I Second That Emulsion (a film thread)

http://www.pbase.com/anubis_photo/hong_kong_70s__80s

photos are kinda meh but I absolutely love that look of washed out yet saturated color - guessing he was scanning prints & not the actual negatives

lol got my test roll back from the fed, also had 1600iso in it which was the first time i used that and really i didnt get much back that was super great but i get it now i get it. def good for taking pictures at night/in the street. this one of a guy i work w/ made the guy at asda ask me if i had a mad expensive camera and i was like no less than £28 guy.

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00017.jpg

totes glad i went w/ the suggestion of whoever said to try out some 1600 bc my underground photos have been semi successful up until now but really you just need smthng higher than 200 right

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00047.jpg

but its great bc while i love this high speed film it also makes me realise how much i love 200 and what its good for more, like being able to open up the aperture on sunny days and like shooting into the sun, im mad into lens flare atm:

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00103.jpg

anyway taking photos is super fun here are more i got three rolls back today so im in a good mood.

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00076.jpg
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00082.jpg
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00077.jpghttp://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/CNV00089.jpg

sorry

Hey these look great! Congrats on the camera!
I love the blue bars and plants, especially. How are you metering?

mostly im guessing (whatever it would be w/ 200 plus a three stops/shutter speeds up) but sometimes i use the lightmeter app on my iphone. im trying to guess mostly, i want to get good at guessing. also thankyou!!!

i shot a load of film today and im gonna double expose it w/ flowers from the park tomorrow!

nj plax - looks like you got a great camera

Nice guessing in that case!

lovin these

what film are you using plax

the guy with the beard, the tube station and the barrier in st. pauls are all 1600iso fuji superia, the taxi, the windows, the tree and the blue fence are all Boots own brand 200iso (i have been told that this is just repackaged fuji superia btw)

really? good to know. boots always has heaps of old film sitting around

you can buy the pack of five for like £8 and its always in the 3 for 2 so it really works out at fifteen rolls for abt £17 and i think its really good film for that price

daaamn thats cheap

you can buy the pack of five for like £8 and its always in the 3 for 2 so it really works out at fifteen rolls for abt £17 and i think its really good film for that price

the slide film that's in this offer is process-paid, btw - have never done anything other than cross-process slide film before, but have recently shot & received slides for three rolls. it's fun.

kinda looking for some interesting new film to try (now the sun is coming out). anyone got any favourites? i bought a roll of ektar a while back & loved it. i like having additional variables that i can accredit/blame my variable photography on.

what type of film do you like to use?

mm, either high or low speed, really; i've kinda given up on using black and white under 400, because it's too grey. so ilford delta 3200 or fuji neopan 1600 for b/w. for colour i tend to just get some fuji thing, though have shot a bunch of agfa and stuff? kodak ektar 100 was a real highlight and was way crisper than anything i usually end up with.

was maybe going to get a roll of portra 800.

what do you like to use, dayo? i've seen a bunch of your b/w stuff & am curious.

oh & also, expired probably should've been a suffix to all of the above, the expired box being where most of mine comes from, ordinarily.

I use neopan 400, at either box speed or pushed to 1600. do you self-develop? I find delta 3200 to be the king of being too grey! neopan 1600 has been discontinued :(

I mess around with 100 speed films but I can't think of anything to shoot when I use them, they're more of a novelty factor. I've tried APX100, acros, have got 3 rolls of rollei retro 80s that I don't know what to do with. Lucky 100 gives a really old school look.

for color negatives, since I scan I find them all to be much of a muchness - it's hard to get good scans from a color neg, so I just pick up the cheapest big name color film I can find, which is fuji xtra 400 at the moment.

neopan 1600 has been discontinued :(

no shit, that's terrible. i used to think it had the edge over the ilford, pretty much. the kinda extreme, high-contrast b/w aesthetic sometimes feels sorta passé, now, but film that pretty much separates into diffused blacks and whites is still what i want a lot of the time, and gives you some freedom to just shoot wherever. kinda can't imagine how you found it too grey!, it has no midtones afaic.

i've played with some 100s pushed up a few speeds but haven't seen the results yet - that kinda camera-math is a bit beyond me, really, i don't quite know how it all works. i just take my prints to the shop, also, btw.

HP5+ was always the king of too grey for me.
tbh, I'd probably prefer that now - with any kind of scanning I'd rather have a low-contrast negative that can be worked on.

I've only shot three rolls of HP5+ but I really liked the results, it seemed very bright and crisp - I'd shoot it if neopan 400 wasn't nearly half the price.

yeah neopan 1600 had a true film speed of about 640, so when you push it to 1600 or 3200 it gets this 'film noir' look about it. neopan 400 is basically the same thing when pushed. I've still about 12 rolls of 1600 that I'm using for a project.

delta 3200 is so low-contrast it's incredible, it scans as this one big pile of grey. I think that's how they get it to push to 3200 or 6400.

