tim_bradshaw1

<p>Zelph: I suspect the requirements of someone whose images were going to be published in a newspaper in terms of sharpness are probably rather lower than that of someone aiming to make relatively large prints like me. I also think that people doing the job professionally tend to get very good at it, which I likely won't. Sorry: I should have made both those things clear in my original question!</p> <p>(I've also always assumed that the point of 'f/8 and be there' was 'unless you are there you will not get the picture, so be there and stop fiddling with the camera', not 'use f/8'.)</p>

<p>What John says is correct in my experience: if you make things (either at scan time or later) so that the thing you want to be black on the neg <em>is black</em>, and the thing you want to be white <em>is white</em>, then you are most of the way there. After that you just need to adjust the response curve to make it look like paper.</p> <p>This is remarkably similar to how you print in the darkroom in fact, especially with a fancy modern enlarger: the one I have used most recently has a sensor which you use to tell it the black and white points on the neg, and then it will tweak the contrast on the paper so they are indeed black and white.</p> <p>(Not all images have true black and true white in them of course, but very many do, and picking one which does to start is easy enough.)</p>

<p>It's not clear if you have tweaked the parameters after scanning at all. You <em>need</em> to do this or you will get terrible images. I am not an expert on this (I print in a darkroom), but you need to at least set the black and white levels properly and adjust the curve between them. Negatives don't have enormously deep blacks or enormously bright whites (ie the film is never completely clear nor completely opaque): adjusting the black & white levels means that your blacks will be black and whites white, and you then need to adjust the curve (really the gamma mostly, I think) between them to correspond to what paper is like.</p> <p>More serious people than me will adjust the black & white levels of the scanner, but I have never been very good at that (it can obviously help the scanner get more bits of dynamic range from the neg).</p>

<p>Thanks for the various replies. I think I will try to find an MPP (I'm in the UK, they are pretty common here). </p> <p>(I must guiltily confess that I have realised that I want one partly out of a combination of GAS and not wanting to break my lovely Chamonix, which are not good reasons: I should just use up the existing camera).</p>

<p>Bob: sorry, I was trying to make a play on words on the group f/64 people: I don't think I even have a lens which goes to f/64 and don't often stop down below f/22 as you say (in desparation in bright sun without an ND filter perhaps). My only aim with a rangefinder is to make focussing much quicker while still being acceptably accurate, so I don't have to get people to wait for ages while I faff around with a dark cloth.</p>

<p>I've done a fair bit of work with a conventional 5x4 field camera & I'm reasonably comfortable with that way of working, which typically (in my case anyway) is very slow indeed. I've recently been inspired by Richard Renaldi's work, made with a 10x8, to see if I can work more quickly with an LF camera. The thing that really makes me slow is the whole focus / dark cloth / film holder saga. So, I've noticed that there are at least a couple of families of 5x4 rangefinders -- Wista made one, and MPP made a whole series and there are probably others. it seems to me that I could use one of those with the filmholder in place, then just pull out the dark slide and take a picture, which would be relatively quick (the emphasis being on 'relatively').</p> <p>The question is: is the focussing accuracy of those cameras good enough to get reasonably reliable results without having to stop down to f/64 all the time? Obviously I'm not going to use the thing wide open, but I'd like reasonably short exposures. My guess is that it must be, since they existed, but I also wonder whether people didn't just burn a lot of film with them to get good results.</p> <p>Any other tricks for working more quickly would be welcome (other than 'don't use LF': I know that one!).</p> <p>Thanks</p>

<p>The advantage of Polaroid for a professional was that you could chimp: rather than waiting at least hours to see if you had got the lighting right you could see an image immediately. That must have revolutionised studio photography.</p> <p>For an amateur or for home use it was also being able to get an image instantly, which I hear people like to be able to do, although in this case it was more often the final product than a prequel to it.</p>

<p>Since you've used the K1000, I'd suggest getting a Pentax, but not the K1000. Instead get an MX: they're cheap, very well-made (I have owned one of my MXs for 26 years and it's just fine), and a much better camera than the K1000, which has an entirely undeserved cult status about it, simply because many students learned on it (so, lots of good-looking young people carried them in the 90s). The MX was the pro/semi-pro option, the K1000 never was.</p> <p>If you feel brave get an LX: this was Pentax's serious pro camera, and is a really lovely thing. They can go wrong in elaborate and expensive ways however, and sometimes do.</p> <p>Don't get an ME or an ME super: they are fine, but setting exposure is by two buttons not a dial, which is a pain. I think the Program A / Super Program have the same system.</p> <p>If you can find the Pentax 50/1.4 lens (lots of MXs were sold with this as a kit I think, and probably all LXs that were part of a kit were) then get that: it's all the lens you really need. The 40mm pancake lens is not as good and has a slight culty thing about it so tends to be expensive, but an MX with this will pretty much go in your pocket, and if you can find a brassed black one, well, it looks seriously cool.</p> <p>I have all of these, and the MX/50mm 1.4 is probably the thing I would keep in a fire.</p>

