposed, and that performance in lower light varied a fair amount from an external meter. The 5 however gives me consistency whether I am inside or out, and with a range of different films.

    The autofocus is more important to me though. I don’t really care so much about autofocus zones, even when shooting digital, and the many autofocus zones that offers, I frequently just set my camera to the centre zone and go (for reference the 50 offers three, the 5 offers 5 and the 500 just has the one zone). What I do care about is how quickly the camera focusses. Obviously, this does depend on the lens used, but a quick test across all three cameras with the same lens reveals a big difference in terms of speed, especially in low light. The 500 is not bad, especially outside on a sunny day, but the 5 is blisteringly fast even inside – so fast in fact that it outpaces my digital camera, and outside in the sun its barely noticeable that its even doing the work. I don’t really understand how auto focussing works, but the 500 also fires out a white light, almost like a mini-flash to aid its focussing, up close its quite off putting. The 500 and the 50 obviously still have to use something to aid focussing, but it’s a more discrete red that doesn’t seem to light up everything in sight.

    This is the only real difference between these three cameras in terms of my everyday use, a matter of milliseconds in terms of focus. However, it is not all about time, its more to do with trust. I absolutely trust the 5 to get the shot in focus, even in challenging conditions, and I know that when I point the camera at something, even if I don’t have time to properly compose the shot I will get something usable. When you are shooting digital and can set your frame rate nice and high and fire off the camera until its perfect this isn’t such a big issue. But on 35mm, unless you want to call on the 5s ridiculous option to run through a roll of film in a matter of seconds having confidence that you are getting the shot (nearly) every time is why I’d recommend climbing the consumer to enthusiast ladder, and for the sake of 20 or 30 extra pounds to find a well looked after example, you’d be mad to take the 500 over the 50 or the 5 (plus, you know…eye control).

    Developing 35mm film in homebrew beer

    TLDR: It didn’t work very well, and I am dubious about what the beer bought to the party.

    I recently bought a roll of Foma Retropan 320 film – it comes in a nice hipster brown canister and the 320 speed is obscure enough to make it vaguely interesting. I was half way through the roll when it occurred to me to investigate how to actually develop it, and some research revealed two things: for best results you should be using a film-specific developer, and that others have commented that the film does not play well with rodinol.

    I wasn’t about to go out and buy developer just for one roll of film, so I did the next most obvious thing – I developed it in beer..and some other stuff…

    This idea was mostly prompted by this video and some further research into what was actually going on in the developing tank when you add beer, vitamin C and washing soda.

    I won’t bore you with the details, but I was a little dubious about what the beer was actually bringing to the party, when you are adding two other things to a mixture that look suspiciously like chemicals you do wonder, but I pressed on nonetheless.

    So there are a couple of things to note about the video – the first is that whilst we are told, explicitly, to use ‘washing soda’ the soda that is actually used is Bicarbonate of Soda. The beer in the video is Guinness. No one mentions what speed the film is…it might matter, it might not, but its not mentioned. The final thing is that the beer has to be warmed to 30 degrees.

    So here is how I deviated from the video, the first way, as you might have guessed from the title of this post is that I didn’t waste a can of guinness on this experiment – I used homebrew. Well, we actually brewed it at London Beer Lab, but it was brewed by me and my buddies. We didn’t follow the recipe very well, and no one will ever be able to make this beer again because we didn’t record what we put in it. Anyway, the beer we made was a black IPA. The second way I deviated from the video is that I bought washing soda, which is sodium carbonate, not bicarbonate of soda. The final way is that I couldn’t really be bothered to check the temperature of my beer, so I eyeballed it (IE – I put the bottle in some warm water before I started).

    So with all these variables I was not particularly hopeful that I’d be seeing anything amazing when I broke open my developing tank – and my suspicions were correct – it was crap. I had perhaps seven pictures from a roll of 36, and these were so poorly developed that I nearly threw everything out thinking that there was nothing there.

    However, messing with some settings on the scanner I was able to coax a couple of good images from the roll, I didn’t do any post-processing on these, so we can confidently say this is what ‘beer’ would look like as an instagram filter. Also, you’ll notice that because I wasn’t confident that there was anything there at all, I didn’t pay too much attention to getting the film clean before I dried it:

    I was also able to coax a few far less impressive ones:

    You’ll notice a lot of my cat being a model in there, I told her about my beer developing mission and she wanted to get involved, and I am glad that one of the best images is of her.