I've been playing around with agitation this week, added just one more inversion per minute and I'm getting nice contrasty negatives straight out of the scanner with HC110. I like it. I'm kind of worried, because so far the majority of my negs have been developed for low contrast (for scanning) so I don't know how they'll come out in a darkroom.

You non-grey people are nuts! I often simply use Tri-X because it's common and (for me, who never shoots faster than ISO 400) fast, but I love using FP4 to get those grey grey midtones. And if it's not grey enough then I'll grey it up a bit.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5013/5564033333_fe837fd679.jpg

MIDS!

For color I stick to Ektar or Portra 160NC to stay low-contrast and low-grain. If I'm cheap I'll by Fuji Superia, but the colors in my lab scans don't look so hot then. I know that I need a scanner of my own... It's next on the list.

So who here scans negatives (or positives)? What do you use and what's your workflow?
I bought a Plustek Opticfilm because my lab scans often featured blown out highlights or clipped blacks and poor color balance. I can now control that a bit better, but my workflow is terrible and slow and I think I should be able to speed it up.
What resolution are you satisfied with, etc?

CURIOUS!

I haven't scanned in ages - my last was a Nikon Coolscan IV, IIRC, circa 2002. Back then it was just too much work keeping the negatives spot free.

Resolution wise, the Epson flatbeds get ~2400dpi and the Plustek dedicated 35mm scanners get ~3600dpi (real world, rather than the state resolutions) - you can (roughly) divide that by 300dpi to get the native enlargement (ie a medium format 2.25x2.25 negative could be printed 18x18inches from an Epson v750, under perfect scanning conditions, a 35mm negative could be enlarged 12x via the Plustek, etc.).

You can probably fudge that and go a bit larger as long as you're not doing something with a lot of fine detail.

I'd like to get back into shooting film and scanning it (and being able to scan all my old negatives and slides), but I'm about to be moving into a new place that's going to cost $300-400 more a month, so I doubt I'll be able to shoot film at all, much less buy a scanner.

I'm pretty committed to film at this point, so the scanner is my attempt to make the process cheaper (lab scans cost too much). Now my struggle is to develop a quick-ish method of working that gets whole rolls scanned in acceptable resolution. Most of the stuff only goes on the web, and I can't imagine printing larger than 12" x 8" so I suppose the resolution I get from the Plustek is fine.
I just had an opportunity to pick up the scanner for not-so-much and had visions of cheap development. After having some rolls mauled at Walgreens and a couple 1-hour spots though I've sworn off non-pro labs.

which Plustek did you get?

I own a Epson V700, that I'm gonna sell when I leave this place. it's been good to me but it's been in the shop once for service and will likely go again before I go, so I don't end up stiffing the buyer. other people on the web have mentioned quality control issues.

I really like it and all the shots on the web I have were done using it. sharpness isn't *great* but acceptable - not as good as the minolta dual scan IV which I owned a few years ago, but more than good enough for making webshots.

process wise, it's nice - it does 24 35mm frames in about ~40 minutes, so you can do a roll in about an hour, an hour and a half. 120's much quicker, the scanner only has to make 12 passes.

I find that it's great with b&w negative, kinda lousy with color negatives and slides. although from what I gather, scanning color negatives is hard no matter what you do - need to figure out the correct color balance, probably need to use Vuescan or some other professional software (I use epsonscan because it's convenient). slides just come out looking soft, it seems, though I haven't really tried fiddling with the settings for that either.

Gonna head out the door in a sec, but I'm using the Opticfilm 7600i, the one that is bundled with the full version of Silverfast. I've been getting decent color scans with it, but not *great*. I think I'm figuring out more as I go along though. It definitely takes some time spent fiddling!

yeah I had a pro lab scan some slides/negatives and then compared them with my own V700 scans - difference between night and day! OTOH they know what they're doing.

color slides/negatives, that is.

probably the best digital film workflow would be v700/750 to make a rough digital 'contact sheet', then using a plustek or other dedicated 35mm scanner to make higher quality scans. I still think the old discontinued ones like the minolta dual scan IV offer amazing performance.

here's what I'm talking about re: the difference between my epson and the pro lab. I could probably get the V700 pretty close if I wanted to fiddle, but I'm not really that invested in my color shots. *shrug*

http://i.imgur.com/0JBRA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/L71tG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ZNvjA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/IEDNE.jpg

also if you want cheap development, and you don't mind supporting the eventual corporate takeover of the world, you could try wal-mart. they outsource all of the film developing to fuji by this point, takes about a week but if you request "develop only" it can be cheap, like $1 a roll - I was never able to get them to only develop though :/

you can also try one of the C-41 DIY kits from freestyle, I've heard that C-41 isn't nearly as fiddly as it seems.