<p>If the first few frames were black then you know that the developer is working, since those frames will have been fogged heavily in the usual way when loading the film. If the remaining frames are essentially clear then, assuming you didn't do something extraordinary involving managing to only get chemistry on the first few frames (which would be hard), they didn't see enough / any light. So the problem is with the camera, almost certainly: either the shutter is not opening, you did not load the film properly so it never left the spool, or you misjudged exposures catastrophically.</p>

<p>Charles: the silver plating out would make sense if this was not new fixer and so had silver in it. It's because it is new that I don't understand what is happening!</p>

<p>I use Hypam 1+4 for film, and typically make up 5 litre batches. I am not as careful as I should be about checking whether it has worn out: I don't do the time-to-clear-film thing, but instead rely on a combination of fixing for a long time (9 minutes) and tracking about how much film has been through a batch. This has always worked fine for me.</p> <p>My chemical hygene is reasonably good (ie I rinse and dry things pretty carefully and generally am careful about contagion). I use Rodinol and a stop bath, so it should not be contaged with dev.</p> <p>Last August I made up a batch, which was the last litre of an old stock bottle (so the stock had had air above it for a while), and which then did not get used very much until April this year. At that time I found a strange thing: the working solution bottle was <em>black</em>, which turned out to be not because the fix itself had gone dark, but because something had plated out onto the bottle. It's stored in a cupboard (so fairly dark) in a flat without stupid variations in temperature. The fix certainly smelt OK, and it seems to be working fine. However it is filling me with even more fear than fixer usually does (I hate it because everything can seem to be fine, but only later turn out not to be, unlike dev where you immediately know if something is wrong).</p> <p>So, is this a known thing that can happen, should I worry (dispose of the fixer) and how can I stop it happening again?</p> <p>Thanks</p>

<p>Stuart: not a completely serious reply, but the thing to do with B/W is get access to a darkroom and make prints. Obviously this is not practical if you aren't somewhere where there is a shared darkroom or willing to dedicate significant space and money to one, but making B/W prints is <em>extremely</em> satisfying, at least for me.</p>

<p>Another vote for Peak Imaging. I've used them for ages and have just rung them about processing some E6 4x5: one of their comments started 'most of our customers ...' -- if they're in a position where they have <em>more than one</em> customer sending in E6 4x5 in 2016 I think they clearly know what they're doing!</p> <p>I am sure other labs are also fine, but Peak Imaging definitely are.<br /> <br />PS if you are planning on processing a substantial amount of B/W buy a tank and a few bits and do it yourself: it really is easy and very cheap if you use something like Rodinal which lasts for ever.</p>

<p>This is a belated followup in case anyone finds this thread in future.</p> <p>I've now used the tank to process film for the first time (don't take much 120 nowadays), and it's fine. The trick is that you can just slide the film into the spiral (there's no clever move-the-two-halves-against-each other as, for instance, with a Paterson tank). It helps if everything is extremely dry of course: the mistake I make is (a) to sweat and (b) to touch the edge of the film with my hands. You can avoid (b). It's no harder to load than any other tank though.</p> <p>You can't agitate by inversion which is what I do with all my other tanks. I fashed about this and then decided that the spin-the-spiral thing was equivalent (ie 10s of one was 10s of inverting). This seems to be right, or right enough: the negs I have look fine.</p> <p>It's light-tight enough: I didn't use it in daylight but under LED lights which have a lot of blue in them as such things do, and there's no fogging at all.</p> <p>The 300cc of chemistry it suggests is fine.</p> <p>It's a fine tank if you want to process single rolls of 120.</p>

<p>Glen: it looks to me like it loads from the outside – there are little notches which look like they're intended to 'start' the film (kind of like the Paterson spirals have special places which pick up the film). But the two halves of the spiral (top and bottom) don't move against each other, so there's no obvious way of working the film in like there is with other spirals I've used that load like this. So I'm guessing it will slide round the spiral if you push it, which I can see could work for 120 if everything is very dry.</p> <p>I think what I am going to do is to take a roll of film, and then try and load it into this tank with a paterson tank to hand, so if it's obviously hopeless (and I've not trashed the edge of the film too badly) I can reload it into the paterson tank.</p> <p>(As an aside: the reason I got this was because I have a really lovely and extremely tiny 3M tank which takes a single roll of 35mm: its spiral is plastic and loads from the inside with a magic winding attachment. It's the easiest tank I've ever loaded, and I've always wanted an equivalent (single-reel: easy-to-load is a bonus) for 120. Next I will look for something which lets me do a single sheet of 4x5...)</p>

<p>Thanks for pointing this out! I live within walking distance of the gallery and will be going there: I love 'Early Color'.</p>

<p>Larry: it does look like a Paterson reel, but it's not: the two halves of the reel are attached rigidly to each other. It looks to me as though the film just slides round the spiral which is probably viable for 120 (obviously would not be practical for 35mm).</p> <p>Alan: yes, I expect to use a gash roll or two, although I'm trying to minimise that: I don't take much MF any more, but seem to have gravitated to either 35mm or 4x5, so scratch rolls take far too long to cycle through the camera. I know how much chemistry it takes (300ml).</p>

