scott_eaton5

I ran the yearbook photo staff during HS and for a few years after. At that time I had to hand out a trix loaded k-1000 with manual focus and pray I got it back in one piece. It was the lack of AF that was a killer and reduced good shot counts more than anything. I found most kids could compose creatively with a bit of practice and would try to get the match needle metering right. I'm honestly surprised and relieved your school has a budget for cameras. Most in my area rely on smartphones and many don't have a YB photo staff other than to manage submitted pictures (from smartphones) via the student population.

Reading up on the guy he claims he does his own printing. That's fine from an art standpoint, but that would mean submitting glossy prints to his publisher. Even in the heyday of film few agencies would take prints vs demanding a transparency. Maybe things are different in London. Some of the images with the heavy cast also have a normal whitepoint. That tends to indicate something done in digital post vs analog/chemical. I used to do stuff like this for some clients before digital like pre flashing paper, or underprocessing neg film, or cross processing e-6 begore optical printing, but it's tricky to be consistent with analog tricks. Scanning your film with a high quality scanner and using any number of 3rd party retro/instagram effects is the easiest way to get a look like this. Using a camera filter wont work with print film because scanning or using an automated printer will null it out. Plus, his images are non linear in color shifts so a filter wont work anyways. Or just shoot 30yr old VPH. Produced yellow skin tones no matter what you did.

Working in Data Centers and supporting hundreds of SANs the past 15 years I've replaced hundreds of spinners. I've had EMC units blow 10 drives in a month simply because the drives had the same sequential problem on the production line. When SSD's fail they tend to die without warning and about the same statistical rate as 10k enterprise spinners in my experience. 15k spinners have lousy reliability, but they are incurring wear and tear at a 50% faster rate. I've also not found SAS more reliable than SATA. Budget USB enclosures (or budget NAS units) tend to come with high MTF / cheap drives, and those should be avoided. Buy em' empty and use better drives. WD blacks, HGST, and more premium drives seem statistically more robust in my experience than the absolute cheapest drives bought via column sorting on Newegg. For home use I run 'caddy' type USB 3 externals where I can plug any SATA drive in at a whim. I recycle my drives this way -vs- tossing them out. With high quality backup software like Veeam or Macrium Reflect available for free on desktop there's no reason to not have bullet proof backups anymore. I have big debates with other system admins about tape, which I hate. Yers, you can boot an AS-400 from LTO, but it's not reliable as people think because tape units themselves are very unreliable. You just don't go out and replace an iSCSI or fiber LTO unit when it fails, and I don't have to 'clean' and 'tension' a bulk SATA drive.

Check fixer for precipitate - that's where I've seen this before. Typical poor shadow detail / speed with Ilfosol. You're going to need to over expose, or increase development (a lot) to fix those lower mids, but this will brick highlights.

Since a front was going through (hence the rough surf) well, that pretty much killed any chance for a nice colorful sunset over Grand Haven Beach. I went the other direction, grabbed a few shots, and hoped for some nice monochrome tonality in post. Spent the rest of time in the waves with the other crazy nitwits getting our brains knocked around. Minor tone map in the sky to bring out detail, but fairly straight from ACR.

The smell of that fresh roll of tri-x going in the bulk roller....heavenly. They need that scent for cars. Number of frames plus 5 cllicks on the auto roller as I recall. You could cram more than 36 frames, but needed to be carefull or they would scratch. There was always some idiot who couldn't find the masking tape and would use duct tape, bandaids, etc to tie the film off. Or they would reef on the camera advance and tear the film out of the cassette. K-1000s could put a lot of torque on film take ups. Oddly none of the newspapers I worked for touched bulk roll. They didn't trust it for some reason.

What Tom just said. I read the article and I read the posts....and I'm not sure if we're reading the same article. Author seems to be making a critical point about how society has changed along with urban interactions....smartphones being either a symptom or cause....that's for a different forum. I really don't see anything here about how street / urban photography has changed in terms of gear. There's street photography that forces itself to be artsy, but ends up being grainy, monochrome, boring, poorly composed and self important when it's barely more than nothing, and then there's street photography that tries to be a documentary with neutral intentions. The former needs to die, and the later we don't have enough of.

I always liked the looks of the early MF Rangefinder Fujis. They had a 'Russian Minimalistic' feel to them while being very pragmatic and clean. They were designed to do one thing; take astonishing high quality, 6x7 and 6x9cm images with little gadgetry. Prints from those machines were some of the best I ever printed. The GW690 emphasized this the best.

Red Dahlia

Carny Worker

Agreed....less fickle in processing than tmx, but tonally nearly identical.

Not to fuzzy things up in this good discussion, but I've become a staunch believer and member of a small but growing group that is critical of current RGB sensor technology being based on 3 colors. Be it CCD, CMOS or other there are hard limits to the optical filters used on optical sensors. The filter itself has a particular bandwidth for each color and isn't entirely discrete. A good deal of color interpolation is used to keep thing level, and the end results tend to be increasingly non linear as luminance and saturation levels increase. Note the universal complaints about dSLRs having trouble with dense reds and oranges. That's because the red filter on the camera has to sort 625nm vs 660nm light when the filter doesn't distinguish like our eyes do. If you make the filters denser to improve accuracy then you sacrifice sensitivity. Increasing to 4 or 5 sensor colors at acquisition level would vastly improve noise and color accuracy with digital sensors.