Whenever I can afford to go back to film, I'll probably stick to medium format w/ a V700/V750, farm out drum scanning in the event that I ever want to make an enormous print.

that's assuming color MF film exists at the point in time :(

I just bought two rolls of 120 fuji t64 - tungsten film from an urban outfitters type store here. lol, but I'm curious to see how it responds in daylight. might cross process a roll as well.

I certainly do not get quite the same sharpness as my lab scans anymore, and I now have problems with color noise that I am trying to solve, but I now don't lose my highs and lows at the same rate as I used to:

lab scan:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/labscan.jpg

home scan:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/homescan.jpg

Your lab scans are probably oversharpened, really - that was my experience with the Noritsu/Frontier automated scans, even at highest quality.

Oversharpened sounds right. Also too much contrast dialed in. I started asking for low contrast scans which were a little better but still sometimes featured clipped highlights. I am also stuck with a lens (Voigtlander 35mm) that is very contrasty and works better *without* adding on even more contrast on top. Thus the adventures in self-scanning.

which voigtlander 35mm do you have?

I have the Color Skopar 35mm f2.5. Mostly because it was the cheapest 35 I could buy once I picked up the Leica. It works well and all, but I'd prefer a lower contrast lens. I'm thinking of selling it and applying the $$ towards a Summaron 35mm. I think lower contrast will just be a bit more forgiving for retaining shadow detail and I like the look more. The color skopar drops off to pure black *soo* fast. I don't have the same problem with my other cameras (mostly fixed lens rangefinders with (probably) single coated lenses), or the lenses that I use on my Pentax.

look into the canon rangefinder 35mm's. the 2.5 was based on the canon design. I have a 35mm 1.8 and it's nice and low-contrast. the summaron is nice too. I picked up a canon 35mm/2 which is supposed to be more modern and high contrast, haven't run a roll through it yet.

but yeah I shot with a rollei 40mm/2.8 for a while, sooooo high contrast. sold it.

Voigtlander makes single-coating versions of some of their lenses that will be more pleasing with film (particularly B&W). They're marked SC vs MC.

yeah but they're still pretty high contrast, modern designs

I think the 35mm/40mm 1.4s come in sc and mc versions

Well, doing periodical B&H browsing yesterday I saw a 35mm f3.5 Summaron for $299 and without thinking bought it. It arrived today and is beautiful (on the outside at least!). I'll have to report back on how it looks! I know the f2.8 is the preferred version but I could not resist the immediacy of getting the thing the next day or the low price.
It is the version made for the M3 bayonet mount without goggles by the way. Meaning it focuses accurately but brings up 50mm framelines. I will have to decide whether I'd prefer to have a tech trim the lug to bring up 35mm framelines or just live with it (35mm framelines on an M2 are pretty much just the whole viewfinder anyway).

And Dayo, do you have shots with the Rollei? I used to use my dad's Rollei 35 when I was back in the Bay Area and compared to the Voigtlander lens it was *low* contrast. I had been keeping it in mind as a preferred look.

Could maybe be due to rushed processing, poorly drying chemicals maybe? I've had some b&w processing come back w splotches. But yeah try the flashlight test.

Xpost: I've gotten pretty nice prints from adorama! I think if you go to a professional lab in your area they can provide nice and large prints that aren't too pricey... You should try!

Better than the drugstore

Yep, multiple frames with different patterns but all variations on a theme (ie bands of light coming up from the bottom) - only starts about halfway through the roll. I shot the whole lot in one afternoon, so it wasn't sitting in the camera for a long time. Will try the flashlight tip. Thanks!

people on RFF have used this (forum sponsor) before and have reported on the results: http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=98700

― 乒乓, Friday, March 15, 2013 1:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so i did in fact finally do this, after a lot of false starts and tests. it's not 100% the smoothest procedure in the world, and i imagine if you're willing to go a little more expensive with one of the super-duper professional type places (like the ones hyped by Ken Rockwell here http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/labs.htm) you might get slightly more attentive customer care. Not that anyone's been rude or anything, just that thing where you can perceive that the system isn't really set up to smoothly serve this type of customer or this type of need. In any case, though, and more to the point of the thread, it's thrilling to have the film back and developed and, most of it, looking pretty good. It's also daunting as hell, and of course I'm making it worse for myself since, while I was waiting for the dozens of rolls to come back to me, I finally got the needed adapter for my film scanner and started laying into some developed-and-never-scanned negatives and, oh, lord, I just see the future ratcheting out ahead of me, soundtracked by the whirring of the scanner and the click of the mouse as I futz with stuff in Lightroom.