<p>I've just bought one of these, as I relatively often find myself wanting to process a single roll of film which is wasteful in a big tank, and also it's a lovely bakelite thing for almost no money which I couldn't resist. It's complete but missing instruction manual: everything is obvious except getting the film into the spiral, and I'm anxious not to trash too many films learning how to do that.</p> <p>I have found places which sell the manuals (or may do), and I'm probably going to buy a copy if they get back to me, but in the mean time, does anyone have a manual for one of these, or remember how to load film into it?</p> <p>Thanks</p>

<p>I would go further: if you are interested in (film) photography, then 'Carol' is a film you should seriously consider seeing: it is simply lovely to look at, quite apart from being a wonderful film. One of the best films of 2015, without a doubt.</p>

<p>Since someone brought up the film-vs-digital quality thing: I would urge anyone who is interested in this to look at photographs taken with similar lenses and ideally of similar subjects and by the same photographer both with a recent digital camera and on film, and reproduced the same way. A good example of this is the book 'French Kiss' by Peter Turnley: it consists of photographs of Paris, taken by him over several decades with film Leicas and (I think) an M9 for the recent ones. All the prints were made by the same printer via an internegative (I think for all of them, certainly for the digital images).</p> <p>The 'objective quality' difference is really obvious to me, and it finally puts this whole debate to bed: digital has won for small format. What is a bit more interesting is the 'subjective quality': it turns out I much prefer the film-originated images, but I prefer them <em>because they look like film</em>, not because they have more bogopixels.</p> <p>And that's really the point: film clearly was once objectively better than digital, and equally clearly it will at some point (which I think is now comfortably in the past, but am also not interested in debating) objectively be not as good as digital. So there simply is no point in arguing that you want to use film 'because it is objectively better'. You don't paint with watercolours rather than oils 'because they are better', you paint with them <em>because they are watercolours</em> and the resulting painting looks like a watercolour. And this is why film is interesting: <em>because it looks like film</em>.</p>

<p>Peter wrote:</p> <blockquote> <p>It is reassuring to see that the radiation dose from a few seconds in the hand luggage scanner can't be compared to a few seconds at 30,000 feet, but perhaps to many hours at 30,000 feet. It is pretty obvious that the information given to me by the security agent at the airport in Copenhagen is not correct.</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact they are correct: you are confused about units. The dose from the machine is about 0.01 millirem, while xkcd gives the dose from a flight from NY to LA as 40 micro Sieverts. 100 rem are a Sv, so if you do the maths you'll find that the dose from flying is about 400 times the dose from the machine.</p> <p>It's actually a little less simple than this, because the dose from flying is presumably a whole-body dose, while film is small. Radiation dose measurement is just a mess unfortunately. However it does seem reasonably safe to worry about the flight more than the machine.</p> <p>Also perhaps worth pointing out that there have indeed been studies of cancer rates in air crew, who get exposed to this kind of dose all the time. They don't get cancer more often, and in fact they may get it less often.</p>

<p>I haven't found information on the doses from carry-on baggage machines: I suspect they are tiny and getting smaller for the same reason that dental x-ray doses are tiny and getting smaller: people have to work around these machines and they (not your film) can get nasty cumulative doses.</p> <p>From the <a href="https://xkcd.com/radiation/">xkcd radiation chart</a> you can see that the dose from a flight from NY to LA is roughly two chest x-rays. This will almost certainly hugely dominate any dose from the carry-on machine. It is notable that all film on a flight gets both the dose from the machine and the dose from the flight itself: I'd like to gently suggest that if very fast film gets fogged by flying it is probably getting fogged by the flight itself, not by the machine. </p>

<p>Thanks for all the replies!</p> <p>I should obviously have been smart enough to check Wikipedia to realise it was made on Super 16: I think I was derailed by the credits which mentioned Arri, who I think now (of course) make digital movie cameras but also (of course) made / make film movie cameras.</p> <p>On interesting thing is to watch my own reaction to things like this: I'm fairly sure that 20, or even 10 years ago I would have looked at this and thought 'oh, shot on something less than 35mm and grainy as a result', while now I have seen so many 'perfect' digital or heavily digitally-processed movies that my reaction is 'oh, a movie with texture in the frame, how lovely'. The same is true for still photography I think: at some point (before film was displaced by digital I think) I went to an exhibition of 35mm photography and suddenly realised that <em>the grain (texture of the image really) is the point</em>.</p>

<p>Just in case: I wasn't meaning to be rude about the C3! They do look fantastic!</p>

<p>A related and (for me!) more interesting question might be: how good is the longevity of <em>processed</em> B/W film now? My guess is 'very good indeed' but I don't actually know. (I'm also at the point where even if it's not that good I probably should not be caring as it will outlive me...)</p>