craftbangboom

So, we’re going to Iceland.

Travis and I normally go on vacation in the fall. We take camping vacations normally, and go in the fall after all the kids are back in school. But, things have changed this year! Travis wound up getting two weeks of vacation in May. We sold our crappy camper. And, in a major turnaround, we decided to take our first big international trip (sorry, Canada, I love you, but the few little trips we’ve taken across your borders don’t really count as international travel).

So, we’re going to Iceland! We were kind of considering three different destinations – Iceland, England, and Ireland – for our first trip, but Iceland won out. I think it’s a good choice for our first trip abroad. Almost everyone speaks English. They drive on the same side of the road as the US. It’s a small country – the size of Ohio, with a total population about the same size as Columbus, so we hopefully won’t get too overwhelmed. Most importantly, though, it’s gorgeous. There’s all sorts of awesome nature-y things going on there: volcanoes, geysers, waterfalls, whales, puffins, etc.

Anyway, we’re extremely excited about this. However, in all that excitement, I’m also a little worried, because this is our first trip abroad, and I haven’t been on a plane since about 2005, so I haven’t dealt with the new TSA screeners and I’ve never had to deal with going through customs and such before. I don’t want to screw anything up. So I’ve been trying to figure out what camera gear we’ll be taking, taking into consideration our luggage weight restrictions.

I think I’ve got it set. Travis and I are each taking a digital camera, and honestly, I think I’ll probably be taking a lot more digital camera pictures this vacation than I have in the past few. We’re taking our GoPro. But we are taking some film cameras too, and as much film as I can stuff into our carry-on luggage. The Yashicamat is going. The Olympus Pen-EE2 is going. The Nikon FM2N with the Lensbaby lens is going. And that was it. Tragically, the Savoy is staying at home. The Polaroid 230 didn’t make the cut either. I know, it is so sad!

And, of course, none of the large format cameras are going either. I just don’t think I’d have room for a Speed Graphic, sheet film, film holders, and changing bag in the carry-on luggage, not and take any other camera. It is tragic, going to a place as gorgeous as Iceland, and not being able to take any large format camera.

This bummed me out, so I decided to make the next best thing – a relatively compact pinhole camera that takes 116 (70mm) film. I used the body from an old, funky Kodak Autographic folding bellows camera as my base. I tore out the face, bellows, and bed of the camera, and constructed a simple front made out of black foamcore. I covered the whole thing in fabric (since the leatherette was nasty and half-gone anyway), strapped it together with Velcro, and was good to go.

I ran a test roll through it today, using some expired 70mm Konica Minolta Professional 160 color film respooled onto a 116 spool. My backing paper is kind of torn up along the edges, and I think I had a small light leak going on in addition to that, but no big deal.

I’m not sure how big the pinhole is that I’m using. I salvaged it from an old 4×5 pinhole camera I had torn up for some reason. I wasn’t sure what to use as an exposure time, so I did various shots at between 2 and 10 seconds. Everything I tried seemed to work okay, weirdly, although I think 5-8 seconds in bright light is the sweet spot.

This was at 6 seconds:

7 seconds:

8 seconds:

So, yeah, kind of light-leaky. I think that might be partly from the Autographic door in the back of the camera, so I’ll have to try sealing that shut. Otherwise, I’ll just throw an extra few rubber bands on it and call it done. I’m less bothered by light leaks than I probably should be.

Anyway, we also did some C41 developing today (yes, we still have a bunch of film from last vacation we haven’t developed). We used the Rollei Digibase color chems for the first time. All the chems are liquid, and are supposed to have a longer shelf life. I’ve only scanned in a few rolls, but it looks like it did a decent job developing. An interesting thing about the Rollei chems is that the Bleach and Fix steps are separated, as opposed to a combined Blix step like in the other C41 kits I’ve used. This makes the Rollei chems a good candidate for trying bleach bypass the next time we do some C41 developing.

You know, I really like making lith prints, because I am so into the MAGIC of it – it pleases me so damn much that one can, through use of a diluted developer, produce images that have beige, brown, gold, olive, red, or other tones to it on black and white paper. How freaking cool is that?

What I’m not especially crazy about in regards to Lith printing is how incredibly long it can take to make a print. That part sucks. If I had a great big darkroom area and could put out a gigantor tray of lith devloper so I could process multiple prints at once, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but instead I’m working in my narrow bathroom, stuck between the table with the chem trays on it and the bathroom sink, in the dark, alone, and scared. And, of course, it’s winter, and I didn’t think to try to rig up a heating pad under my lith tray to bump up the temps (warmer lith developer temps will allow the image to develop faster). My house is around 68 degrees right now, and the developing times were sloooooow, like around 20-30 minutes for a print. Kill me now.