I stopped shooting film at the end of 2011 - god, time flies - so it's kinda just nice to be back in this look-and-feel. Lots of fairly grainy and not that sexy consumer-grade Fuji 400 and stuff. And it turns out some of the stuff I was shooting in early 2010 wasn't that attractive or well-lit in the first place. But still, some of these are making me happy.

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/659/20604950259_b0d1931b7d_z.jpg

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/780/20553796818_84c7bffc6c_z.jpg

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5777/20528647060_03c15bc135_z.jpg

Top one there also an experiment in applying Lightroom's like-magic "vertical" tool, which naturally plays wayyyy better with RAW files from cameras where it knows the lens, to film shots. Wish I could figure out how to get it correct lens profiles for the film lenses I did have. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the way those work, but just for it to know what transformation it should apply to fix barrel distortion would be pretty cool; I use those all the time for digital stuff.

Also, there really should be a word for the nagging, but unprovable, feeling that you must have lost a roll of film in a drawer somewhere. I really can't have taken so little in the way of personal/party candid shots between Fall 2010 and June 2011, I just can't have. Adding further confusion: one roll that I apparently developed at Target (!?!?!) somewhere in that time, where half the roll appears to be replaced with somebody else's pictures. I have no idea why I was getting film developed at Target, but I'm trying to comfort myself with the logic that, at the time, I would have noticed this strange development and taken action, unless I had some reason not to care (like it was a short roll anyway). But why wouldn't I have tried to return the other person's negatives? It makes no sense.

that's awesome, dr c
those are happy-making, esp <3 3rd one
incomparable experience to get old rolls developed, to scan old negs
you remind me, have some v v old disposable camera rolls inexplicably never developed; prob ruined by now but obv worth processing anyway
also many negs from middle/high school (!!!), most prints long lost, never scanned
don’t know why i keep postponing likely proustian experience

there really should be a word for the nagging, but unprovable, feeling that you must have lost a roll of film in a drawer somewhere
so otm

one roll that I apparently developed at Target (!?!?!) somewhere in that time, where half the roll appears to be replaced with somebody else's pictures
that reminds me of roll i once took to be developed, which lab lost or mixed up with someone else’s roll (b&w, so lab outsourced to another lab)
anyway, roll was never found
this happened like decade ago; i’m still haunted by that lost roll
vividly remember when/where i took those pictures— long rambling walk on melancholy overcast late afternoon in place with fraught associations when i was in v particular/inarticulable state of mind
maybe the vividness of the memory is due to (& worth) the loss of the photographs

aww, thanks a bunch. much more to come on flickr of course. btw i realized i may have been confusing above - none of these are from the big batch i got developed/scanned through those people (just me with my buddy the coolscan), so don't take them as samples of their work.

do the disposable cameras sooner rather than later! you seriously never know. IMO if there's one precious memory great shot buried in there it's so worth it.

i scanned a big bunch of high school negs the other week, not sure when i'll get around to processing them or what i'll do with them. i think all i had then was disposables. they're none of them "great photos" but definitely the kind of thing that folks on facebook may get a kick out of, might bring a smile to some people's faces, etc. that's a worthy thing. but only so many hours in the day. maybe i'll save them for twenty years out from graduation or something.

my other great "lost roll" - only one that's ever come back blank, crushingly - was from the end of summer 2008, mostly goofing around at coney island with a couple of good pals. i would love, love to see what was on that. sigh. really interesting to think that the memories of the day are heightened by taking but not having the photos. normally i think of photos as memory-prompts, gradually the days that were photographed come to call up (but also to stand in for) many other days and times. but perhaps a day that one THINKS about having photographed can actually work the same way. that's really interesting.

cool stuff doctor casino

Man, that makes me want to get a film camera and shoot. Are they still doing $12 all in plus shipping for the scans?

thanks y'all!

Yeah! I think you do have to be a registered RFF member and click through from their ad there, otherwise you won't find that item to add to your cart.

i've realized i should probably use a service like precision.

i had some developed negatives and went to a semiserious developing place today and got a price of 99 cents per frame for scanning to cd at "good" resolution, a buck something per exposure for "excellent" resolution ???? it's considerably cheaper if a develop/scan package for whatever reason (maybe there's a good reason that i'm unaware of).

Well, it's a LOT simpler to feed film into a scanner before it's been cut and sleeved. That's probably the biggest reason, assuming it's not like a drug store deal where the sacns happen (as I understand it) in the same machine as developing (?).

I should revise up my Precision comments a bit - in the end they came through, clearly tried hard to unravel some crossed wires, and insisted on a partial refund even when I was like ahhh, whatever, it's fine.