Nobody ever shoots a full roll of film and loves every single frame, but on my most recent outing I came pretty close on two rolls. When you only bring three rolls of 120 film and a square format Mamiya C3 to shoot the pace slows down a lot, after all you’ve only got twelve exposures per roll. Keeping things flowing is important, but you definitely do not want to go off releasing the shutter when you are not within a hair of certainty that the resulting negative will contain the image you desire.
For my last shoot of the semester break, I only ended up shooting the two rolls of black and white film I brought – Kodak Tri-X Pan 320, and Ilford Delta 3200. The roll of Kodak Portra 400, the best color negative film in existence for portraiture as far as I am concerned, I had with me will have to wait for another time. Having never shot with this particular girl before I was unsure how things would go, but it was evident from the start that if nothing else we would at least have a good time. When I took my film out of the tanks and held the negatives up to the light, I knew I had some winners.
Joe has been a good friend of mine since the mid-90′s when our families both lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. When he asked if I would take a few photos of him and Miriam after their wedding of course I said yes. I wish them all the best in their future together.
Fall 2011 proved to be an incredibly stressful semester for a number of reasons, but I survived and did well enough to continue my pursuit of a mechanical engineering degree. When grades posted, I had managed to turn what started as my best grade into my worst, and what started as my worst grade into my best. In the spring, I will see if I can manage to just keep them all at a respectable level. At any rate, the prospect of actually finished one of the four degrees I have started in the last eleven years still exists and that was really the best Christmas present I could get myself.
As far as Christmas itself went, I made out pretty well with some gizmos for my road bike, a stein from Germany for my beer, and some new clothes. I also picked up a new-to-me large format camera, a 4×5″ Shen Hao, with a 135mm f/5.6 Symmar-S MC lens. That will help me blow off some steam in the limited free time to come, and hopefully let me make more things to hang on my wall. The gifts I gave out this year were all framed darkroom prints from photos I took this summer in Scotland. People seemed to enjoy and appreciate those, so it may become a tradition for as long as I can source film, paper, and chemistry.
A few Tuesdays ago, my youngest sister and I took a ride to IAH to board the first of three flights that would take us to our parents in Aberdeen, Scotland. In the interest of not missing our flight, we arrived several hours early. Security was easy enough since we were flying out of Terminal E. No need to wait in the mammoth line typical of Terminal C. This proved to be a good thing. With more than thirty rolls of film to hand check someone would have surely been irritated had I been at a different terminal. The TSA folks were happy to scan the film. I suspect that’s because doing something unusual breaks up the monotony of their job.
Our first flight was uneventful. IAH to EWR. When we landed someone else was still parked at the gate, but we made the connection still so it wasn’t a huge problem. At EWR we boarded a demon aircraft. Some pump/compressor/generator used during taxiing was not mechanically sound and made the most terrible cyclic noise I’ve had the displeasure of hearing in quite a while. Of course with a busy airport we spent a long time sitting on the jetway waiting, and that damned noise was with us the entire time. It was loud, and clearly caused several of the people on the plane physical pain. When we finally landed in the UK we got to deal with the same racket again. Continental/United ought to get out of the practice of flying aircraft with an obviously failing system on board. The only part of the trip that was a real nightmare was our short hop from Heathrow to Aberdeen. There was an infant, a cute baby even, seated directly behind me. What a set of lungs – for the entire flight.
The first thing I noticed about Scotland was how green everything was. The buildings? All grey and dreary. The surroundings? As green as green gets. For a moment, I almost wished I’d gone heavy on the color film instead of bringing a ton of B&W film.
My Mom did a good job getting us to our parents’ flat in one piece. She’s never paid much attention to lanes so driving on the wrong side of the road didn’t phase her. I’m sure our time in Malaysia helped. Where my folks live is awesome. There’s a view of rolling hills right out the front windows, maybe 20 yards from their front door is a trail that goes for more miles than I could have run even at my most fit, and maybe a 1000 yards or so beyond that is a river. Excellent.
Jetlag wasn’t as much of a problem as the fact that Aberdeen is way further north than I’ve ever been before. As such, during the summer the sun never really goes down. Dark like we know dark here just does not happen. 1am? Still looks like twilight. 4am? Full on sunrise. Either way, the trip was great. I’m not going to go into great detail about everywhere we went, but we saw several castles and drove all over the island. A few notable bits below:
The grounds at Crathes Castle are gorgeous, and the large red squirrels everywhere would have entertained Abbey for years.
The castle in Edinburgh is hugely impressive, as is the giant rock outcropping under it.
One day I must camp in the Scottish highlands.
Our tour guide at the Glen Ord distillery was pretty funny. He says he gave up on whisky snobs the moment he read a review calling out flavors of “butter fried spices” and that if you pay your good money for a bottle of Scotch drink it any damn way you please. I’ll still drink it straight.
There is livestock everywhere, and the food is great.
