New black and white film developer!

There are so very many film developer options for black and white it makes my head hurt. 

Color is easy, use C-41 chemistry or go home. The only issue with color is reaching and maintaining the required fluid temperature of 102F. However, if you're willing to spend around $100 then several easy to use options become available to open up the brave new world of home color film development. Further, C-41 works for all color film emulsions and regardless of box speed, they all develop in three minutes and thirty seconds. (Note: I am sure there could be examples where that last statement is patently incorrect, I just don't know what they are.) Of course, as you continue to put rolls of color through the C-41 process you must add a few seconds to the development time to account for chemistry exhaustion but that's pretty easy. And you have to do the same for black and white chemistry reuse. For C-41 it is about 4 seconds added per roll. I just developed my eighth roll of color with the current C-41 kit I'm working through and I'm up to a total of four minutes development time. That's actually a pretty fast development time in relation to black and white development times.

As I opened with, there are seemingly endless options and combinations for black and white home development. Do you want more/less contrast? Here's a developer. Do you want sharper/less sharp negatives? Here's a developer. Do you want more/less grain? Here's a developer. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the interplay between various film emulsions and various developers. Again it makes my head hurt. That is why, upon beginning the home development journey, I opted to go the monobath route (see my earlier post on this topic). One chemistry which combines the developer, stop and fixer. Very convenient. Though intended to be used at 80F, not exactly room temperature, there are development times listed down to 70F or so. Pour in the monobath, agitate as indicated by the instructions, return the solution to its container (for reuse), pour in water and rinse, hang the negatives to dry, then scan them. Easy peasy. However...

As I gained more experience developing black and white and as I started developing color as well, I began to wonder about the wide world of black and white developers and the "traditional" development process. That process is; developer followed by a stop bath followed by fixer followed by water rinse followed by hanging followed by scanning. And as I had already become used to the two-step color process (developer followed by "Blix" -- a bleach + fix concoction), it didn't seem a reach for me to try the three-step black and white process. 

After a week or so of research I decided to go with Kodak's HC-110 developer and Photographer's Formulary TF-4 Rapid Archival Fix. Both are well regarded and have been in use for a long time. About a week later I was mixing the TF-4 into a working solution (the HC-110 is mixed up on use). The next day I developed my first roll in my "new" process (everyone else's standard process). That process is developer, stop bath (I used water), fixer, water rinse, hang, scan. Turns out it was very straightforward and I ended up, even after screwing up my development time (more on that later), with a very nice strip of negatives. I am happy with the process and will continue using HC-110 going forward.

If you go down the black and white home development path you will need to become familiar with Digital Truth Photo's "Massive Dev Chart" (https://www.digitaltruth.com/devchart.php). That chart will help you navigate the process of determining how long a particular film emulsion should be developed in a particular developer mixed at a particular solution concentration. They also have mobile apps. Highly recommended. Just pay close attention to the info you are fat fingering into the app. I messed up my data entry and was told to develop TMax 400 for seven minutes and thirty seconds at 68F. The correct development time should have been five minutes. My fault as I didn't let the app update properly and pulled off the incorrect number. Now I know and am good to go for the future. That said, the negatives turned out great. Perhaps some added contrast? Not sure until I develop another roll, at the correct time, to see how it comes out. 

The bottom line of all this chatter is that I'm happy with my decision to give up monobath development in favor of HC-110. In a few weeks I'm off on a short road trip and am planning to bring only two cameras, a Leica M3 (with 28mm) and a Canon P (with 50mm) and six rolls of black and white film. Should be fun. Looking forward to how well they develop.

See below a few of my favorite images from a recent trip to London. That roll of film was the test of my new process. Even more risky, they were shot on the Olympus XA-2 point and shoot I bought new in 1982! I replaced the light seals a few weeks before the trip, inserted a new battery, loaded it with film and brought it with me to London. To be completely transparent, it was the third string back up to my primary kit Leica M10R with a Fuji X100V backup. That said, I am happy with, and relieved by, the images that old Olympus XA-2 and the TMax 400 film development returned! 

The chandelier at the entrance inside the Victoria and Albert Museum in London

Statue on Whitehall Street in London

The Three Graces inside the Victoria and Albert Museum in London

London!

