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What's striking to me is how dull most of the gallery work is. I rarely see anything great and inspiring. Most of

the gallery traffic is a boring cliche of what has been done over and over and over. The other extreme is stupid

gimmicks. It's become fashionable to show gimmicky, cliche pseudo-humorous crap in galleries and pretend that it

has merit. I guess it fills the void. Nothing new.

 

There is plenty of room for great still image work - it's just that we haven't had anyone radical and exciting

the caliber of Robert Frank or Diane Arbus pop up recently. Video or film is a whole different story, and I

wouldn't go as far as to compare the two or suggest one over the other. Also commercial interests, supply/demand

and personal success are tangental, and not to be confused with great work. The majority may well prefer crap and

cliche over quality for economic and trend or whatever reasons, but the majority is rarely a barometer of new

and exciting art.

I'd do something along the lines of Friedlander's "At Work."

"inherently contrasty film I've used is PanF+"

 

underdevelop it by a minute and its good to go.

I would also like to recommend BBC's recent six part documentary "The Genius of Photography." It is superb and covers all the relevant greats up to now (even Alec Soth); especially the big street photographers and Sally Mann.

 

The older documentary done by PBS on the history of photography is plain boring by comparison.

 

Also recommend "Contacts" by William Klein. It is a documentary about several famous photographers' contact prints and their editing.

Robert Budding: what if we try a petition through one of those petition sites? If enough people sign, might be worth the try.

"I'd love to be able to buy it in 120, or even 4x5."

 

This is very frequent in forums all over. I too, would find it very useful in 120. Do you think there is enough demand to petition Fuji, or Fuji just can't as be commited to B&W film as Ilford for instance? I tried Delta 3200 in 120, but Neopan 1600 beats it even in 35mm for me. I find the base fog, low contrast and very long devel times awful with Delta 3200. Makes me wonder if Ilford's published times (which are 1/2 of the real devel times to get normal contrast) for it are in fact an attempt to conceal long dev times. People constantly underdevelop Delta with Ilford's recommended times, then go to forums and ask what's up.

Neopan 1600 has the finest grain out of the three ultra-fast films available. It rivals 400-speed films when properly developed. Microphen works well. 11x14 prints looks great. Out of all utlra-fast films it has the fastest devel times, tightest grain, less fog, and a much cheaper price to boot.

 

Anyway, people are too fixated on the technical aspects. When you stumble onto a great image (and for me this is very rare) - the grain size is irrelevant. I've seen Sebastião Salgado's prints up close. They have huge grain. Nobody cares though - it's amazing work.

If you are in the area, you can see a hundred or so of his prints (I think about 120(!), lots from his Women are Beautiful series) at Sycamore Hotel in Miami. Just visit, you don't have to stay there to see the collection. They have a great collection of Winogrand, Erwitt, etc.

What's wrong with drunks? I love this Friedlander photo:

 

http://bp1.blogger.com/_AoAZAqhlN0U/RwOozgiOtRI/AAAAAAAAAB0/KtQe3nANUhk/s1600-h/friedlander_drunk_under_vermouth.jpg

 

What's wrong with shooting without looking through the viewfinder? D'Agata, Ackerman, news photogrpahers and many others can't be all wrong.

Why is this even a question? Community is important to humans. That's it. Last time I checked photographers were human.

 

Part of the trouble with the modern industrialized societies is that people spend a lot or most of time being talking heads in front of communication devices or sitting in a car instead of being socially-involved with face-to-face interactions in communities. Diminished or non-existent extended families wasn't such a big problem as it is now. How many people do you know that say they only have acquaintances, and not real friends. Best friends...? What was the last time you met to chat face-to-face or have a drink with your friends?

 

A bunch of people having common interests and only communicating online is not a community.

Neopan 1600 shot at 800/1000 with Microphen is my combo. Will probably switch from Microphen to GSD-10 if Neopan 1600 will not be manufactured.

 

Best ultra-fast film on the market. Much cheaper, sharper, and finer grained (pretty much 400 ISO speed grain in Microphen) than Delta 3200 or T-Max, very short development time that coincides with the development time of Neopan 400. What kills Delta is the terrible fog problem, off the shelf. Great 11x14 enlargements from this film.