To check the alignment of a 23c running 35mm use a razor blade Put the razor blade in your neg carrier and observe it's sharpness wide open. Then flip it 90 degrees or rotate your carrier. The blade should be sharp symmetrically and not sharper closer to an end. 23cs can get out of alignment easily and the razor blade trick gives you a target that's solid. Get a piece of 1/8 milk plexi and mount it above the neg stage. This gives you the same physics as a cold light or dichro with a $5 piece of plastic. It will also eat heat. Instructor who taught me this trick learned it from either Adams or Sexton given he worked with both. 35mm negs that don't hold flat can be fixed with a glass carrier, or letting them sit in a sleeve under a flat weight for a few weeks. While I always wanted to print my negs fast after they dried they are much easier to handle when sleeved in tight contact pages for awhile. If I still had my 23c I'd retrofit it to LED immediately. No more heat.

400F was stunning when pulled a stop, especially in MF. The problem with Sensia 400 and a lot of the other Provia based films is they didn't work right run through E-6 lines spec'd with Kodak Q-strips, and most E-6 labs spec's with Kodak for Q/C purposes. Kodak E-6 films like shorter color developer times....Fuji E-6 films, especially Provia 100/400 prefer much more extended times. Net was result was reduced saturation and 'cool' shifted tones of Provia and 'green' looking Sensia. Properly processed Provia 100 and Sensia 400 / Provia 400 were warm, lively, and had punchy yet detailed colors. The Sensia in question here will liekly age to the wamrm/ magenta side, which won't hurt it.

Used to love it when customers would bring in Fuji E-6 cassettes loaded with bulk Tri-X. Fuji 35mm cassettes used to be reloadable at one time if you popped them off right, and it drove one of my old lab owners up the wall. Lab rats would grab that E-6 cassette, and even it though work order said explicitly "B&W / Tri-X" they'd run it through E-6 with narry a thought. This required a full dump and reload of our entire E-6 system due to contamination. After awhile we refused to accept bulk roll unless they paid for a snip test. Otherwise, loved bulk roll. Bring's back yearbook memories.

Over then years I've had the opportunity to use pretty much every enlarger made, in both home darkroom, fine art commercial and photo journalism roles. I started with condensers as a newb, bought a 23Cii, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. Well, for 35mm....with MF I never could get a uniform light plane on a 23c. I then worked for a newspaper, and veterans with 30years of press experience and making their own prints were producing prints made from 35mm orders of magnitude sharper than I was getting with my 23C, and hen you push Tri-X to 3200 you need every molecule of detail. Turns out they were using Focomat V35s. I could not match the sharpness and edge detail with my 23C using a 50mm Componon S lens, which wasn't exactly a dog. The problem as I found was mostly thermal. Straight Condensers like a 23C focus incandescent light on the neg stage including all the heat they generate, which causes the neg to bounce a few seconds after you hit it with light. Some more fiddling and I designed a multi stage thermal filter and got me kinda close to the V35s. I then moved to the fine art side, and fine art B&W vets with 30 years of experience once again smoked my 23C prints. These guys had all moved from cold cathode to commercial dichroics, and the difference in high key tonal ranges was astonishing compared to Condensers. Dichroics then used halogen light sources, which you would think cause lots of neg popping, but the mixing box absorbs a lot of the heat and little seems to make to the lens stage. Plus, with variable contrast paper (I hate it but there's always Polyfiber and RC fans out there) gave any intermediate grade you wanted by simply adjusting magenta. I added a piece of 1/8 milk plexi above the neg stage in my 23C and got nearly identical results as the dichros. I know it's subjective, but as I evolved I preferred Dichros / milk plexi modified condensers -vs- straight condensers, especially for MF / LF. The problem is all the good fiber papers like Agfa Portiga and densitometer killing Dmax are long gone. Graded Ilfobrom is ok, but once again the trick is to use devlopers other than Ilford's weak lot to get full density range out of it (Dektol to the rescue). Graded fiber is better than RC, but not by much.

Riding through a park in West Michigan on my Cannondale. Only thing I had was my Samsung Edge, but it worked. Minor tonal map and level adjustment

This....all of it (especially the first part). Remember that at the time TMZ was introduced Kodak had no dedicated high speed workflow other than pushing Tri-X via 3rd party developers (Acufine / Diafine), and Royal-X was painfully outdated (if you could find it). When TMZ was shot at it's true speed, which is around ISO 1000, it produced normal contrast and lush shadow detail, which is something Tri-X couldn't do even in Acufine. So, as a journalist at the time it was easier to meet printing guidelines for density requirements if you needed ~1600 speed with low contrast. It was briefly popular as a fashion film. The problem was that TMZ has godzilla sized grain, absurdly low shelf life, expensive, sensitive to fog, and required TMAX developer for full shadow detail. In Acufine it looks really good up to 3200 or so. I was one of the few press guys who messed with it when it came out, and only for niche situations requiring high speed and low contrast. Tri-X (and then TMY 400) souped in Acufine or Diafine produces far finer grain (see the example in this thread). Most people are going to buy it, then send it to a local lab, which is the same problem since the dawn of time with conventional B&W film. The lab will then almost certainly under develop it because most labs still running conventional film lines are running Ilford developers, and they are terribly mismatched for something like TMZ. Also realize TMZ is horrendously sensitive to ambient radiation and fog levels and degrades quickly near it's expiration date. If Kodak wants to bring back something pictorially unique then Panatomic-X is my first choice followed by TechPan. Panatomic-X is easy to process (except in sheet form) and restores the classic silver heavy tone range with fine grain lost by TMX 100 and it's Acros clones. IMO, FP4 is a better film than Plus-X and still available.