 Just returned from an eight day visit to London as part of a Rick Steves Europe tour group. The group was 26 folks strong including our most excellent guide. This was my first visit to London and all I can say is, "wow!" We had a wonderful time. Most memorable were visits to Westminster Abby, St. Paul Cathedral and St. George's Chapel. I could actually feel the weight of history as I walked through those magnificent buildings. An additional show stopper was the trip to Greenwich to visit the Royal Observatory and to stand on the Prime Meridian. As a mariner for a majority of my professional life, navigation was one of the primary areas of expertise which was learned early on and put into practice each and every day. It was wonderful to visit Greenwich and learn how it came to be that the Prime Meridian was set there and to learn the major role accurate timepieces had in the advancement of navigation. 

The tour covered many additional sights throughout the city. From just about any location we visited, the skyline views of the city were amazing. And we also very much enjoyed how easy it was to get around. Years earlier, we had lived in downtown Tokyo and loved the ease of movement throughout that huge metropolitan. Subways, trains, buses, cabs in abundance. London is the same. It seems we were never more than an eight to ten minute (leizurely) walk to some form of transportation. Super convenient!

Armed with two digital cameras, a film camera and two iPhone 13s, between us we captured 2,000 images! While it seemed fun at the time, culling through those images a week after returning home has proven quite challenging. And in the end I want to get the pile down to about 50 (or so) images for a photo book. Wish me luck...

Prior to the trip I agonized for months on lens choice. In the end. I bought along a 15mm, 28mm and a 50mm. The 28mm and 50mm seemed like no brainers and were the lenses I used most of the time. Probably a 65/35 split with the 28mm being most used. I brought the 15mm in anticipation of interior shots, mostly at the three holy sites mentioned above. However, 15mm was just too hard for me to manage. If the sites had been empty I think I would have focused on the magnificent ceilings in those buildings. I just couldn't get out of the way of the lens. And, the distortion and perspective issues of not holding the lens perpendicular or at least level, proved my undoing. My fault for not regularly using the lens to learn how to use it effectively - lesson learned. In its place, I used my iPhone 13. At some point I will publish a ranting post on just how easily modern smart phones capture images. I have been truly amazed by some of the straight out of phone images I've taken in situations that I know my modern and very expensive digital cameras would have choked on. Certainly you can do a lot in post processing to make the camera images look equally, if not more so, amazing. But at the moment of capture, "chimping" the shot to show your family / friends, the iPhones can sometimes win. But I'll save that rant for another time.

Back to lens choice. Later this year my wife and I will again travel to Europe and I'm just now entering the period where I will begin agonizing over the perfect lens combination for the trip. A fast zoom lens would be the best choice but that isn't really an option for the camera system I am bought into. Instead, small, fast prime lenses are the choice. So, for this next trip I'm thinking a 24mm, 50mm (40mm?) and a 90mm. Why the 90mm? I noticed as I have been working through the images captured in London I am often cropping into some images to highlight a particular aspect. The 50mm was my longest lens and in some cases it just doesn't have the reach. I think the 90mm will give me the necessary reach while maintaining sensor resolution. On the shorter end, 24mm will be perfect for walking the streets in the downtown areas. I shoot a lot of architectural images and noticed in London that 28mm, although my favorite focal length, was often not quite wide enough for the scene. I am a "scenes" photographer more than I am a "subject" photographer. Better for me to capture a bit more and crop it out that to miss something I want included. I'm still thinking this through (actually, I'm agonizing over it - fear of missing out!) and have plenty of time before the trip. Regardless, between now and then I will spend a lot of time with the 24mm and the 90mm and become very comfortable with those focal lengths. 

A process I did enjoy executing was shooting panos with the 50mm lens. And that is a technique I practiced before the trip to London. Shooting three or four (or sometimes just two) images, with about 30% to 40% overlap, and stitching them together in Capture One has been a game changer for me. I used to think I needed wide angle lenses for landscape (nature or urban) images. However, I believe I like shooting the 50mm better in those situations and stitching in post. More compression with the same field of view. While the images can be captured in either horizontal or vertical aspect, I tend to shoot mostly horizontal. Probably because it is most comfortable for me with the camera I use. Regardless, if you haven't tried this technique, go for it! I've also shot panos with the 90mm as well and was equally please with the results. 

