My little Rivy-Bear is finally on film. Ilford Ilfocolor Vintage Tone 400 film, to be exact. It’s not a shot from today, but, hey, it’s film! Hopefully down the road the speed of my workflow will allow for a “film” shot of the day.
A Film Journey update down in Stray Pixels, along with the rest of the shots from my first roll of Ilford Vintage Tone.
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On Monday, I figured I’d done enough research, studying, and practicing, and that I just needed to jump in. I developed my first roll of B&W film since 1987, and it went really well, except I didn’t have some cooled rinse water ready… I was rushing around while the fixer did its thing, mixing tap water with some refrigerated water. Ugh. (My cold tap water is way too hot and needs to be mixed with cooled water from the fridge; life in the desert).
You can see the results of that roll (Kodak Tri-X) and a Kodak Portra 400 roll taken with the Kodak Snapic here.
On Wednesday, I had two rolls of color film staring at me on my desk and figured, why not? The cold tap water is too hot for B&W; why not just do some C-41 processing, which requires 38°C? I had wanted to do a few more rolls of B&W first, but what the heck, I’ve done my research, and I had two rolls of film that were not important, test rolls if you will, in case I screwed it up.
I set up my sous vide, mixed up the chemicals from the Bellini C-41 kit, and got them in the water to preheat while I wrote out a task card. Temperature control is very important with color, so you want your steps down pat. I haven’t had any trouble with putting my film on reels; I practiced a half dozen times, and so far, everything has gone smoothly in the dark bag. I did have my dev temperature drop by 1 °C in the Paterson tank, so I think next time I’ll raise the sous vide temp to 40°C.
Preheat, Dev, Bleach, Fix, Wash, and Stabilizer all went well. After each step, I poured the chemical back into its bottle. Bellini says you can get 16 rolls out of one kit. I hung the film up in my shower with weighted clips and let it dry for about two hours while I cleaned up and prepped for scanning.
Scanning is getting better. I’m using a Valoi system to scan with my Nikon Z8 and using Negative Lab Pro to convert the negatives in Lightroom Classic. I spent a good while figuring out how to do batch conversions because if I have to crop, convert, and process each picture individually, I’d pull my hair out. I also experimented with using CineStill Convert Tools with the B&W negatives and was very happy with the results. I need further testing and experience to make a judgment call.
The learning curve is steep but fun. I have glimmers of my process streamlining and becoming more efficient.
I have an up-to-date resource page here. If you are interested in doing any of this and have questions, please feel free to email, comment below, or reach out on Mastodon. If there is any way I can help, please let me know.
The shots below are nothing special, but it’s all about testing my process and learning.
Camera: Nikon F3, Lens: Nikkor 50mm ƒ1.4
Film: Ilford Ilfocolor Vintage Tone 400 Plus
Developer: Bellini C-41 kit
Film borders: I did not take the time to crop; you get the real film border with these shots, no fake film borders put on in post with these! I intentionally used generic Frontier scanner settings and did very little tweaking to the photos so you can get a good feel for this film.
*Click the first picture to open a full-size viewer, then use the arrow keys to navigate through the whole set
No chance of the Kodak Snapic review today; I’m just too tired. Today was a good 1000-yard swim at the gym, then I dove in with both feet and developed two rolls of color film (C-41): a roll of Kodak Portra 400 and a roll of Ilford Vintage Tone 400 Plus. It went very well. I learned a bunch and will be much more efficient next time. Scanned both rolls and just used generic settings so you can get a good feel for the “look” of each film type. I had to take the time to learn how to batch-process my film scans with Negative Lab Pro because processing each one individually is not realistic. If I’m going to keep this film experiment going, I’m going to have to be more efficient. Yesterday, I did the B&W conversions one by one, and it took forever.
It was a ton of fun, but man, I’m exhausted. The learning curve is steep!
Hopefully those pictures and a write-up about it tomorrow. I’m also delaying the Snapic review so I can show you both color and B&W shots from it. Sneak Peek: The Snapic is staying in my flight bag for sure; I’m just not sure which film to keep in it yet.
This was such a quick shot; I regret not framing it better. In Silvertone, it looks pretty good.
Had a doc appointment for my bi-annual FAA physical today. Then spent the rest of the day developing a roll of Tri-X, scanning it, and converting it.