I tried out a few new old papers to lith this time. Some stuff didn’t work, but this paper, circa 1951 Ansco Indiatone Kashmir paper, lithed like a dream. Of course, it makes regular prints like a dream, too.

Love this paper. SO MUCH.

I also tried out my Kodak Polymax Fine Art paper that seems to be fogged. This is the 16×20 paper that I cut a few pieces down for experimentation. It kind of lithed…

I’m not sure why it came out so splotchy. Maybe the paper had some kind of slight water damage to it? At least it did something, and I’m willing to give it another go with warmer chems.

Finally I whipped out some of my Agfa Cykora Kashmir paper that gave me such a good result with this lith print last year:

I used 3 minute long exposure under the enlarger and had it in the lith devloper for 9 minutes. As a contrast, I did this test strip for the new lith print:

I used 20 second increments and wound up going with the darkest strip (80 seconds) to base my exposure on. I ultimately did a 5.5 minutes enlarger exposure for the lith print, which is a crazy long time to listen to my Gralab digital darkroom timer beep every second. I felt like I was on ’24’ waiting for the bomb to go off.

Here’s the resulting print, about 25 minutes later (see! I told you my chems were cold! And probably exhausted, too!):

On a different subject, Travis has been interested in using Caffenol lately as a developer. For the uninitiated, it’s an instant-coffee based developer. The base ingredients used are instant, caffeinated coffee, water, washing soda, and Vitamin C. We used soda ash in place of the washing soda (I’ve previously used soda ash interchangeably for washing soda when I was dying cotton fabric), and citric acid in place of the Vitamin C. We took some shots on 3×4 sheet film to test out, and began to develop.

Where I think we went wrong, in retrospect, was that I had the brilliant idea to try developing the sheets of ortho lith film we had shot first. The ortho film is able to be handled under a red safelight, so I thought, great, let’s try developing this in trays first so we can watch how the film develops and judge how long it takes. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize is that apparently the developing takes longer with a slower speed film… and we were shooting our ortho lith film at ASA 12.

About 25 minutes later, we saw only the barest hint of development in the negatives, and finally I just said “Screw it,” and whipped up a quicky batch of print developer (fortunately, I had the concentrate stored under the bathroom sink… in case of emergencies, I guess?), and we threw the caffenol-soaked negatives in there. They developed about 2 minutes later, looking no worse for the wear.

Travis tried developing another pieces of sheet film (100 speed this time) in the Caffenol in a tank, but it just came out completely blank. I think the Caffenol had gone weird by that point – I guess it has a really short shelf life. So, anyway, a FAIL, but something we’ll probably try again. Just not with ASA 12 film.

Since I wound up making a small batch of the print developer anyway, I put it to good use making some cute little contact prints using some circa 1970s FSC Contact paper.

This is another paper I love, even though it’s glossy (I kind of hate glossy paper). It’s weird, some prints tend to go brownish, and others made on the same paper went a lot colder in feeling.

Same paper. Weird, I know. It probably has something to do with the time spent in the developer.

After months of not doing much, photography-wise, Travis and I finally got back in the swing of things this week. We did several things! First, we spent a few hours doing basic black and white embiggenments. It took me a while to remember what the hell I was doing, and also, how to do it.

Travis (about 6 or 7 enlargements in, where our exposure times under the enlarger have been really long): What aperture are you using?
Me: … I have no idea?

Good times! Anyway, the goal of the session was to see if an unopened box of big-ass, 16×20 Kodak Polymax fiber-based paper was still any good. Judging by how the test strip came out… not so much. Looks fogged. So, it goes into the the Lith pile. I managed to find a picture online of someone using the same paper to make lith prints, so that’s good, anyway.

Since the Polymax was a bust, we moved on to making some prints using 8×10 Arista Classic paper from the mid-70s that I got last year in my Epic! Ebay! Paper Haul!. I was curious as to how some of those World War II/Paris Liberation negatives would print.

Hey! Pretty good!

Man, I love using Arista paper. That stuff is so reliable.

The next day we responded to the Photography Bat Signal of BABY SHEEP!! and headed out to a friend’s house to check them out.

Ack! So cute!

We also took along a newish (to us) camera, a Japanese Samoca 35 Super.