 

I find HC-110 a very crappy developer, especially for pushing. You might like the effect though.... Microphen is a good choice.

 

Tri-X seems grainier and uglier at 400 (depending on development).

you might find PC-TEA interesting in that regard. it gives an interesting grain pattern to begin with (I have Neopan 400 developed normally in it with a grain almost as small as that of FP4+ plus great tones, and beautiful grain shape), although fine grain. Like Rodinal, it does not contain sulfite. Considered a true acutance full-speed (unlike rodinal) developer. The longer you develop, the sharper, the more pronounced the grain, but not much sholder - beware of highlights.

Chris Chen: simple human biases...

keep part a air-tight. if the phenidone and/or hydroquinone oxidize enough, it's done.

Keep in mind that tape backup is not recommended. Disks are cheaper, faster, and last longer than tapes nowadays. Redundancy is your friend. You can buy two disks and use them in a mirror configuration - RAID1. But keep a copy of the mirror backup up as well. All disks eventually fail.

I'd like to add that mixing developers is not very hard, as long as you have the ingredients measured out (so you don't have to buy a scale - this is the biggest barrier to entry for many people). It's about as much effort as developing a couple of rolls of film. Only you mix a developer something like once a year or less.TEA is widely available from several photo chemical companies, albeit in a gallon size if you want savings. That gallon will last me probably more than five years. People make such a big deal out of it....

Hi Jay.

 

Nice to see that you are still around on these forums. I ran out of 510, but might use it in the future. I find staining developers harder to work with - since it's harder to judge negatives and the midtones are not what I like. That's just me though. 510-pyro with a little of sulfite makes a good non-staining developer. It also develops faster than PC-TEA at the 1:50 dilution, so 510-pyro's staining can be turned off if needed.

 

Thanks for the GSD-10 invention! Most developer tweakers don't care about pushing film and shooting in low light. That was very cool. I am planning to use it more, although glycin is on the pricy side :(. When or if Neopan 1600 is no longer manufactured, and I will be forced to push 400 film, this is the developer I will use. You are the best, dude.

some good pics on shorpy.com

There's too much emphasis on intellect and rational mind. Some things can only be experienced or learned through experience. Photography, like any other practice of art is one such thing.

Odd that this thread is still alive, but I've used Diafine part A alone to develop Neopan with relatively good results.

Hi. I have lots of Tech Pan.

If anyone wants to buy this film- I have plenty for sale, but it won't be cheap.

Unfortunately that successor isn't much cheaper than TP.

I'd say nothing beats knowing how to meter, with any meter. Even then, if not sure - bracket. And even then you may end-up with garbage, depending on the light.

Here we go again. Someone asks a question about material hoping to get a magic formula. The problem is there are no magic formulas, only what the inquisitive person likes. How do we know what that person likes? Hell, even landscape means different things to different people. So the answer is to try different materials for what you do and find the formula that you like. You might find that you do like large grain just as well as small grain depending on a subject/filter or enlargement and viewing distance. But the odds are within the speed range, you'll find the differences small enough to ignore them (if you really did capture something interesting), and base your decision on practical reasons.

 

 

First, unless you tried certain combinations, you may not even know that you like them. You might be hung up on the idea of resolution, etc, and not even try some things that would work just as well.

It's very easy to fall in a trap of fine grain and resolution, t and marketing babble etc., and to forget about a little of experimentation. After a few years of experimentation I understood that materials are the least deciding factors for a good image. The differences are small, even if you are hung up on the idea of small or large grain etc. For me, an interesting image (and interesting images happen very rarely) is an interesting image on any film, in any grain size as long as exposure/development are good enough of course. So really the deciding factors are practical factors, such as short development times, speed depending on availability of light, and price. I shot dunes in Death Valley using pan-f+ with a red filter on a tripod. It was dirt cheap at the time (50 cents a roll as expired at some places and $1.50 new as rebadged at freestyle), and I wanted to try it. I also shot hand-held with fp4+ without filter in sunny conditions, and even tried technical pan. In the evening I shot fast film handheld - Neopan and HP5+ and Tri-X. I liked the results from all of the above-mentioned films, they're all excellent films, but excellent images happen very rarely.