    So it turns out that film developer exists for a reason, I think even if I had followed all of the instructions this wouldn’t have given me anything like the quality I can usually obtain from even a second rate developer. However, when you are developing with beer, everything smells a lot nicer than when you use conventional chemistry. What is pretty cool about the whole experiment though is that no one will ever be able to develop film in that beer again (we made 60 bottles, and have drunk all of them), these are the only images that will ever come out of that beer, not like all those boring guinness developed images that are probably out there. Will I do it again? No. Are my unique one of a kind images the best I have ever shot? No. Was it good fun? Yes. Should I have just consumed the beer instead? Probably.

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    Rodinol

    TLDR: I like rodinol

    I am a huge fan of Rodinal for much the same reasons as many other photographers:

    • It is a ‘single shot’ developer, so what is left in the bottle basically lasts forever (or for long enough to not have to write a date on it)
    • Measuring out the amounts you need with a syringe makes you feel like a cool scientist
    • It is basically an ancient formula, so using it feels especially apt when using older camera

    There are loads of blogs out there discussing the various benefits of using Rodinal in terms of things like sharpness, grain size and other photographer type things – I’d recommend this one from Ed Buffaloe if that sort of thing is important to you – but what I want to talk about here is how Rodinol represents a turning point in my journey as a photographer.

    I have explained elsewhere how the decision to explore 35mm photography was primarily a result of receiving a not insignificant amount of expired 35mm film for free. It was because the film had expired that I didn’t want to invest money (that I didn’t have) on having it developed professionally (is that the correct term? Are the people working at fotofast professionals?), just in case it was too far gone. So, after a fair amount of ‘how to’ watching, I ordered the cheapest developing chemistry I could find. It didn’t occur to me that mixing chemistry from different manufacturers might be something some people frown upon, or that carefully weighing out D-76 powder and working out ratios to make up just the right amount to develop one film was anything but normal (it isn’t don’t do this, not least because all of the powder developers literally tell you not to do this).

    And it remained normal – making up a new bottle of developer was a chore, I’d save up films for a good while so I could use a batch before it lost all its good developing power, and I built a solid collection of brown plastic bottles from manufacturers with stern sounding names that promised to keep everything airtight but that all eventually succumbed to what I am calling ‘chemical degradation’’. Either way, it was my process, and, because it worked, it never really occurred to me to change it.

    Fast forward a good number of years from when I first began my adventures in 35mm, and my understanding had progressed to the extent that I was seeking out stores that sold film, and these stores also (quite logically) also invariably sold chemistry. More importantly, by this time I felt comfortable speaking about my process to other people, particularly, people who happened to work in those stores that sold chemistry. This was really the turning point – I could answer questions about what I wanted in terms of my process, could confidently say what sort of films I was using in different circumstances, and what I was doing in terms of my photography – and this meant I could unlock all of the knowledge that I wasn’t getting when I was buying D-76 on the internet.

    It was a very short hop from here to someone recommending Rodinal. When you are asking which film is cheapest its pretty obvious that recommending a developer that will last for ages and can be made up in whatever amount you like is going to get you a sale. The biggest thing about this was that it all made sense to me – a conversation that would have made absolutely no sense to me a few years before now sounded completely normal, and it really hit me how much I had learned about 35mm photography.

    None of this changes whether my pictures are good or not, but it has meant that everything has become more affordable and predictable, meaning that I am happy to take a 35mm camera on holiday instead of my digital camera, and have embarked on projects that will require the development of a not insignificant amount of film – all of which I am undertaking with confidence and enthusiasm because of the power of Rodinal, and the knowledge that I had to acquire to discover it. Perhaps if I had been smarter I would have done more research when I bought that first batch of developer, but it makes me far happier to consider how far I have come, and to look forward to the discoveries of the future. 

     

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    The ‘Mobile’ Film Scanner

    TLDR: You’d need a light box to make this work well.

    For the second (and final) part of my ‘digitising 35mm film’ series my plan was to use one of the many mobile phone apps that promise to help you take pictures of your negatives and turn them into something Instagram worthy. Whilst thumbing through the app store though I experienced a strong sense of deja vu.