Nifty looking, isn’t it? It’s a rangefinder, and 35mm, neither of which are my favorite things, but the camera looks so damn cool, it’s worth using just to get style points. There was a mystery roll of Sakura Konipan SS film inside of it, which, when shot, gave us images like this:

Fortunately, we tested out the camera with some relatively more stable Kodak Plus-X, too. The camera is a little tricky to use – what you intuitively think is the focusing mechanism actually controls the aperture, and the rangefinder dot isn’t very bright, so it was kind of goofy to focus. Plus, the sheep kept moving around. However, we were able to get a few decent shots.

Yesterday, I finally got up the nerve to try playing with the Berg Color Toning System I got off ebay a while ago. The results were kind of meh.

I mean, I’m not too sure what I was expecting. I think I thought the areas that were black in the original print would kind of stay black-ish after it was toned (dyed, really – turns out the Berg system is actually a dye, not a toner).

So, I don’t know. It was kind of fun to mess with, but not OMG THIS IS AWESOME!!11!!. I suspect that my chems were kind of weak due to age, so I’d be willing to try this again with some fresh activator, but it’s nothing I’m going to go out of my way to do over and over again. Also, the instructions were kind of vague-ish, I thought. Not cool, Berg.

I did find out it was possible to tone (dye) a lumen print, though. I wasn’t sure if it would react weird to the activator or clearing solution, but it turned out all right.

A few days ago we dragged out the RA-4 chems to see if they were still good. I’m working my way up to making an epic Freestyle order, and wasn’t sure if I needed to order more color print chems. Turns out, the unmixed RA-4 chems stay good for forever, but I also mixed up the last bit of what I had, so I need to order some more anyway.

I’ve been using this Fuji paper to make color prints since, unlike almost everything else I have, it’s fresh and in-date. It’s supposed to be kept under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but I’ve just kept the box at room temp since I’ve gotten it. I don’t have room in my fridge for more photo stuff. It’s bad enough already. Anyway, the paper doesn’t seem to have gone weird, and we were able to get some pretty good prints from it.

This, however, isn’t one of the better ones. It’s a print from some cross processed 35mm Kodak Color Infrared film, respooled onto 120 backing paper, and shot in the Yashica-Mat. It’s not that great of a picture anyway (it’s interesting… but that’s about it), but I was curious to see how the color infrared worked as a negative. This particular picture was shot with a red filter, but I shot others with yellow, orange, and green filters, so I may have to try making a print of some of those to compare.

A better print is this one, which came from a C41 Kodak Ektar 4×5 negative.

I was very happy with this print. The colors actually look like reality, which is what I was going for! Yay! Also, 4×5 just kicks ass. I’ve completely gone off 35mm. The more I work with actually printing photos, the less use 35mm holds. The difference in the grain is stunning. For a comparison, here’s a section of the boat picture at 100%:

And here’s a similar section of the cactus print at 100%:

That may not be a completely fair comparison, since the cactus picture is cross processed, which tends to make things more contrasty, but still, it doesn’t make me want to shoot a ton of 35mm.

Not that there’s not still uses for 35mm, though. I made this print from cross-processed Kodak E100G 35mm, respooled onto a 620 spool and shot through the Savoy. It’s not exactly sharp, or has realistic colors, but it’s still fun.

Travis also shot a ton of 35mm film on vacation using a little Olympus Pen-EE camera. It’s a half-frame 35mm camera, which means instead of getting 36 pictures of a long roll of 35mm film, you get 72 half-sized pictures. So, yeah, the image quality is not great, but it’s a fun little camera to use.

We made a few prints using some of the Pen-EE negatives yesterday. One of them came out especially neat (cross processed Kodak Electronic Output film), but Travis doesn’t have them up in his Flickr yet. So, the Pen-EE is a cute little camera, and it’s fun to make pairs or trios of smaller prints on one sheet of color paper.

It was my intent to do more color printing today – I might as well keep going until the chems are all used up – but I found myself making stupid mistakes and it got to the point where it wasn’t fun. And if it’s not fun, then I probably need to take a break from it. I’ve got some weird stuff I want to try with the remaining chems, though, so I’ll probably be back at it tomorrow.

Oh, one thing that is potentially interesting is that Freestyle is now carrying their own brand of color paper. I’m excited! It looks like they’re getting it in stock in a few days, and I’m definitely going to get some and try it out. It’s slightly cheaper than the Fuji paper (which I like, and have had good results from), but the main benefit I immediately see is that you can buy the paper in boxes of 50 for the smaller sizes, as opposed to Fuji, where you have to commit to a box of 100 sheets for anything smaller than 16×20. That being said, I’m kicking around possibly ordering a box of gigantor paper (16×20 or larger) to try making UBER PRINTS. It’s not like I have any wall space to hang prints that size up on. I just want to make a gigantic print. It seems fun. (I think I used the word “fun” about 80 times in this post. Yay?)

