my life, my thoughts, my world.

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.

Results:

The relay I need to switch my enlarging lamp was in the mail today. I now have all but one of the components I need to build the digital timer I found here. My hope is that the wait for the proper LCD to show up isn’t too terribly long. Of course, the correct LCD is on backorder now but the customer service guy did say that there were quite a few orders and that usually puts a rush on getting new components. He also said I’d go to the front of the line and get overnight shipping on one when it showed up to make up for making me wait.

At some point tomorrow I’m likely to end up in the garage burning myself with a soldering iron trying to wire up the PCB and mount it along with the microcontroller and a power supply inside a project box. Realistically I ought to be able to even test the thing without the LCD, but I think I’ll just leave it alone until I have a way to see the settings before I push the go button.

Along the same vein, I kind of wish I hadn’t sent the Velvia I shot in my pinhole camera to Fuji for processing. Sure it’ll save me more than 50% of what it costs at the local pro lab but it will also take two weeks instead of a few hours. I’m anxious to see how it came out since I’d never really dealt with reciprocity failure before and want to know if I ended up using appropriate times or not. If these slides come out okay, the old expired Velvia I have in the freezer won’t last very long.

A few from the new darkroom

My first task when I finished my finals was to get busy building my darkroom. Two and a half days after I started, I had a fully functional darkroom.

The build was fairly straight forward. The two doorways into the room would need to be blacked out. Tables for both the enlarger and the developing trays would need to be built. A rack to dry my prints on would also need to be built. The room would require ventilation to avoid catching a case of instant death from toxic fumes. None of it was particularly difficult to build, though getting it all up the stairs and crammed into one small space was tricky.

Anyway, it all works and I just spent the last three hours of my life in that darkroom making prints of some of my favorite negatives. Now that I’ve eaten, I’m on my way back in to finish washing and drying the prints I’ve already made. Rather than inline a ton of images, here’s a Flickr slideshow of the build.

I’ll scan some of the prints later.

Tomorrow my short summer will begin sometime around noon. I have one final left in my engineering math course (diff eq and linear algebra). As it stands, I may very well end up making an A in that course. As soon as I finish that final, I’ll be picking up some darkroom chemistry, photographic paper, and more film. When I get home, it’s time to build a darkroom.

Cramped would be a good way to the space in which I’ll eventually make photographic enlargements of my B&W negatives. That’s a lot better than non-existent though and I’m hardly complaining. I need to build about five things for the darkroom. First, I need a raised platform to put the enlarger on. I’ll also need to build an extension of the sink area for the wet side of the darkroom. Drying racks for my prints will go over the print washer. Ventilation will be necessary as well, and I suspect I’ll put some fans in a duct over the wet side and vent into the adjacent bathroom to use the vent in the bathroom to get the fumes out of the house. The fifth item will be the most ambitious. I need a new timer, because I managed to destroy the one that came with my Beseler CB7. Fortunately, I came across working plans for a digital timer that’s fully programmable to the extent of my coding ability.

The timer will take some waiting, for parts delivery and to digest the existing code and decide if I wish to modify it at all. That won’t stop me from trying to make some enlargements this weekend using no more than my ability to count off seconds as a timer. I’m highly unlikely to do any dodging or burning this way (though I suppose I could) but I have a few negatives that will print just fine with a single exposure to the paper.

Once all of that is finished, I’ll move to my next set of projects. First, I’m going to finish the medium format pinhole camera I made several months ago. I’m not sure I care to really build it out of wood or anything at the moment, but I’m going to use some Liquid Nails to stick a tripod mounting hole to the bottom so I can put it on a tripod. I’ve cut a hole in the back, which I need to cover with some red transparency material, so I can see the frame numbers on the paper backing of the film. No sense wasting film by having no idea how far to wind the take-up spool. After I finish that, I’ll be building another pinhole camera. My enlarger will take 4×5″ negatives but I have nothing that produces 4×5″ negatives. Sounds like a perfect excuse for another pinhole camera. For now I’m thinking that a 4″ focal length with a .012″ pinhole (which I intend to make by shoving a guitar string through a piece of thin brass stock) will do nicely. That should give a wide angle of view, somewhere around 75 degrees, and a very small aperture of roughly f/340. Even in full sunlight exposures on an ASA100 film will be several seconds. Perfect for the simple blade type shutter I intend to make to cover the pinhole. I’ve got more than enough bits of scrap this and that to make a large format pinhole camera without having to spend money on anything but a few film holders (though I suppose I could just make those myself too).

Stay tuned. I’ll certainly be posting progress of the build sooner than later.

Gatorade and a few other sporting brands have taken to dramatic lighting in their ad campaigns for several years now. The number of times I’ve read questions about how to achieve such lighting answered simply with softbox has grown so large I’ve decided to go ahead and answer the question with an explanation I hope someone will find more useful than softbox.

