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Monophoto

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Everything posted by Monophoto

  1. I was taught to start in neutral (with the #2 filter), and print a test strip that include the darkest and lightest areas of the print. Develop and fix the test strip, and examine the extremes. Then, you can adjust contrast up or down by changing filters - more contrast (higher number) to get darker shadows, or lower contrast to get more texture in the highlights. Half steps are subtle, but you will see changes.
  2. Many years ago, I asked my wife to give me a darkroom item for Christmas, and even ordered it from a well-known photographic supplier in Los Angeles. It arrived, and without opening the box, I handed it off to her to wrap. When I opened the package on Christmas morning, I first noticed that a detachable part was missing. Then, I flipped it over and noticed initials written on the bottom with a Sharpie. Other than those two points, it seemed to be in perfect condition. Ah ha - it had been sold and returned, and then placed back into inventory as a new item even through the circumstances clearly demanded that it be treated as used but in excellent condition. I sent them an e-mail (on Christmas day) and receive a reply the next morning - they acknowledged the error, had already shipped a new easel to me, and were sending a shipping label for the to return the used easel. So my conclusions were: s**t happens, to anyone and at any time the measure of the quality of a company is not whether they have problems, but rather how they resolve them My experience has been that reputable suppliers are very sensitive to customer satisfaction, and respond quickly when a problem is discovered. Sure, the time required to address a problem can vary - smaller companies may take a bit longer than larger companies, and its only reasonable for it to take a bit longer to resolve a problem involving more expensive items since the company needs to do a more comprehensive investigation. But when problems happen, good companies resolve them. They have to - that's how they maintain their reputation as a good company.
  3. If hacking LEDs is your thing, take a look at this YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom Clive regularly takes apart LEDs and reverse engineers the circuitry, and one of his frequent observations is that they are often designed to overdrive the chips in order to maximize light output. Of course, this means that the life expectancy is reduced. There are some relatively simple things that can be done to hack these LEDs to achieve longer life at the expense of light output, and Clive. Interestingly, he did a couple of videos a while back on 'Dubai lamps' - LEDs made by Phillips for exclusive sale in the Emirate of Dubai at the request of that country's government that are designed to have both longer life and higher efficiency. Obviously, these lamps cost more because they aren't as cheaply made. You get what you pay for!
  4. Another batch today - different user name, but I'm certain its the same person(s).
  5. Five pages of spam posts this morning.
  6. Clearly. When I built the darkroom in our former home, my enlarger was a Durst F60. To get additional enlargement capability, I attached a shallow shelf to the wall at my enlarging station, and the designed the counter below the enlarger such that the top could be lowered in 6" increments below the nominal counter top level. With this arrangement, printing 11x14 was a snap, and I could easily get to 16x20 with a little effort. Later, I bought a DII that came without a baseboard. I attached it to the same shelf (with some additional reinforcement of course).
  7. A number of years ago we visited our son in Silicon Valley, and I took along my 4x5 equipment. My practice was to hand carry my camera and film in a backpack, but to pack my tripod in my checked bag. As my carryon bag was being checked at our departure from San Jose International (which probably sees more travelers with large format equipment than just about any other airport), I overheard a couple of the TSA folks debating about whether tripods are allowable as carryon items. The size and heft of tripods makes them pretty potent weapons in the hands of someone who has practice with a baseball bat. Thought it was an interesting debate, but approach of checking my tripod avoided the issue. The TSA folks have an important job to do, and sadly they are probably only marginally trained to do it. Even so, they do are remarkable job. As someone who had the experience of going through an emergency evacuation from a plane in response to a bomb scare (down the escape slides in the rain on a runway at JFK Airport), I appreciate what they do for us.
  8. I am originally from Florida, but have lived in Upstate NY for 53 years. When I retired, people asked if I planned to move to Florida. I told them that I considered Florida to be too hot, too humid, with too many insects, old people, and hurricanes. Having lived through a few hurricanes growing up, I do feel for the folks down there. But frankly, I'd rather deal with snow.
