Paul's Film Photography Blog

Pinhole photography is something I think I’ve mentioned before, but here’s another cool DIY pinhole setup presented at Damn Cool Pics: how to make a pinhole camera from a matchbox. It uses 35mm film with a 24x24mm frame size. The film transport is especially clever, I think, using a piece of plastic to make a noise every time a sprocket hole passes – wind the film and count sprocket clicks to get to the next frame with some accuracy.

One of the great things about film is its archival qualities, especially traditional silver-based black and white film. How does developing some film exposed 31 years earlier and getting great results sound? Can you be sure that if, in 2041, you were to find an old SD card with a bunch of proprietary RAW files on it, you’d be able to even find something the card would fit into, let alone read the contents? It’s not like you can hold it up in front of a light source and just look at the photos, after all. Would the data even be intact after 31 years? For the record here, I’m an IT guy, I’ve been around computers since 1984 and have done the data obsolescence dance far too many times to ever use the words “archival” and “digital” together without the word “NOT” involved somewhere.

Cearta.ie has a good article debunking Ten Copyright Myths. They should make everyone read and understand this before they’re allowed to use the “Save Image As…” menu option in their web browser.

Via Reuters: “Nokia exec: phones to make system cameras obsolete“. I checked, it wasn’t posted on April 1st. Call me crazy, but I really can’t see this happening. On the other hand, if I ran a company which depended on sales of compact point and shoot digital cameras, I’d be looking at cellphones and the lower end of the mirrorless interchangeable lens segment with much fear and loathing right about now as their outflanking maneuver unfolded around me.

The Discerning Photographer has an article up explaining why it’s important to do at least some of your own printing. I’m in agreement here: sure, it’s convenient to be able to present work online, but a printed photo just has something about it which viewing on a screen lacks.

Like finding out that the motor drive for your 35mm camera is smart enough to leave the film leader out when rewinding a roll of film. I’m not sure how I got to roll 15 without realizing that, except that I’d just recently started shooting with the heavy motor unit attached.

This is handy if you need to switch mid-roll as I did a couple of weekends ago or if you’re planning to develop at home (no need to pop open the film canister, just leave the leader out, trim it off and feed the film onto the reel straight from the canister, you can even use the bit of  leader you trimmed to make sure your fixer is still good).

Of course for rewinding and reloading later you do need to remember what frame you’d reached. I scrawled it onto the film canister in blue sharpie – “adv.to#24″ (I’d shot to 22, seems safest to leave a 1-frame gap to avoid any risk of overlapping frames). With the motor drive set to H, it took about 5 seconds to get to where I’d left off when I reloaded the fast film later on!

Incidentally, looking at the developed negatives it appears that the frame registration would have been accurate enough to not overlap frames. I might try that with a less important roll sometime, maybe when I run my first test roll of black and white soon. Then again, I’d rather lose one frame to blankness than run any risk of messing up two frames which might have been good otherwise.

Is Kodak Ektar 100 the promised land for color print film shooters?

It would be fair to say that Kodak caused a bit of a stir with the introduction of Ektar 100 film. I finally got around to buying, shooting and processing a roll to see if the stuff was all it cracked up to be.

About half the roll was static test shots; I wanted to see how it behaved under certain conditions. The rest was my usual semi-aimless shooting at whatever looked interesting.

I have to say, based solely on the scans as viewed straight off the CVS photo CD (1.5MP or so Noritsu scans, auto corrected to within an inch of their lives) I am very impressed with this film stock.

Just a handful of photos for now. These are all shot on Ektar 100, uploaded as scanned with the only changes being quick cropping and resizing for the web.

Lit by natural light (daylight through window), metered off a gray card. The colors are close to real life, as I remember it at the time.

Love that color saturation. Punchy without being ridiculous, again reasonably faithful to the real scene, looks like it emphasizes reds a bit.

They're not kidding about the grain being fine, bearing in mind the proof-quality nature of the scans. I'm thinking with high-res scanning you could do some seriously aggressive cropping on this film, even in 135 format. I can only imagine how well it works in medium format, never mind in large format!

The extreme end of my exposure testing. Lit by flash, underexposed 3 stops compared to the metered exposure, auto corrected by the Noritsu at CVS. I haven't done anything to this yet, it's straight from the CD. Shadows and dark tones are muddy, the brown book on the top of the pile is very undersaturated and dark, and it's a little flat overall, but I'm thinking it could be pushed this far and some repair work done in post if I had to. I'll be curious to see just what I can do with it, or what can be done when I eventually get a decent scanner.

Yes, I do believe it is.

I don’t know why, but there’s something about old, abandoned places which fascinates me. So of course I was captivated by this series of photos taken on a tour of the Chernobyl power plant grounds and neighboring abandoned city of Pripyat. Be aware there are a LOT of images on the one page, it will take a Very Long Time Indeed to load if you’re on a slow connection.

Just found out about a new creative teaching site which has gone live. creativeLIVE will stream lessons on various creative pursuits. For free. Photography will be one of the subjects covered. Only the live stream will be free; to watch later, or download for your iWhatever, will cost a small sum per download. Sounds pretty good to me!

Artinfo talks about the photo by Richard Misrach used as the Apple iPad’s wallpaper. Somewhat ironically for the current most-talked-about digital gadget, the photo in question was not shot digitally, but on 8×10 large format film. Lovely photograph either way though.

Lightroom Killer Tips has 3 tips for smart collections in Lightroom, well worth a look if you’re an LR user.