First of all, you don’t need a softbox. Any spill-controlling light source you can get close to your subject will do. Zach Arias likes to use a collapsed bounce umbrella and a hotshoe flash like a small softbox. You can make a softbox out of a cardboard box lined with foil and covered with a white trashbag if you really want to. Do you have a large beauty dish with a diffuser? That will work too. Your options are only as limited as your imagination so long as you’ve got a means of providing a large apparent light source that controls spill and can be placed very close to your subject.

Why does the light source need to be close to your subject? If you take light intensity as a function of distance the value decreases rapidly as distance increases. Outside of my engineering courses I don’t know very many people who even remotely care about the science behind that fact, or the math used to describe it, so I won’t go there. If you want a quick practical example turn the lights off in your room and shine a flashlight at your hand, then shine it in the far corner of the room. It’s going to be significantly brighter against your hand. Your flashes emit light, and light is light. It all behaves the same way.

Now, let’s review some basics of flash photography. Aperture controls flash. Shutter speed controls ambient light. Shooting at your max sync speed (1/200s on my Canon 5D Mark II – ask Google if you don’t know your max sync speed) will kill the ambient light, leaving your flash to do all of the work. To make this work, go with a small aperture – say f/8 or smaller. Combine all of that with a light source very close to your subject and you’ll get light that goes from bright to dark in less distance than the width of my head.

Example #1 – ISO 250, 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, 2x Vivitar 285HV hotshoe flashes @ 1/4 power into collapsed Westcott 43″ Soft Silver umbrellas:

Two Lights

Lighting Diagram for Example #1:

Lighting Diagram

Example #2 – ISO 100, 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, 1x Einstein 640 @ 1/96 power (-6.5f) into a 28″ Fotodiox beauty dish with diffuser:

Beauty Dish

Lighting Diagram for Example #2:

Lighting Diagram

There you have it. Get in close with a large apparent light source, shoot at your max sync with an appropriate aperture. If you want more light to spread across your subject open the aperture up, if you want it to spread less close it down. Alternately, you can control how far the light travels across your subject by varying the power of your strobe. For reference sake, you don’t need a huge room with black walls to do this. Both shots above were taken in normal bedrooms. The first was taken during the day with a window open, and I forgot to reduce the ISO from the product photos I took moments earlier. Post-processing was limited to a preset that simulates Kodak Tri-X black and white film. Honestly, the preset overdrives the highlights far more than it kills the shadows. Control the spill, and get in close – you can get this effect nearly anywhere.

Illusionists have been wowing people for centuries with their sleight of hand. Sometimes their trickery is entertaining, but it is never permanent and you cannot take it with you and hang it on the wall. Enter the darkroom. Here, you can watch things appear before your very eyes and hang it on the wall later.

I had dismissed darkroom printing as a waste of time and money for several months. Why bother? Sitting just to my left is a pretty nice film scanner. How often do I view images in print? Who knows, but the vast majority of the time I’m viewing images on a screen. Now, few are unaware of my preference for black and white images. Printing black and white on an inkjet with anything resembling a successful result requires a good deal of time and monetary investment. Purplish-blue and bluish-white is easy. Grayscale? Not so much.

A few weeks ago, the opportunity to take a look at high quality darkroom prints presented itself and I took it. Two binders live in my dark closet. Several of the negatives residing within those binders ought to find their way onto my walls. Seeing the level of detail in these enlargements was enough to push me over the edge: I am building a darkroom. Wait a second, I have never even been in a darkroom before! A kind member of the Texas Photo Forum volunteered her time, patience, and darkroom to show me the ropes. After several hours of playing around in the dark and getting a feel for the process I left with pleased with several prints. Two of my favorites are below. I recommend clicking and pressing ‘L’.

Grandma

Library

I loaded up my Kodak Retina IIa and a borrowed Bronica ETRSi with their very own rolls of Fujichrome Velvia 100 to take some bluebonnet photos. The scans don’t do the slides justice, but they’re still pretty nice.

Adelaide in bluebonnets

Adelaide in bluebonnets 2

Bluebonnets on 120

Bluebonnets on 35mm

My good friend Angela is trying to sell her house and asked if I would come take some photos for her. I’ve never done that sort of work before, but she promised food and beer so I agreed to give it a shot.

Recent remodeling of the bathrooms in this house has left me with several bars of light sockets that I do believe I will turn into continuous-light strip banks. It should be pretty easy to fill them with 100W-equivalent daylight-balanced CFLs, shove them in a reflective backing, and pop a diffusion sheet over the front to get a nice soft light source. CFLs probably won’t melt anyone’s face either.