lotuseaters

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<p>Parker, of course you could buy these things straight off the shelf. What I meant was chances are these chemicals won't be in stock. Try Monochrom at Ackerstrasse or Fotoimpex at Alte Schönhauser.</p>

<p>I don't think you'll be able to simply walk into a shop and purchase things like potassium ferricyanide over the counter, but you can certainly mail order it. Try http://www.subolab.de/ ...might be useful to know the German name for it. It's Blutlaugensalz or Kaliumhexacyanoferrat. </p>

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<p>If you're "willing to go film" you might want to consider a Contax G1/G2 or even a Nikon 35Ti. If you'd rather have a camera that doesn't depend on batteries, used with the right lens, the Voigtländer Bessa R is a pretty decent tool for travel photography too.</p>

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<p>It could well be a case of not having the exact pinhole diameter here. How did you determine the size of the pinhole? I've only just started pinhole photography myself recently and scanned the first pinhole I made using a dedicated slide scanner. The measuring tool in Photoshop will show you the exact diameter of the hole. An iPhone is unlikely to have the same field of view as your pinhole camera, therefore the reading might have been off, unless you compensated for this. Your first image doesn't look too badly exposed though. There's a lot of trial and error involved here. But that's part of the fun.</p>

<p>About 40 rolls of 120 and maybe 20 rolls of 35mm - that's black and white - plus a good 30 rolls of 35mm slide film.</p>

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After 10 days of flooding of the river Main in Frankfurt last winter<div></div>

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<p>Dear PN community,<br>

I could seriously do with a bunch of fresh ideas from the collective photo.net brain. A very good friend of mine will turn 60 this year and has been working as a black/white wet printer since he was 16. He came over from London about 20 years ago and runs a small lab/gallery in Hamburg's Sankt-Pauli district where he's been printing and selling fine art by well known and a few lesser known photographers, - which until a couple of years ago, was enough to cover expenses and make a little extra money.<br>

<br />He's one of the last traditional printers in Hamburg (not many of them around in Germany anymore, full stop) and the rapid advance of digital photography over the past few years has resulted in the serious decline of demand for monochrome wet prints done by hand. In short, despite the fact that he's a fantastic printer and very good at what he does, his work is getting less and less, with bills piling up and no other alternative than to drop what he's doing and close the lab for good, facing a rather meagre retirement pay, 'boosted' by the prospect of having to stock shelves somewhere. He's been pumping everything he had into the lab financially, but funds have now run dry with no sign of enough work coming in to keep going. He also has a rather extensive archive of fine art prints - a lot of them signed by the photographers, some limited editions, some a few decades old - and quite a few prints of recently discovered negatives from before WWII.<br>

<br />This may be pretty naive of me, but I would like to know, if anyone has any ideas on how to help this man (as in getting him assignments or organise some sort of official funding) and prevent him from having to give up his lifetime work and carry on printing. Any suggestions and ideas are much appreciated.</p>

 

<p>You could have the lab make a clip test of your first spool before processing. Any decent lab will do this. That way you'll find out if film speed has changed and see what the grain is like. Alternatively, get a Diana with a 35mm film back, put the those 100ft through and marvel at weird colours and fog afterwards - assuming it's colour film, that is. B/W shouldn't be too bad, unless it's above 400 ISO, me thinks. I've had a few rolls of Tri-X in the freezer for about 9 years and it's fine.</p>

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<p>Sorry, you were talking black and white but as far as film is concerned - E6 is a similar story.</p>

<p>Well, you can still buy vinyl and Hi8 tapes... the choice may not be as wide as it used to be but I wouldn't be surprised if film and paper will be around for a while. Spoke to my local lab people the other day and was told a couple of years ago, in a month they'd put about 50 rolls of E6 film through their AGFA dLab and now apparently that figure is somewhere between 500 and 600 rolls a month. I suppose it's all about supply and demand. Stating the obvious - if people keep buying film - it'll remain available. You'll probably have to mail order it, but at least you can still get it.</p>

<p>2.0/45 Planar</p><div></div>

<p>You'll be fine. Just show them the films and ask for hand inspection. I had it done in Beijing a couple of times in 2006 and no questions were asked (presumably, this is what's your concern). If you're traveling by train within the country, don't bother with the x-ray machines at train stations (they're everywhere). Staff won't even look at the monitors, let alone kick up a fuss if you don't put your bags through.</p>

<p>Hold on a minute, Mendel.. are you saying when the ICE button in Scan Utility's Custom Wizard is active, the Grain Dissolve button stays active too? When I pick ICE the GD button goes grey. I would have thought this means you're using ICE only? What's your average scanning time for a slide at 5400 dpi with ICE (lowest setting) turned on? I'm batch scanning four in roughly 18 minutes on an Intel Macbook - doesn't the use of GD take a lot more time?</p>

<p>Jonathan, the Dimage Scan Utility has a preference pane for batch processing accessed via one of the buttons above the scan preview window. There you can set, among a bunch of other things, the preferred resolution and the amount of dust removal (ICE) as well as turn off the grain resolving feature.</p>

Felucca on the Nile<div></div>

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