Hopefully, I can get a post up about it tomorrow. I thoroughly enjoyed the process and am stunned at the old-school grainy beauty of Tri-X even shot through a cheapo Kodak Snapic camera. My wife had no idea what I was doing, and she came into the office while I was converting photos, looked at the monitor, and said, “What is that? It’s beautiful, just so classic. It reminds me of photos from my childhood.” (She is 59).
Have you ever had those days? Feel like you’ve walked a mile, only to find out ⤴️.
Click for Stray Pixels & a Film Journey Update
Spent some time today setting things up in the spare bathroom, making a “task card” of the process, and dry-running it to make sure I haven’t missed something. It’s always worth taking the extra time; I learn something each time.
The crazy problem I have right now in the Summer is my water temp. My cold running water is at 34° C, and I need my chemicals and wash water around 20° C. So, I’ve put a 3-gallon jug of water in the fridge and will mix it with warm water to get my desired temp. Kind of crazy.
It’s all kind of exciting. Hopefully tomorrow I can get the first roll done.
Well, what a day. I had planned to get up early, take two cameras to the Wildlife Park, and wander around before the heat really ramped up. But I woke up to text messages and emails saying I had used airline miles to buy tickets on Qatar Airways, along with two credit card charges for additional mileage purchases. I logged in to my account and found 185k miles missing. The one damn account I did not have 2FA on. WTF OVER!
So it took all morning to clean that up. By the time I was done, it was quickly climbing toward today’s high of 113°F/45°C, so my photo walk plans went by the wayside.
So you get this mediocre iPhone shot instead. I do like the moody feel, though…
I’m aiming for the Wildlife Park photo walk tomorrow. Planning a digital-and-film camera walk. I was able to get out a short while today with the Nikon F3, trying to get through a 36-exposure roll of Ilford Ilfocolor 400 Vintage Tone. I wanted to start tomorrow with a fresh roll.
Hope your day went better than mine.
Click for Stray Pixels and a Film Journey Update
Well, I’m convinced that developing at home will save money and might just be fun. Might be fun, heck, I know it will be fun! I have such fond memories of working in the dark room, and this will be a tiny step toward that feeling.
I’m waiting on some C-41 chemicals, and I have my black-and-white chemicals to start with. I’ve watched numerous videos to refresh myself and have practiced rolling film onto the spools in the dark bag a number of times, both 35mm and 120. I’m sticking with the AP plastic spools for now. You can see what I’m using, what videos I watched, and other resources here.
I’m going to start with a few rolls of black-and-white film. Get comfortable with that, then dive into the temperature-sensitive C-41 developing.
I’m starting with rolls that don’t have anything precious on them to make sure I know what I’m doing. Any great shots will be brought to the local lab until I get my process down. Too many ways to screw it up.
I hope to get a blog post up soon about my process, what I used, and how it went. I’m guessing within a week or so, I’ll have time to start.
Equipment for this first round of B&W developing
ILFORD:
Developer: DD-X
Ilfostop
Rapid Fixer
Washaid
Wetting Agent
Paterson Tanks, AP and Paterson spools/reels, dark bag, scissors, film retriever, hanging clips, Pec Pads, and distilled water.
Ran out of time today due to errands and honey-dos. Made it out to the backyard before sunset and tried to get some good motion-blur shots of some palm trees, but I wasn’t happy with the results. I got what I got.
Off to work on a four-day trip tomorrow. It’s always hard to leave home…
Figuring out Darktable is in the queue. Reading this site gives me some hope. All I ever hear about Darktable is that it’s deep and complex, with a learning curve like a hockey stick. All that means is you need good instruction. The Darktable.info project looks like it breaks it down into bite-sized chunks. Hopefully, when I get back into town, I can spend some time with it.
You know what I’m missing these days? Photography road trips. I used to take five-to eight-day road trips and do nothing but shoot pictures and weave a story out of them. I used to post those stories on Exposure, but I got tired of their pricing and the lack of an easy way to download my stories intact. So I canceled everything. My goal was to remake those stories on my website, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. It’s just so time-consuming. I’m itching for a long road trip just to explore and shoot pictures.
Well, if you couldn’t tell, I’m trying to write more under my pictures. Keeping it mostly in a photography vein. I really like it when I read other photo blogs that have a story/thoughts along with the photos.
Film Journey: I’ve been thinking a lot about photography class back in high school and our darkroom work. Made me research today what folks are doing for film developing at home these days. That was a rabbit hole! Found some good stuff, and boy, it hasn’t changed much. There are some nice kits out there, and for B&W film in particular, it’s pretty straightforward stuff. I’m blowing off the kits and may just get a super simple piecemeal setup and try a roll or two at home, what the heck. You can get everything you need for about $120 if you shop around. If you get good results, it wouldn’t take long to recoup your investment with the cost of developing. If you’re going to jump back into film, why not jump in with both feet? More on this foray later.