    A quick rummage through my old photographs revealed the culprit – the very first roll of film that I ever attempted to develop at home. At this point I didn’t know if taking pictures with 35mm was going to be anything I’d be taking seriously, so I invested the princely sum of zero pounds on an app that essentially converted negative images to positive ones. This was basically all it did, the interface was terrible, it could only manage one image at a time, and the results look a little like this:

    As you can see, there are a number of pretty major issues with this – there are basically about three shades of grey here, the app said to itself ‘well this seems close to white, I’ll make it white, and this seems close to grey, I’ll make it grey’ and then retired to wherever it is that apps hang out when they are not being used. The other major issue is clearly that it’s nearly impossible to get the framing right when wrangling a film strip and a phone in front of a window for some back-lighting, and the app didn’t include anything to crop the image down.

    But this was in 2014, and surely even if ‘I don’t want to pay any money’ app technology has not progressed, phone camera technology must have?

    So to the app store! I go with the ‘LumoScanner II’ from Lumography. These guys are all about making analogue photography Instagram worthy, so I have high hopes. Even on the landing screen I can see that app technology definitely has improved – I didn’t pay for this app, just like that first attempt many years ago, but this one actually has an interface that looks nice. One of the options is panoramic though, which I am fairly sure isn’t a film format that anyone is using (quick click to confirm, no idea what you’d use it for) so I am beginning to think this isn’t for purists. Maybe it’s a lumography specific format? Anyway, I click on ‘regular’ cos that’s just the sort of guy I am.

    Pretty much the same format as my 2014 app – a nice square to put my negative into and a big red button to take the image – however now I have a few options! I can tell the app what sort of film I am using, and there are a whole bunch of other things to mess with, including exposure and contrast – Helpful! There is also a little icon with a mountain on it, but clicking it doesn’t seem to do anything, though I feel like I may just not be cool and ‘lumo’ enough to understand it. So the app looks better, how are the images…

    All of the issues that I had back in 2014 remain, getting the negative centred, and in front of a good light source is nearly impossible, and whilst the app looks better, the images absolutely do not. My old app gave an image that is almost the same size, but with a much higher resolution – the detail, dynamic range and sharpness are light-years ahead in my first photo, pretty ironic considering it was taken five years ago.

    This isn’t to trash the Lomography app, there is a place for this, and if you have the time to set up the negatives, and a really high quality phone camera, you can get probably usable images from this, or at least ones that you could Instagram filter into something usable – but for me, looking for quality, this just didn’t work!

    The moral of the story? You are probably going to struggle to get really good images from 35mm black and white negatives with anything but a dedicated film scanner, and this isn’t necessarily because this is where you are going to get the best resolution or DPI, but because this is the only place that you’ll be able to completely control the amount of light hitting the negative, get it completely flat, and do everything quickly for more than one negative. So thinking about buying a 35mm camera? Factor in the cost of an 11-year-old film scanner at the same time – mine cost me 40 quid!

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    My First Roll of 35mm Film

    So I know many people have been following my epic mission to digitise my 35mm negatives…no? Well I know at least one person has been following my vaguely interesting mission to digitise my 35mm negatives, and they will know that I have concluded that it is impossible to do without a dedicated scanner. Enter the Canon CanoScan 8400F – an absolute behemoth of a flatbed scanner that was released onto an unsuspecting public in 2004. Best thing about it – it is all about the 35mm scanning, with fully backlit dedicated film scanning negative holders and the like, oh, and it cost me £40.

    This isn’t a review of the scanner – its old, its clunky, it scans things, it was a nightmare to get working on windows 10 (oh you actually want a review…? Here is one from 2004!). This is the story of my first roll of 35mm film.

    It all began when I responded to a freecycle advert from a guy giving away a whole bunch of expired 35mm film. I didn’t own a film camera, I hadn’t a clue how to shoot film, I didn’t even know what it actually meant for film to be expired – I went along and got it anyway. When I arrived it transpired that he had been a professional photographer for most of his life, and was finally making the switch to digital. He wanted to get rid of a whole bunch of other film developing stuff, some chemistry, an enlarger, I think even some paper – I had no idea what that stuff did at the time, so I didn’t take it – something I regret to this day!