Finally, several years ago I bought an Ona Bowery camera bag. Almost from when the bag arrived to my home, I began second guessing the choice as I thought it too small. And in the months leading up to the trip I became more concerned about its size in relation to the kit I was planning. So, I began taking the bag on the many photowalks I regularly take in my local downtown with some version of the kit I through I'd use in London. Often I'd return home convinced I needed a slightly larger messenger type bag. On a few occasions I nearly pulled the trigger. However, it turned out that the one camera body with a lens attached, plus the two other small, fast prime lenses, two spare batteries and a few SD cards all fit comfortably in the Ona Bowery bag. Slung cross body and carried slightly behind, I never had issues with the security of my kit and could access it very quickly on those few occasions when I wanted to swap a lens. The camera was usually on a wrist strap but even when on a neck strap there was no interference with the Ona Bowery. I'll admit it looks a bit like a man-purse but I decided to be brave and not worry about how it looked. Turns out that with its small size, and in black, it is mostly invisible. And it fit into the backpack I hand carried onto my flights there and back. I'm not sponsored by anyone but I will say that if you are looking for a small bag for your camera kit, take a look at the Ona Bowery.

Below are just a few of my favorite images.

The Lloyd's (of London) building.

The Gherkin (30 St Mary Axe)

 Looking up the Thames from the Millennium Bridge on a cloudy day

The National Maritime Museum from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (50mm pano)

The Tube

 

Medium Format Frenzy!

A few weeks ago on a visit to my local camera shop I came across the gorgeous Yashica Mat 124 G shown below. Minty clean throughout, all the knobs and dials worked and the meter seemed not only to be functional but fairly accurate as well. Although nearly 100% of my life's film shooting has only ever been 135, I have always been curious about 120. In support of that curiosity, I periodically binge eBay looking at medium format cameras - Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) and their single lens cousins (Hasselblad, Bronica, etc.). As a result of the online research I knew this particular model of Yashica TLR was the most sought after variant and that it commanded the highest prices on eBay. I also knew that the shop’s asking price was about half of what similar condition cameras had actually sold for on eBay. It didn't take me long to pull the trigger and I walked out of the shop with the camera and two rolls of Kodak Gold 200 in 120. 

Within an hour of my arrival home I had downloaded and read the manual, watched a few YouTube videos and loaded a roll. First order of business was to check the meter against a few of my hand held meters and all looked well. Then I headed outside to shoot images at various shutter speeds to assure myself the speeds were accurate (of course I would only know the results after the roll was developed). Even with only 12 exposures available to me on a roll of 120 (6x6) it took a few days to complete that process. Once completed, more YouTube to learn how to load 120 onto my Paterson film reel. Looked easy and it was and in about an hour I had developed the roll. The huge negatives looked fabulous as I hung them to dry. And later that evening I was able to start the scanning process. Oh my goodness those images are wonderful!

Fast forward to now, I have shot, processed and scanned a second roll with similarly great results. I am hooked on medium format film. Well, to clarify, I remain, primarily, a digital shooter. But my goodness those huge negatives are gorgeous (I keep repeating myself).

The Yashica is larger than my 135 cameras but it is light and quite easy to get around with. Composing and focusing through the waist level view finder is a very different shooting experience and it will need to be practiced more frequently. Especially that "left is right and right is left" thing. Based on the 24 images I have so far produced, there is a time and place for 6x6 images. My weekly photowalks will remain, largely, in 135 format, mostly digital. However, I have a few specific plans for this square format beauty and I'm very much looking forward to viewing the results.

See below four of the 24 images I've captured so far. All were developed using Cinestill's C41 kit then scanned on the CanoScan 9000 flatbed using VueScan, and finally, brought into Capture One for a bit of further development. I am very happy with the results!

 

C41 Film Processing at Home

Not content with developing black and white (see a previous posting) I recently took the plunge into color film processing ("C41"). Turns out it is fairly easy - once you have the kit. The key with C41 is maintaining control of the temperature of the developer and to a lesser extent the Blix (bleach + fixer). Once I resigned myself to spend the money to buy the necessary kit, I was good to go. Certainly there are many folks developing C41 at home who do so by carefully managing the warm/hot water coming our of their bathroom (or kitchen) water taps. After watching many YouTube videos it was clear to me that going the temperature controlled water bath route was for me. Cinestill was the source of choice as I had used their products to set myself up for black and white film processing. They sell all the necessary gear and chemicals to get the job done. In particular, their temperature control system - which is an enhanced sous vide heating unit - is awesome! That unit, a 15 quart plastic tub, and I was in business. Having now processed four rolls of film with the C41 process I can state authoritatively that it is a straightforward process anyone can do at home. 