  9. I'm a special case because I had a detached retina in one eye; it was corrected anatomically, but I have limited vision in that eye. Having two eyes means you have a spare, and if one doesn't work, then its important to take very good care of the other one. So I opted for distance correction in the interocular implant in my good eye. That means that I don't need glasses for walking around, driving or watching TV, but I do need glasses for reading. The surgeon who did the implant suggested using drugstore or dollarstore readers, but my retina doctor suggested that a better solution would be bifocals with reading correction in the lower portion, and no correction in the upper portion. His rationale was that wearing bifocals all the time would provide physical protection for my good eye - something that is important since I no longer have a spare. He pointed out that one of the things that automobile safety experts don't talk about is that air bags may save drivers and passengers from death or serious injury in the event of crashes, but the deployment of airbags is responsible for thousands of incidents of serious eye injury .. So bifocals work well except for one situation - working at the computer. Bifocals are fine if the text you are reading is held in your hands (like a book or newspaper), but if the text is higher relative to your head, you are forced to tip your head back to engage the bifocals, and this causes neck strain. So I have a set of single-vision readers with fairly large lenses that I use when I'm at the computer. While the issue of whether blue light from computers is actually dangerous is subject to a lot of debate, I think most people agree that too much blue light close to bedtime may interfere with sleep, I opted to get readers that are also 'blue blockers'. They have a faint yellow tint that doesn't interfere with normal reading, but may offer some added value, and they were cheap on Amazon. As to the cataract surgery itself - it was a total non-event. The surgery itself was 10-15 minutes, and I was awake for most of that time. There was a wait of a couple of hours while they were putting in drops to cause the eye to dilate, and of course there are the drops that you have to use afterward. But compared with retina reattachment surgery, cataract surgery is a piece of cake. I was a bit concerned going in because of that spare consideration, but my retina doctor directed me to a new opthamologist who was also the head of the ophthalmology department at a local medical school, and had more experience than the typical cataract surgeon.
  10. Indeed. A few years ago, I found a set of blue-tooth cellphone earbuds that were branded Vivitar. Nothing photographic about them. And the quality was pretty grim - nowhere as good as my old Vivitar 283.
  11. Rubbing caused friction that increased the temperature and caused local increases in development. I tried it a few times but never found it to be all that useful. As to fingernail staining - I think that was mainly associated with the use of Amidol as a developer.
  12. Several posters have mentioned that brick walls are occasionally photographed as a means of testing lenses for distortion. Recently, this subject came up in a very different context - in a discussion of a post regarding the collapse of the condominium tower in Surfside, FL. It turns out that a couple of weeks before the collapse, someone noticed that the masonry facing on a flower box toward the back of the pool deck was failing. They had an engineer visit the site to inspect the flower box to see if the failure was indicative of some other problems. A set of photographs was taken, but apparently they weren't examined closely. More recently, since the collapse, someone took a closer look at the photographs and noticed that they depicted curved grout lines between the deck pavers (grout lines are always straight). The discussion centered on whether this curvature was lens distortion, or whether it was an early indication that the deck was sagging. The general consensus of those in the discussion was that because the curvature appeared to pass through the center of the image and not along the sides, it was more likely to be a true representation of the conditions at the time the images were captured and should in fact have been interpreted as signs that the deck was sagging between columns. So the point is that photographs sometimes disclose important information that is simply overlooked until much later.
  13. Accuracy is how well the thermometer indicates the actual temperature. Precision is how closely it reads the temperature - how many decimal places or fractions of a degree it can read. But for darkroom work, accuracy and precision aren't as important as the third characteristic - repeatability. To achieve optimum results, you want the process to become calibrated over time. Until the process is calibrated, you have no way of knowing which processing variable to adjust to get desired results (normally, the variable that would be tweaked is time with all other processing variables held constant). And to have a calibrated process, the thermometer must always read X when the actual temperature is X - but you don't really need to know what X is.
  14. Here's a video that Jon Katz made when he and George Forss were hang a show at a small cafe in Cambridge, NY in 2014
  15. George Forss has died. You Got Your Wish George, I'll Look For You In The Sky With Your Beloved Aliens - Bedlam Farm Forss became famous as a street photographer in New York - both a photographer of street scenes, and someone who barely barely survived by selling his pictures on the street. Eventually, however, he ended up on the cover of Time Magazine. He died in his small apartment above his art gallery on the main street in Cambridge, NY.