    Nonetheless I went home with my box of what must have been about 40 canisters of expired film. There was a bit of everything, ancient Kodachrome, some medium format which I gave away to someone who knew far more about photography than me, some Kodak 400 (also given away) and some apparently not so out of date Kentmere and Ilford rolls.

    One charity shop visit later, and armed with an ancient Ricoh KR-10, which subsequently developed a truly epic light leak, but which I still have the beautiful Pentax 50mm from, I went on my first photography mission.

    I didn’t go that far, all the pictures were taken within about a 10-minute walk from where I was living at the time, which just happened to be next to a railway line. The pictures were not actually too bad considering I was shooting in manual mode without really understanding what difference aperture, shutter speed and ISO were going to make to my images.

    The fun came though when I developed my first roll. I had decided that this was something I had to do at home in my bathroom – I would never be beholden to those corporations making vast sums of money developing people’s photos. Sums so vast that by this time they had mostly shut down, and I am assuming happily retired. A number of internet how-to guides and a trip to the library later and I was prepared – I had my developing tank, and epic Soviet-era looking thing that I still use to this day and my chemistry – I distinctly remember using Kodak developer and Ilford fixer, but I think I just used whatever was cheapest. My ‘changing bag’ was a very dark cupboard, my stop bath didn’t exist, and I prized open the film canister with a monkey wrench (I still sometimes to this to be honest).

    I have to admit that I am pretty proud of the results! The main issue was that I hadn’t had any practice in winding the film onto the developing tank roll, so there are lots of places where it was touching and the developer couldn’t reach it – aside from this though, simply following the instructions on the developer, and being intensely careful (far more so than I am now) about the temperature yielded some pretty nice results – especially now I have put them through my new (old) scanner – and thus began my love affair with 35mm.

    You can read the story of my first attempts to get these negatives digitised here, and my first foray into a dark room is a story for another time – but I will always be grateful for that guy who gave away a biscuit tin full of film  to someone who had no idea what to do with it.

     

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    The ‘Cardboard Cutout’ film scanner

    TLDR: It didn’t work too well

    Having survived with a 5 mega pixel, very cheap, 35mm scanner for a number of years now I have decided that it is finally time to invest in something that produces higher quality images. I have been exploring the confusing world of DPI values and various ‘in scanner’ touch up tools. The strange thing about all of this is that it seems that since the advent of digital photography there don’t seem to have been any major leaps forward in scanning technology, it’s almost as if all the major manufacturers said, “Well, you can scan your film, what more do you want?”. This is means the process of buying a new (old) scanner is actually a very involved review of ancient scanners on ebay – and the requisite trawl through websites that were last updated in 2008 to find reviews. I’ll keep you updated. Anyway, as this fabled scanner may be a rather long way off actually arriving, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what other 35mm-to-digital options there were out there – and first in this series (of probably…two…) is the method I am christening ‘the cardboard cutout’.

     At its heart this method basically uses a digital camera to take a picture of the 35mm negative. So, armed with my digital camera and a roll of pictures taken in the Scottish Highlands (that eventually ended up as the ‘Highlands’ photobook) I embarked on my experiments.

    Experiment one, simply holding the negative in front of a light source, and taking a picture worked ok. It was too difficult to hold everything in position though, and there were some pretty major bright/dark spots from the uneven light source and because it was fairly bright (too bright!) the image doesn’t really have the contrast we need.

    You’ll notice there is a lovely vignette on the image too, this is simply because I used a lens hood for a 50mm lens on a 28mm lens – entirely my fault, and nothing to do with my scansperiment (scanning experiment). The image is a pretty challenging one, a lot of snow, clouds and generally not a huge amount of contrast, but you can see here that even the grass and field borders in the distance are not very well defined. It gives a fairly nice effect – something akin to an old print, but its definitely no improvement over my current scanner.

    So for experiment two I cut a negative sized hole in the end of a box, and with some leftover card and tape created a rudimentary negative holder. I then used a piece of tracing paper to diffuse the light-source, and put my camera in the other end of the box. Holding everything still with the box meant I was able to spend a lot more time getting the focus spot on, and could play with the aperture until I had it where I needed – I figured wide open, as I’d be focussing on effectively a very flat plane and wouldn’t need any depth of field at all, would work best.