It’s raining here. It’s 104°F/40°C and raining. Real nice.
Yesterday it was 113°F / 45°C, and it was miserable. From the news, it sounds like we’re not alone. The heat has settled in everywhere, and summer has arrived like a blowtorch.
This is a shot from yesterday that I just got around to editing in Lightroom.
Thanks for stopping by.
Click for Stray Pixels and a Film Journey Update
Film Journey:
Another update to home digital camera film scanning. I read the user manual for Negative Lab Pro and its scanning recommendations, and I tried a second batch of scans. I think they turned out much better. I’ll show a couple of shots from yesterday’s post, plus a few more, that show the difference between the lab scans and my scans. It surprised me and made me realize that the lab isn’t always the best.
I will say that color scans are the hardest. B&W is pretty darn easy; there is no white balance to deal with, and you’re basically just adjusting brightness, contrast, black clip, and white clip, unless you use toning.
I’m most surprised at the sunset pictures. The lab scans came out really dark, and I thought I had just screwed up my metering, which metering for that shot is tough with the bright sky and dark street, but I wasn’t even going to process those shots, and I’m glad I did. When I scanned them and used Negative Lab Pro with just standard settings, they were not that dark at all. It just shows me that whoever scans your pictures, they, or the software, is making a judgment call on your negative. I think I’d rather be making those decisions.
I’m rather enjoying the process and creative outlet. Looking forward to getting some good pictures to work with now.
Of note, I’ve been using Negative Lab Pro for negative conversions, but I just found another way from CineStill Film. They have LR, PS, and ACR presets that do the conversion. I downloaded them, but haven’t had a chance to play with them yet. You can watch a YouTube video on how to use them here.
The first seven shots are professional lab scans from my local lab. The next seven are my scans. Ignore the quality of the shots, I just wanted to shoot a couple of rolls of film to test the Rolleiflex and my metering. You can compare them yourself. I’m working on getting that cool image reveal slider on my blog, but it’s a bit more complex than I thought. It would be nice to have the slider and see the lab scan vs my scan in the same shot. Hopefully soon.
My second try with new knowledge and tweaks to the software and camera settings.
My Digital Camera Scans - Negative Lab Pro Software - Portra 400My Digital Camera Scans - Negative Lab Pro Software - Portra 400My Digital Camera Scans - Negative Lab Pro Software - Portra 400My Digital Camera Scans - Negative Lab Pro Software - Portra 400My Digital Camera Scans - Negative Lab Pro Software - Ilford HP5 400My Digital Camera Scans - Negative Lab Pro Software - Ilford HP5 400My Digital Camera Scans - Negative Lab Pro Software - Ilford HP5 400
Sad day for taking photos, but a good day on the film scanning front!
More down in Stray Pixels about the film journey.
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Film Journey:
Today was mostly an office day to see if I could do my own scans of my negatives and get them close to the professional lab results.
I’m going to post the professional lab scans, then my camera scans. My goal is to be able to scan my own negatives and at least come close to lab-quality. I know labs vary widely, and I only have one lab to compare to right now, but I don’t think mine are that bad, especially for my first attempt. There is a pretty steep learning curve, and I’m sure I’ll get better as I learn more and practice. Please ignore the photo content; these were test shots to make sure my grandfather’s Rollei was still working, and my light metering technique was working. I was just shooting random stuff around the house. Oh, and ignore the dust! My word, the dust on my black-and-white negatives was horrible. I’m going to have to be way more careful in the future.
I’m also going to have to decide where I’m going to document my film journey. Here in Stray Pixels, or I should probably just make a proper page over on Cliff538.com. I will give this some thought.
The last photo is a Vlads Test Target. It’s a simple concept that works really well for testing sharpness, especially in the photo corners. Setting up your camera and film scanner so that everything is straight and parallel is really important. Then figure out which aperture setting on your lens gives you the best focus, especially in the corners. I was using f/8 on my lens, and there is some softness in the corners. This warrants some testing with other apertures.
I used my Nikon Z8 with an MC 105/2.8 lens and a Valoi 360 system. Processed with LightRoom Classic and Negative Lab Pro.
All shots taken with a Rolleiflex. The color film was Kodak Portra 400, and the B&W was Ilford HP5 400.