  16. In the late 1970's or early 1980's, Nikon also made a 100mm lens that would work quite well as a macro lens when coupled with extension tubes. It was a less-expensive 'E series' lens that proved to have been a mistake - because if worked much better than cheap lenses were supposed to!
  17. Case in point: the so-called 'smearproof' stainless steel that is so popular on kitchen appliances isn't stainless steel at all - its just paint!
  18. Good advice here. I used bulk film for years (decades) until I stopped using film. Three reasons - the cost was lower, I could load lengths of film that were more appropriate to my way of working (I stored negatives in sleeves that would hold 30 frames, so a 36 exposure role was a problem), and I always tested my film to determine an optimized film speed, and doing that with bulk film meant that the test results would apply to the entire bulk roll. I repeatedly reused commercial film cartridges - specifically, Ilford cartridges because the ends just snapped on. I carefully cleaned the felt light trap between uses, and then reused each cartridge until it was so old that I could no longer close the end. I know that's not supposed to be a good idea, but my experience was that cleaning the felt between uses prevented problems with scratched film. Cleaning isn't difficult - just pass something along the felt to dislodge any dust or grit that may be there. Bulk film normally comes with frames premarked, but those rarely line up with the actual frames after the film has been loaded. So one additional chore that you have when using bulk film is that you must number the negatives for reference. I used either a Rapidograph technical film and India ink, or a Staedler pigment pen for that purpose. My experience was limited to bulk loading black and white film (T-Max). I did purchase one bulk roll of E-6 film back in the day, but concluded that the advantages of bulk loading didn't apply to color film, at least in the way that I worked.
  19. Film development times are not calculated. Instead, they are determined through a process of testing. OP referred to this as 'trial and error', but it's actually a fairly rigorous process.
  20. Two interesting photography-related news items from this day: 1. Central Camera, the iconic photo store in the Chicago Loop, was looted and burned in the riots following the George Floyd death in Minneapolis. News reports say that the owner promised to rebuild. 2. Elsa Dorfman died in Cambridge, MA. Dorfman was known for her very large format portraits made with one of the extremely rare 20x24" Polaroid cameras.
  21. Sean I have no idea what you mean by "superimpose color film with black and white film". It might be a bit more clear for you to describe what you are trying to achieve. I suspect that your objective is to have a final image that is an overall monochrome, but with some elements in color. That's relatively easy to achieve digitally. A very old technique was to shoot monochrome film and make a monochrome print, and than selectively add color using either pencils or oil paints - that's actually a lot of fun, but it takes quite a bit of practice to become a real master of the process, and to achieve the best results, you have to have the right materials. For example, the print generally should be made on fiber-based paper with a matte surface.
  22. I'm with SCL - interpolate, and then rely on variable contrast paper and your printing skills to compensate for any imperfections. But if you insist on making it rocket science, you can do a film developing speed test to calibrate your process to the chosen EI. But when you do that, make sure that you understand that the results only apply if you have the same film emulsion number - if you come back a year later with a different emulsion batch, the results could be different. The Massive Development Chart is only a guide, and at best it should be considered as a source of a starting point. Your personal darkroom practices will result in variations.
  23. Freezing stops the aging process, but it resumes when the film returns to ambient temperature. In theory, it is possible to freeze/thaw film repeatedly, but in practice, most people are concerned about the problem of condensation that occurs as frozen film is thawed, so the usual practice is to reserve freezing for one-time long-term storage. If film needs to be stored for shorter periods, and periodically used, then simply refrigerating is probably a better solution. That slows down the aging process, but doesn't stop it, but refrigerated film comes up to ambient temperature faster with less risk of condensation.
  24. One other point on frozen film - back in the day, when Polaroid was a going concern, they had a research group in Cambridge, MA. A Polaroid representative who had worked in that group told me that their tests showed that freezing film would stop the aging process, but that after previously frozen film had been thawed, the aging process returned and even accelerated to some degree. The shelf life of film is set by the manufacturer based on his subjective criteria for acceptable performance. So what the Polaroid test means is that if you have a film that is rated by its manufacture to have a shelf life of 5 years, and you freeze that film, you can keep it for 15 or 20 years without any deterioration, but once you thaw it, you have no more than the original five years, and possibly less, to use it before it deteriorates to the point where the manufacturer would consider it to no longer be usable.
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