    Untitled-1

    And the result is improved on attempt one. My ‘negative holder’ gives a nice lumo frame that wouldn’t look out of place as an Instagram filter from five years ago, but the results are still far from optimum.

    The tracing paper solved the issue of the very bright spots though, and the contrast is much better (it is a more contrast-y image anyway, but it definitely helped. Its also much sharper, probably because of the extra attention I could pay to focusing.

    I did some playing around with one of the images, cropped it and worked on the contrast, and the conclusion – a new film scanner is still required! You can see the rest of my images on this roll below anyway. I’d post a picture of my cardboard cutout scanner, but it went in the recycling as soon as the experiment was over.

     

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    What does X-Pro II even mean?

    TLDR: It means cross-processed.

    So you have found yourself here, reading a blog post about an Instagram filter – probably not because you are remotely interested in reading about Instagram filters, but because you want to know how anyone could possibly write a blog post about them. Well let me tell you how we got this point. I once had a lot of fun at a party by asking people I had never met before what their favourite Instagram filter was. I had recruited a friend to fortuitously join the conversation after the question and volunteer their favourite, thus kick starting a ridiculous conversation about the (entirely made up) pros and cons of various filters. Our first victim didn’t see through the joke, but did think we were ridiculous, and told us so. This, as far as I was concerned was a victory, but it was not quite as amazing as when our second victim joined in, volunteering – ‘my favourite has to be x-pro two’. At this point I felt a little guilty at our ruse, and unable to detach myself from the situation of my own making I was compelled to actually take this favourite filters conversation seriously. 

    The conclusion? The Instagram filters have ridiculous names. Much like paint colours and perfume, filters need names that allow us to refer to them as something other than things like ‘the one that makes everything a bit more red’ or ‘the one that makes it look like sunset all the time’. These names are too long, too descriptive, too much effort. So the Instagram team plucks names out of the air, apparently, if the internet is to be believed, based on artistic styles, their coffee intake, or the name of their dog. There is however one Instagram filter that is named after something slightly more meaningful. X-Pro II, though I didn’t know it the six or so years ago at that party, before I had even picked up a 35mm camera, is named after the results you get from processing a 35mm film in some way other than how it was supposed to be processed. This gives you the nice vignette, higher contrast and popping colours that we see when we use the filter. Hence the name. 

    Except, it is not all as simple as that. X-pro is a short way of saying cross processing. If you are unfamiliar with the way in which films are developed, it is basically a chemical process – you leave the film in various chemicals for certain amounts of time and the film comes out of the end of the process developed. Films are supposed to be developed by using specific chemicals for specific amounts of time – like a recipe. However, because we’re grown ups and no one can tell us what to do, we can develop films with other chemicals, make up random amounts of time to develop for, or even use things we have found in the kitchen in place of our chemistry. Its a bit like getting ready made cookie dough, throwing away the cooking instructions and doing your own thing. Now much like the cookie dough analogy, sometimes this can be delicious, and sometimes you can end up with an inedible mess – the instructions are there for consistency, but not always creativity.

    So what does this mean for x-pro II? Well basically that you very much could cross process a film and get something that looks just like you have applied the x-pro II filter, or you could get something that looks equally cool but completely different. The image below was taken on colour, rather than black and white film. Colour film involves a complicated chemical process to develop (colour film also has to be printed in complete darkness, and nobody has time for that, just one of the reasons all my pictures are black and white), but I chose to develop it with chemistry that is designed to be used with black and white film. Of course, because the manufacturer doesn’t suggest that this is a good idea, they have not told me the amounts of time I had to leave the film in the chemicals for. So I made it up. 

    This next image was processed in exactly the same chemicals. Again, it was colour film, and because I quite liked the blue tint on the first image I decided to process it for the same amount of time (writing down these ‘recipes’ is a good idea). The one difference is that this particular roll of film was from a different manufacturer.

    Two images that are stylistically completely different (they are actually of the same bridge, which is somewhere in Ipswich I think) from two colour films, with black and white chemistry.  This, really, is why cross processing film is more exciting than putting filters on Instagram – you never quite know what you’ll be getting, and if you don’t like it, unfortunately there is no swiping on to the next filter, you are stuck with it forever. Consider this next time you use x-pro II: out there, somewhere, is someone putting random film through random chemicals, and giving their images a look that no one has ever seen before.  

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