Professional Lab ScanProfessional Lab ScanProfessional Lab ScanMy First Attempt at ScanningMy First Attempt at ScanningMy First Attempt at ScanningMy First Attempt at ScanningVlad's Test Target
My morning bird shots will be coming to a close for the Summer. It’s bloody hot in the mornings now, and I’m not happy about it. One of life’s true little pleasures for me is sitting outside in the morning watching the birds with my coffee and camera.
This nice couple gave me a few shots this morning. As you can see, the female is in focus, but the male, not so much. My shallow depth of field bit me. My plane of focus was so narrow that their being offset just a touch was enough to throw the male out of focus. But it’s my shot of the day nonetheless.
Film Journey: Got my first roll of Portra 400 back from the lab today. These would be the first pictures taken with my Grandfathers Rolleiflex in over 40 years, I believe. I didn’t take the time to take good photos because I just wanted to make sure the camera was working, didn’t have light leaks, and that my light metering technique was at least in the ballpark. (Grandpa Leamer, your beautiful Rollei still takes great pictures…)
Still waiting on the Ilford B&W negatives/scans.
Down in Stray Pixels, I’ll put the one shot that is even slightly worth showing. I’m very happy with my exposure and with the sharpness. Love that tight grain. But, boy, did I have to straighten the photos. There is a learning curve dealing with a waist-level viewfinder!
If you’re a film person, you’ll laugh at my observations, but I haven’t shot film since high school and college. It’s funny to me that I’ve been shooting digitally and using film emulation on some shots. Then I get these scans back and stare at them, thinking, “This is the real deal, real Kodak Portra, no simulation needed.”
Photography is a funny thing these days. Digital, film, emulations, filters, recipes, A.I., apps. Even shooting film and scanning negatives to make them digital so you can post them is funny to me. You take negatives, scan them, and then you can still tweak to some degree, colors, brightness, sharpness, etc. Are they film shots still? (That’s rhetorical). You have purists who think most of this is sacrilegious.
I’m not in any camp. I love photography. I don’t care how you do it. In fact, tell me how you do it. Tell me your process. I’m curious about your art and how you make it. It’s yours. Don’t let anybody tell you your art is less than because you don’t follow their rules. We all have our preferences and beliefs. I respect yours, and maybe I’ll even adopt some of yours if they make sense to me. I always try to follow the mantra of “Strong Opinions, Loosely Held.” Be open to change, to new data, to new ideas. It will make you a better person and photographer.
I’m really enjoying my photography journey these days. Digital shooting, Rolleiflex, (BeerPan coming someday (35mm Pano)), printing, film, negatives, scanning, it’s just all really interesting and fun exploring as much as I can. Heck, I’m watching a very in-depth Large Format Photography course right now, and there may be even more variety in the future. I’m just say’n: the 4x5 and 6x17 stuff looks awfully fun.
Anyway, I’m babbling now. Go take some pictures.
Click for Stray PixelsRolleiflex. Portra 400.Same Photo. Processed Black & White in LR
Short drive tonight on some errands, and when I drove past this, I knew I had to capture it. I turned around, parked, and hiked to a good spot to take in this peaceful scene. A good reason to always have your camera with you.
Nikon Z8 • 125mm • 1/125s • f/2.8 • ISO 5000
Film Journey:
I shot a roll of Portra 400 tonight on some sunset shots with the Rollei. I don’t have a cable release for it, so I ordered one on eBay tonight. I had it on a tripod, but who knows how shaky I am when pressing and releasing the shutter with my finger in Bulb Mode. No instant results—just have to wait and find out. Another roll of exposed film in the refrigerator. When I get back from my next work trip, I’m going to try a local lab for developing and scanning. I think I’m set up to scan my own negatives now, but I want some lab scans to compare mine to.
This Rollei that I’m using has a lot of meaning for me. It was my grandfather’s; he was an avid photographer and very active in his local photography club up in the Pacific Northwest. I loved spending time with him in his office, looking at slides on the light table. I want to keep his camera shooting film for many years. It’s been a long, slow journey back into film for me, but progress is happening.
The next roll to experiment with is Kodak Ektar 100. It’s supposed to have very fine grain and vibrant colors. Excited to see it.
Click for Stray Pixels4x6 Test Print of yesterday's photo on ILFORD Gold Fiber Rag. I like it.
Nikon Z8 • 500mm • ƒ/13 • 1/500s
Nikon Z8 • 24mm • ƒ/4.0 • 1/400s • ISO 800
