Film Friday: 'Film' Baker's Dozen

St. Patrick's Day Parade, New York City, 1974
by John Custodio, New York, New York, USA

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Photo by Nick Depree,
Auckland, New Zealand

"This was one of the first pictures I took after getting back into shooting a lot more film in 2020. It's from Karekare beach, one of my favourite and most visited places. Something about the gentle colours and shape really grew on me, and it has been on my wall for a few years now."

Photo by Reg Feuz,
Wellington, New Zealand

"Thanks for the opportunity to re-visit an old favourite image from the wall: my Muddy Waters face shot from his Auckland, New Zealand concert, 19 May 1973.  Film loaded in my Nikon F2 Photomic was Kokak Tri-X rated at 400 ISO, and the lens used was the Nikkor 80–200 ƒ/4.5 zoom. Film developer was D-76.

"I developed the print shortly thereafter using Ilford bromide 10x12-inch double-weight paper in Dektol. It was the last sheet of paper in the pack, and the last print after a long night in the darkroom. And then I discovered that I had underexposed the print. Shucks! So, I did the only next best trick and flashed the paper under the enlarger light and ended up with this result. Never bothered making another print of that negative.

"Three years later, in 1976, I entered the print into The Dunedin Photographic Society's Autumn Print Exhibition, and much to my surprise, as well as to other longstanding club members, I was awarded The Pattillo Cup for best portrait by the club judge on the night.

"I haven't darkroom printed for two decades. Still got the gear though, and keep on threatening myself to mix up the chemicals and finish of those old unopened packs of paper."

Photo by William Barnett-Lewis,
Eau Claire, Wisconsin, USA

"This goes back to the fall of 2008 when my son was sitting in his first day of first grade at the neighborhood school in Madison. The bright Fall sun was pouring in through the east facing windows as he faced me so I'm sure I had the Summitar stopped a bit down on the Leica CL I think I was still using (may have been a IIIf by then), though the focus was still a bit muffed. I was a little bit close so that may have been the problem. Hard to remember after 16 years  ;-)  .

"I do know it would have been Fuji Reala 100 ISO film as it was one of the few color films that did justice to his looks. It is not the most technically perfect of images but it caught the feel of his excitement and the beginning of the new year so nearly perfectly that it still remains one of the handful of portraits I am pleased to have taken. I don't think I could duplicate this look with either my Leica M 240 or my Pentax K5 without insane amounts of luck and/or post-processing skills I don't possess. This, on the other hand, came from Walgreens' Fuji machines. That was, in the end, one of the great joys of the last days of the film hegemony...."

Photo by Pierre Charbonneau,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

"Ancient car show, near a local airport in the suburbs of Montréal.

"This photo is from around 2004. Despite the fact that I had already started to shoot assignments with a digital camera, I have kept the habit of shooting film for personal pictures. The Canon 1Ds of yore was a marvel at the time, but heavy and less nimble than a Leica M6.

"The pattern did not change much in the last 20 years. If the pro Canon has been replaced by a current model, I still shoot 30 to 50 rolls a year with the old rangefinder camera.

"There is something in the highlight rendering and smoothness of film that is distinctive from digital. Hard to explain for me, actually. But very often, I prefer my film pictures over the digital ones."

Photo by Gordon Haddow,
San Carlos, California, USA

"This is a combination of two film images taken in the early '90s—one by me and one by my wife, Jane. The overall image was taken in Bodie, California with a Wisner 4x5 camera and 210mm Schneider lens on FP4 film, developed in D-76 at N+3. The image of the little girl was taken by Jane at a party where the child was longingly looking out of the window at the festivities.

"This image has always been special to me because of the emotional tones and the fact that it was a cooperative image with my wife."

Photo by Bob Keefer,
Creswell, Oregon, USA

"I took 'Pelican at Malheur'  of a pelican resting in a marsh at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon around 2005. [Ed. note: Bob now thinks the image was probably made on the Oregon Coast.] It's shot on Tri-X in my Canon EOS-3 with the old 100–400mm zoom, developed in Rodinal, and printed on good quality fiber-based, matte-surface paper in my late home darkroom (I succumbed to digital in 2007).

"After making the B&W print I used traditional Marshall's Oil Paints to hand color the image, giving it some quiet color and an early 20th-century vibe."

Photo by William Schneider,
Athens, Ohio, USA

"As one of a series made for my MFA degree, this print suggests how a person edits from space and time when photographing. It is a combination of two different prints—a smaller one inserted into a cutout made in the larger one. The surface of the two dry-mounted prints is flush except for a thin, X-acto-made cut line where they adjoin. The central print nestles into an opening cut in a 16x20 print, and they are dry mounted together to present a flush surface. (A close-up of this in glancing light may be seen here.)

