mbntr

Pardon the odd title, but it's true! You can take pictures with film without developing them. I am strictly talking about B&W as it wouldn't work for color. This all relies on how film works. Film is made of a polymer base covered in an emulsion, this if made up of halides, usually silver iodide and silver bromide crystals in suspension in gelatin. AgBr and AgI are sensitive to light, they respond to different frequencies, but we can ignore this bit. When a photon hits one of these crystals metallic silver is born, through a process I won't outline as it'd make this whole thing unnecessarily long. When around four or five of these atoms conglomerate you get a "seed" that makes the crystal developable, i.e you can reduce the whole crystal using the seed as a catalyst, to metallic silver... but what if you didn't do that? Developing only amplifies the a latent image (according to a paper from the 1930s by a factor of up to 10^8), but the image is still there, if you expose it long enough a large enough amount of metallic silver is formed to be visible. If my math is right you should do so by around 26-27 stops. So this is exactly what I did This could look a lot better, it's severely underexposed, to the point that you can barely see it, but that's my own fault, I exposed for midday lighting which... doesn't exactly represent average exposure and I still stopped short just out of personal curiosity. Yet there it is, a picture, by exposing better and for longer you can get a better picture, definitely. You get better results if you scan before fixing it, and the image can be fixed, the silver won't be washed away. In my case, I used Fomapan 100 for 4x5 you also need to develop the film later as it's the only way to remove what appears to be a second anti-halation layer (there are two, one is green and water soluble, but if you wash that away with water you'll get a brightly colored pink negative, and to remove that you have to let the film stay in a developer for some seconds). But if you do like me and get a comically underexposed negative, fear not, you didn't get a negative at all! You got a positive! There's so little silver that the way you actually see the image is through the reflected silver and not light being blocked from it, so... under the right light you get a positive! This is also what you get straight out of the camera

Short backstory, I recently got a Sinar A1 with a Schneider-Kreuznach 150mm 5.6, and never having shot large format I did the financially responsible thing of buying Fomapan 100 to try it out so I only lose 80 cents a frame! The problem is, for each of those frames I have shot I did end up losing my money, basically the shadows seem to be consistently crushed. I took this frame in direct sunlight at 1/60 f/22, in theory it should have been enough? Correct me if I'm wrong, and looking at the metadata from that picture taken with my phone, it used f/1.9 1/3774 at ISO 45, which if you do the math should be equivalent to f/22 1/60 ISO 100 There doesn't seem to be an issue with the shutter, I did some testing which basically consists of placing my Sony A7 body in the focal plane and taking a picture at at a certain shutter speed with the copal shutter of the LF lens in bulb, then again taking a 0.4s exposure on the Sony with the copal set to the same shutter speed as the mirrorless before, the pictures I got were identical except for the top speed of 1/500 where the one I took using the copal was slightly overexposed (I'd say by half a stop-ish), and let's say there was a demon screwing with the shutter mechanism when I have actual film loaded... usually old shutters don't get faster, do they? Since there doesn't seem to be a technical issue I have to blame my technique, so help me out here. For exposure I usually just take the reading from my Sony A7 which I use as light meter, the fuckup here could be: 1. Taking a general reading without really metering for the shadows 2. Not accounting for how much light is passed by the Sony's lens compared to the Sinar's 3. Not accounting for bellows factor, but afaik I should only start considering that once I pass 150mm of bellows extension Of course this could be caused by my dev process, I develop at home since I'm cheap, and since I'm cheap I devised my own way to do it without having to buy extra equipment. I basically tray develop in three casseroles. For the developer I use Rodinal 1+50, it's getting warm here and my tap water doesn't go down to 20c so I develop at 21. At the end I get a temp adjusted dev time of just about 8 minutes. Since I develop one sheet at a time I use only 200 ml of water with 4 ml of concentrate, this should be enough for a single 4x5 slide. I agitate, or more accurately rock the casserole slightly, once every minute, more or less. The film lies on the bottom of the casserole emulsion side up. I honestly don't see where the problem could be in this process After the eight minutes have elapsed I rinse under the tap and fix, I don't see those last steps being the issue personally. So the question is... where did I screw up?

It could be, though I remember tightening it pretty well, seems like I'll have to wait for a sunny day and shoot another roll!

Hello everyone, some time ago I bought a first gen Mamiya m645, since this is a fairly old camera I replaced the seals with new ones, and while I fixed the classic film door white leak, I got a new one, this time orange and on the side. Out of all shots it appears only once in a frame and another time between two frames. Now, tell me if I'm right, but since the leak extends outside of the frame, it can't really be coming from the shutter since the mask would stop it, it's also orange which would entail that it's going through the orange base, but how come that happen? Wouldn't the backing paper stop that? This camera lacks a back, it uses film inserts so I can't really blame the connection point between camera and back, at the same time I replaced the foam behind and, as far as I can tell, I did a good enough job that it seems light tight when shining a fairly powerful torch at the film door and all the parts where I replaced the foam, I really don't know where it could be coming from since even a door light leak wouldn't look like that since the film emulsion would be the one being exposed, and not the back? I'm honestly mystified and other than going out and shooting another roll in midday sunlight, I don't know where to start, none of this makes sense, would any of you have an idea?