Fill the tub with water, set up the heater for 102F, place the developer and Blix containers in the bath and let everything come up to temperature. While that is in progress, set up the dark bag and load the Paterson film rolls with the film to be developed. Once the chemicals are at temperature - about 30 minutes - the processing begins. Three minutes and 30 seconds to develop, eight minutes for Blix. Rinse the film for three minutes and you're done. From setup to cleaned up takes me about one hour. 

Following the development process the film is removed from the tank, hung on clips attached to a closet hanger in the shower. Squeegee excess water then give the film strips a few hours to dry completely. What could be easier? 

Per the instructions, one liter of the C41 chemical kit is good for 24 rolls of film. If you believe the internet, it will actually last longer. Counting the cash outlay to get established as an upfront sunk cost, I'm developing film for about a buck a roll, far less expensive than the cost at my local camera shop. And I see the results much faster!

However, more is required than just the chemical processing. Film negatives do me no good as they are. I'm not interested in the next step of building a full on dark room in my home to print the negatives. My preferred image viewing is via computer screen and photo books that I generate digitally and have printed. This drives me to a hybrid workflow. Analog for the image capture and negative processing, then digital to scan those images into the computer. That portion of the process is completed with my Canoscan 9000F Mk2. Recently I began using Vuescan software for the analog to digital image capture process using the scanner. The initial learning curve was more painful that I thought it should have been but once again YouTube came to my rescue. While I'm not a guru, I'm quite happy with the scans I am seeing from Vuescan. Once scanned, the images are imported into Capture One which is my software of choice for processing digital images. The final step is exporting the images as jpegs.

The three jpegs below are from my recent development activities. And yes, the first image is black and white! That film stock is Ilford's XP2 Super black and white. It is a "true black and white" film stock whose emulsion has been modified such that it can be developed in C41 chemicals. This enables me to mix and match film rolls in the same processing. Super convenient as at any moment I have cameras loaded with color and cameras loaded with black and white. One film developing process to rule them all!

Ilford XP2 Super (ISO 400). Shot with the Leica M3 and a Voigtlander 28mm f/2 Ultron ii. This image was my week 11 post for 52Frames.

The two images below shot with Flic Film Elektra 100 (ISO 100) which turns out to be re-branded Kodak Aerochrome IV. Shot with the Leica M3 and a Voigtlander 28mm f/2 Ultron ii.

52Frames

 In late December last year I became aware of the web site 52Frames.com. A photographic assignment is provided every week for a year. The assignments make up a wide variety of subject matter. A few examples include; macro, depth of field, blurred action, self portrait, etc. One photo is uploaded, once a week. There is no cost to register and the only pressure is that which you put on yourself to get the shot and upload it. Thousands of photographers, professional and amateur alike, from all over the world, participate each year. After reading a bit about the site, I took the plunge and registered. Today I uploaded my ninth consecutive assignment - "macro" (image below).

Generally, I am not a joiner. However, I truly wish to become a more accomplished photographer. Reviewing past year's assignments, and more importantly, the many submissions against those assignments, I became convinced that 52Frames could provide me an assist both creatively and technically. Having now just completed my Week 9 assignment, I can state confidently that I know more now than I did nine weeks ago. 

My primary shooter is a Leica M10R. It is a mirrorless, manual focus (and aperture), rangefinder camera with a 40MP full frame digital sensor. I love many aspects of this camera, one of which is that "M-mount" lenses made as early as the 1950s work as well on the camera as lenses made yesterday. I also very much love the tactile, manual operation of the camera. It forces me to slow down and to think just a few moments longer before I release the shutter. That said, it does have modern digital camera features. One of those is "Live View." Live view is an LED screen on the back of the camera which shows you an image looking through the lens. If you shoot pictures on your cell phone you know how this works. However, until I became involved in 52Frames, I had not used live view as I preferred the analog rangefinder experience of looking at the world through an optical viewfinder rather than through a tiny digital screen. The down side of that thinking was that a lot of potential images would be difficult to capture due to my insistence on NOT using live view. 

One example on this topic would become apparent early on as the Week 2 assignment was "blur the motion." The image I sought required low angle camera positioning and a slow shutter speed. In that position I couldn't get my eye to the viewfinder to frame the shot. As I was about to give up I (re)noticed the 3" LED screen that partially fills the back of the camera. A few minutes futzing around had me up and running in live view and I was able to get the shot I envisioned. In the weeks following there were other occasions where live view was the right answer to achieving creative vision. Now I am (more) comfortable and (a bit more) proficient in knowing when and how to utilize live view. And as a result of several of the follow-on challenges I've also become more proficient in using ND filters and shooting portraits. Thank you 52Frames.