"The center darkroom print, made on air-dried glossy Agfa Portriga paper, shows the photographer’s preferred cropping. Surrounding it is another print, made on Portriga matte paper that was pre-soaked in a contrast-reducing chemical (potassium ferricyanide solution) before developing. The surrounding print’s purpose is to show what the photographer chose to exclude from the scene. The two prints were made from two different negatives, with two different cameras (a Hasselblad and an 8x10 Deardorff), exposed days apart."

Photo by David Lobato,
Baltimore, Maryland, USA

"This is my Grandfather, feeding hay to livestock. Taken in 1979 on his farm in southwest Colorado. Camera was a Nikon F2S, probably on Tri-X film."

Lovers and Seagull, Portugal, 2022 by Soeren
Engelbrecht, Valby, Denmark

"Spending nine days of family vacation near/on a beach in Portugal, I decided to make a small photo project out of it. Apart from my Olympus OM-D for general photography, I also brought my OM-2n with a 50mm ƒ/1.8 Zuiko and one roll of Ilford XP2.

"Out of that project/roll came a small 'zine with 28 pictures, titled 'Between Estoril And Cascais—Holidays 2022' (I couldn't resist the acronym BEACH  :-). This by far my favourite—initially, I was planning to take a picture of the seagull, who was literally walking around at my feet, feeding off tourist scraps. As I followed it around with my camera, this scene appeared in the viewfinder, and I instinctively snapped the shot."

776 Nicola Street, by Francis Sullivan,
Daajing Giids, British Columbia, Canada

"Taken with my newly acquired Kodak Retina IIc with Kodak Plus-X film, 1974, in Kamloops, British Columbia.

"Pic of my partner having a break (back when we all smoked?) while young daughter naps in the baby carriage. In the foreground are ripe apricots. A very warm summer day."

Safety Pants by Darren Livingston,
Prescott, Arizona, USA

"My image was made using my first camera, the Diana all-plastic model, that I obtained in 1968 when I was 10 years old. The photo was taken on the streets of downtown Denver, Colorado, in 1978. I cross-processed the Ektachrome 200 film using Acufine film developer followed by the C-41 process.

"The camera still sits on a shelf in my office today."

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And one more for good measure....

Photo by Richard Fox,
New City, New York, USA

"This image was taken at MoMA (NYC) on February 3, 2012 @1:50 PM. The camera used was a Canon S90, processed today using DxO PureRAW version 1.6, Lightroom, and Photoshop. The gentleman holding what appears to be an Atget negative was not a thief or a vandal, but a museum employee installing or adjusting. I exposed three files of this situation; this is number two of three."

Ed. note: 'Tis indeed Eugène Atget: Marchand de paniers en fil de fer, 1899–1900, gift of Shirley C. Burden, Jr., who participated in New York City politics as Carter Burden. He was a three-times great grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and among many other accomplishments and patronages was a significant collector of old master drawings and of American first editions. Curiously, of more than 28,000 photographs online at the MoMA website, more than 10% are works by Atget.

The picture doesn't precisely fit the category—it's not film! It's a glass plate. Or at least the original was—this looks like it might have been an enlarged negative on film used to contact-print the exhibition print made by the Chicago Albumen Works for MoMA. Atget never used a camera this big that I know of. But I liked the symmetry of a digital picture of a photograph originally made on a glass plate negative—the two media symbolically bookending the broad era of film.

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Honorable Mentions: Honestly, from some 140+ submissions I don't think I got one I couldn't have shown. However, FWIW, the other finalists from the next-to-last pass were Gert Foget Hansen, Henning Wulff, Chap Achen, Zyni Moë, Mark Hobson, Mike Peters, James Hengst, Brian Schnupp, Ken Renton, Michael Trupiano, Robert Griffin, Russell Guzewicz, Brendan Gara, Lara "RubyT" Arnold, Tony Gale, Jayanand Govindaraj, Jamie Pillers, Tony Woollett, Larry Angier, Vijay Ramakrishnan, Bob St-Cyr, Stanley Venit, Niels Hansen, James Coleman, Ritchie Thomson, Jim Arthur, Rodolfo Canet, Bob Gary, Jim Martin, Chris Rusbridge, Bob Burnett, Frank Raeymaekers, John Gordon, Kefyn Moss, Russ Scheid, Bill Poole, Tomas Jiricek, Steven Traudt, Jerker Andersson, Kenneth Ginn, Lorenzo Dunn, Jim Bullard, David O'Bryan, David Francis, Tom Stermitz, Earl Dunbar, Dennis Connors, Eric Peterson, Kent Phelan, Bob Feugate, Stephanie Luke, and Bruce Bordner—and I think I missed a few.