Coming home was fairly trouble free aside from the cab driver that took us to the wrong hotel in London. The plane was unusually hot inside so instead of sleeping the entire flight I just stayed up the majority of the time. On the return jetlag still wasn’t a problem. I’ve kept myself busy developing film and running errands.
Since I’ve finished scanning and uploading all of my 35mm film from the trip, I’ll go ahead and post my favorites as well as a slideshow to the set of everything on Flickr. I’ve also finished developing all of my B&W medium format film, but I haven’t scanned any of it yet – check back in a week or so for new favorites from that camera. Two weeks from now I should have the color medium format film back as well, so check back again then too.
A few hours ago my sister and I landed at IAH. My two weeks in Scotland has come to an end. Now, I’ve got real life to tend to while also working in the development of many, many, many rolls of film. My color film will be heading off to different labs in an attempt to not spend a ton of money. The C-41 120 rolls are going to Fuji via Wal-Mart. It will take two weeks but there is not a cheaper option anywhere by any metric. The C-41 135 rolls are off for Aker Imaging tomorrow morning, I’ll have them back tomorrow afternoon. The B&W fun will start tonight. I need to mix up some fresh chemistry, but I’m getting started tonight for sure.
Anyway, these will tide you over until I can start posting photos taken with better cameras.
In unrelated news, I got the internship I applied for just before my trip. I’ll take the weekend of Independence Day to get back into the swing of life closer to the equator, and start the internship immediately thereafter.
The only digital camera with me on this trip is in the back of my increasingly annoying HTC Aria. Two of my film cameras have done the bulk of my shooting, which has totaled something like 9 rolls of film so far (with the 10th and 11th in progress). Good thing I brought 38 rolls with me. Anyway, it’s too gorgeous here not to share so here are a few cellpics.
These are the cameras tasked with really capturing my vacation.
A few weeks ago I bought myself copies of Ansel Adams’ instructional books on photography. “The Camera” was a quick read and contained little information with which I was not already familiar. As of right now, I am about two thirds of the way through “The Negative” and I’ve learned quite a lot. Several sources I’ve read attempted to explain the Zone System in summary. None of them ever made as much sense as the chapter dedicated to the Zone System in “The Negative.” Today, I took a trip into the back yard to try my hand a visualizing the values I wanted to see, deciding how to expose my film after carefully using my light meter, and then actually exposing the film. The results are quite encouraging. Quick scans are below, but next week I will be enlarging these negatives in the darkroom.
Well, the Velvia is back from Fuji. Wal-Mart says the turnaround is two weeks, but so far it hasn’t ever taken that long. Anyway, before I ran a roll of Velvia through the PepsiCam (my pinhole camera) I searched for some information on the reciprocity effect. I found a table, wrote down the appropriate information on a note-card and taped it to the back of the camera. Most of the exposures were at least 30s long, and it worked out very nicely. I think the camera cost a whole $7 to make. Results?
Coffee is disgusting. The smell, the taste, the stains it leaves in unsealed tile when field-grade officers spill it all over the floor without even attempting to clean up after themselves (that’s what they make privates for). All of it is just vile. Until last night, I was fairly convinced that if I happened to take over the world one of my first acts as Supreme World Commander would be the banning of any more coffee production. Then I used it to develop film.
Now, I won’t claim this was an original idea. I’m not even sure, in this age of information, that original ideas even exist anymore. A handy website, Caffenol.org, provided some nice examples and a few recipes. The necessary ingredients? Instant coffee, washing soda, vitamin c, and water. Water comes out of the faucet, you can get washing soda (not to be confused with baking soda) at ACE Hardware, and I needed groceries anyway so HEB solved the rest of my ingredient needs.
The recipe I used called for 6tsp of instant coffee, 4tsp of washing soda, and .25tsp of vitamin c all dissolved in 350mL of water. It was recommended that the coffee and washing soda be mixed in separate solutions to later be combined for a total volume of 350mL. The soda was dissolved in 200mL of water, and the coffee in 150mL. Swishing the water and coffee around to dissolve it all caused quite a lot of foam. Bubbles and even development are not friends with each other, so I had to let it sit for a long while before I decided to pour the terrible smelling developer into my film tank.
My test roll was one of the 20 rolls of Agfa APX 400 I was given a few weeks ago. I did not really bother metering anything, and just guessed at the exposures using my Kodak Retina IIa. When I shoot test rolls, I like to try and cram a wide range of contrast levels, lighting, and textures into a single roll and then see how my normal development process works for the general case. That’s exactly what I did with this roll, and the results were surprisingly good. The only issue, other than the horrid smell, is a fair amount of base fog but the film is old and expired and my scanner really doesn’t seem to care if the base is fogged or not. Apparently adding a few grams per liter of iodized table salt to the solution helps to control fogging, so I will give that a shot on the next roll. Actually, I’ll probably develop a roll of the APX 400 in my regular chemistry just to see how much of the fogging is really caffenol’s fault.