Nine weeks into the year's worth of assignments I find myself looking ahead to upcoming assignments, thinking about how I will capture the essence of the challenge. And as I see how other participants addressed challenges each week I am continually amazed by the creativity and thought they put into their work. I am beginning to think less about the "letter of the law" describing the assignment and more about the "spirit" of the assignment. The upcoming Week 10 challenge is "complimentary colors" and I'm thinking about a product photography setup using a back-drop lit with multiple flashes. A year ago that never would have occurred to me. Again, thank you 52Frames.

It turns out I needed outside prompting and guidance to begin, and stick with (at least for the nine weeks so far) a journey of continuous improvement. Not sure where it is headed but I'm enjoying the ride.

More to follow.

  My wife's Pink Christmas Cactus in full March bloom. Captured with a Fuji X-E4 and an adapted Nikon 105mm f/2.8D AF Micro-Nikkor lens in natural, morning light. Developed with Capture One.

Home film developing and scanning

Shooting film is slower and more deliberate than shooting digital. The "shoot-chimp-shoot" style of digital photography is not possible. As such, immediate feedback regarding exposure is not available and patience is required to see final results and learn if you got it right. 

A few of my film cameras have built-in and working light meters but most do not. That led me to re-familiarize myself with the Sunny 16 guidelines I learned back in the 1970s and used for years. Fortunately, with digital, the guidelines can be put into practice with immediate affect. Look at a scene, apply the Sunny 16 guidelines, shoot the image, then look at the image. Is it correctly exposed? If not, why not? Think it through, convince yourself you understand why the image was not exposed as you believed it would be, make necessary adjustment then reshoot. Rinse and repeat. After a few digital outings using that process I felt comfortable enough to put it to the test with film. However, I still had the issue of delayed gratification in seeing the images. That issue led me to home development of 35mm black and white film. 

After much research I settled on Cinestill's Df96 Monobath process. Rather than the standard three part process of developer -> stop bath -> fixer, Df96 develops and fixes in one chemical solution. A solution  that can be reused to develop up to 24 rolls of film. With each roll developed there is a slight increase in the time required for the process but it is on the order of seconds and not at all time-consuming. At a solution temperature of 80F film development times run from about three and a half minutes to six minutes depending on how many times the solution has been used. Following developing and fixing the solution is poured back into its container and the film is rinsed with water (I use distilled water). It is then hung up and left to dry. All-in-all a very straight forward and fairly easy process.  

To date I have developed four rolls of black and white film. For the first two I utilized a Paterson tank with its easy-to-load film reels. No issues with those rolls and the film developed very nicely. For the second two rolls I utilized a Nikor stainless steel tank and its stainless steel reels. Unfortunately I didn't roll the film properly onto the reels. Most of the images developed nicely, however there were areas in the reeling process where the film layers touched. Those areas did not develop properly and the images were lost. Additionally, the steel tank leaked quite a bit during the agitation cycles. Based on this one experience I plan to move forward with Paterson system.

Steel film reels aside, the four rolls developed properly. Following development they were scanned into the computer using a CanoScan 9000F Mk2 (with supplied Canon software) and edited as normal with Capture One. Home development and scanning provides much faster feedback on exposure settings and should, hopefully, cause me to output better images. 

The image shown here was shot on Ilford HP5+

The next step is color processing. More on that later...

Foggy Mornings

 Who doesn't love them? One morning a few weeks ago was fogged in tight to the shoreline. Just visible a few dozen yards off the beach were the remnants of a pier damaged in a hurricane nearly 20 years ago. Camera, lens, tripod and ND filter in hand I walked to the water's edge to get the shot. The ND filter provided six stops of exposure reduction that enabled me to achieve a four second exposure at f/8 through a 90mm lens. The longer exposure gave the water a dreamy complexion. Though my mirrorless camera supports live view, I rarely use it. However, it made all the difference in this shot as the camera placement was too low to let me effectively use the viewfinder. About thirty minutes were spent experimenting with live view, the ND filter, various exposure settings, tripod placement and camera height. Of the many images captured, this one achieved the look I sought.