I’ve experimented with redscale photography before, with varying results. (Just a refresher: redscale photography refers to the technique of shooting color film with the emulsion side facing away from the lens. This involves running the film through the camera backwards). I’ve liked the results that other people have gotten from redscale film, but have just been more or less meh on the shots I’ve taken.

However, during the great Respooling Odyssey of 2011, when I was getting all of my film ready to take on vacation, I went a little crazy and wound up buying some of Rollei Nightbird film (pre-flipped redscale film) and respooling several rolls of 35mm redscale film onto 127 or 120 backing paper.

This picture and the one at the beginning of this post were both shot on a roll of expired Fuji X-Tra 400 speed 35mm film, flipped for redscale, and respooled onto 127 backing paper (shot through the Ward’s 26 camera). This is pretty typical of how redscale generally looks – the majority of colors are tones of yellow, orange, and red.

What I had wanted to try in addition to just shooting the redscale normally was seeing how it came out when it was shot in conjunction with a filter. So, for this roll of expired 800 speed Kodak Gold Max, I taped a small section of a teal gel over the inside of the lens (again, I used the Ward’s 26). I made sure to use a faster film for this, since redscale film in general is like shooting through a red filter (the base color of the film), and I was adding an additional dark filter on top of that.

I didn’t really know what to expect, although I guessed I’d get results that were dark brown. I shot the roll on a very gray, misty morning that didn’t have much going on in the way of color.

As you can see, the redscale film plus the teal filter resulted in green tinted images.

So, that’s kind of neat. I packed more redscale film than I actually wind up shooting, though, so I still have some more filter experiments I want to try with it (if I shoot with a straight blue filter, will I get purplescale images?). We only managed to develop a little under half of the C41 rolls of film we shot before I started to get paranoid that our chems were going wonky. So, I need to restock.

So, we’re back. Actually, we got back home to Ohio last week, but there’s been a confluence of drama since then (some family stuff, some health-related stuff, and a good heap of drama with our camper – here’s a tip for you: don’t buy a Rockwood. Worst. Camper. Ever.). Anyway, it turns out I did pack a boatload of film that we didn’t wind up shooting, but not by much. I think we shot all but one or two rolls of the 20+ 620 film I had respooled, and quite a bit of the 127 film.

What I barely shot was any 35mm film. Even though I had a boatload of fun, weird 35mm films to use, even though I love my 35mm Nikon FM2N outfitted with the Lensbaby, I had to force myself to use it. I don’t know. The more photography stuff I do, the less I see the point of 35mm. I just like working with the larger format negatives so much more.

So, the cameras I did wind up using! The Polaroid 230:

The Yashicamat:

The Speed Graphic (Zarl!), of course.

The Savoy, although I haven’t uploaded any vacation photos from it yet, and, to a lesser extent, the Ward’s 26 127 camera, the Bollywood pinhole 4×5 camera, and Watson, the 5×7 camera.

All we’ve managed to develop so far is the black and white film. I accidentally fogged a chunk of our 4×5 black and white negatives (sad trombone), which kind of sucks, but things like that inevitably happen when you’re loading and unloading film on the fly. The majority of the film we’ve shot is process C-41, which we haven’t even started to develop yet.

After looking over the black and white negatives, though, I know one thing – if I had this vacation to do over again, I’d take less pictures of waterfalls.

I can’t help it. I don’t exactly live in waterfall country, so whenever I see one I instinctively take photos of it, which is fine, but seriously? I could have stepped back a bit from the waterfalls. Less waterfalls. More other things. I guess I took so many waterfall pictures that any pictures of other subjects, like this one:

…automatically stand out to me.

We were gone for a month, and it was easy to get in the habit of drive, drive, drive, get to a “Destination,” and stop and take pictures, automatically. The interesting pictures, the ones I’m drawn to now, are the ones we took not of a big major scenic Event, but of smaller things, like the awesomeness we ran across in Forks, Washington:

Or being so bored while doing about 18,000 loads of laundry that I brought the pinhole camera inside the laundromat and amused myself for a while:

We still have a boatload of film to develop from the trip, so we’ll keep slogging through the developing and the scanning. I’m looking forward to making prints already!