Thanks to everyone for participating! As I've mentioned before, these Baker's Dozens are great fun for me. It's like gifts in my inbox every morning.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "What an excellent selection of images (regardless of medium)! Several carry such shades of their times and, at first glance, appear to be samples of renowned photographers such as Harold Feinstein, Elliott Erwitt, et al. I'll be revisiting these all weekend. Thank you to everyone who submitted work. And thank you, Mike."

Steve Deutsch: "'776' reminds me why I love Plus-X so much."

Mike replies: I loved it too....

Mike Ferron: "All fine shots. Pierre C.'s Chevy Bel Air with plane overhead immediately caught my eye. I also saw Muddy Waters and company play in a less than perfect bar. The location for me was Nantasket Beach, Massachusetts, probably late '70s. James Cotton and Matt 'Guitar' Murphy were band members that night so that photo brings back memories. But for me the near technical perfection of David L.'s Grandfather makes it the shot I wish I took."

Comments

[XK50]

Yay! Real pictures, crafted by real people, using real cameras. Superb! I could almost smell the fixer. Thank you.

[BG]

Fascinating. I love the variety that you showed us. And they do not look digital!

[Mark B]

That’s a real film smorgasbord Mike. I loved every one of them.

[William Lewis]

Marvelous images. I'm humbled to see the portrait of my son among the rest of these. I honestly didn't think it would make the cut though I do love that look at the joy and excitement he felt that day.

Thank you for this Baker's Dozen Mike, it's a true delight.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Most of these were shot when film wasn't a choice, it was the only game in town. However, what's important is that so many of them are good photos or at the very least interesting photos (and that's just from my own opinions of course; not a question of fact!).

I am personally particularly fond of:

Nick Depree's Auckland, New Zealand, which among many things captures the light on the grasses so nicely (I keep going after light on grasses and scrub trees, and occasionally get something myself).

Bob Keefer's Creswell, Oregon, USA, for reasons I can't really pin down. Therefore I suspect it's partly things he achieved with the hand coloring, and if so, bravo! (Bravo anyway, I like this photo.)

David Lobato's Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Really elegant, precise, rim light. I'm just slightly perplexed that the camera is known but the film is not. I guess this is a from an older scan, and you can't (or didn't take the time to) dig back to the actual film? But your metadata in some form recorded the camera? But that doesn't affect the quality of the image in any way.

Darren Livingston's Safety Pants (Prescott, Arizona, USA). One, it's reminiscent of one of my own very earliest photos (taken on 116 roll film I think in my case; around 1962). My photo also featured a man carrying a paper bag. And two, I'm just a bit freaked out at processing in Acufine followed by C41. I never played with cross-processing myself and hadn't happened to hear of that one. I used Acufine, or the one-shot version Acu-1, a lot myself, but just on its own, with B&W film.

The others all have clear virtues, and no doubt I'm not fully appreciating even the ones I like enough to comment on.

Cheers to to all the people whose photos were selected, all the people whose photos weren't, and of course to Mike for going through them all and making these choices!

[Richard Alan Fox]

Mike, thank you for the background of the Atget image in my digital photograph, I hope someone might be able to identify the gentleman holding the frame.
You mentioned the more than 28,000 photos online at MOMA and that ten percent are works by Atget, let me introduce you to my little friend the one and only photograph in the MOMA collection online by me.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/48209?classifications=any&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2025&include_uncataloged_works=false&on_view=false&q=richard+alan+fox&recent_acquisitions=false&with_images=true

[Jim Arthur]

What a lovely assortment of pictures. A few jumped out at me right away but when I pulled them all in to Affinity to eliminate the distraction of the bright web page and to see them as Mike probably did, they all showed me their charms.

At this early stage of assessment I’m loving the simplicity of David Lobato’s picture of his Grandfather. When I think back, I don’t think I’ve ever made such a picture. It strikes me that David’s picture has just enough information to identify the man to those in the know. I also keep returning to the pictures by Reg Feuz, Francis Sullivan and Darren Livingston for just one more look. Well done everyone.

[Bob]

Ooops... I realized after submitting the hand-colored pelican photo that it could not have been taken at Malheur Refuge.More likely the Oregon coast!

Wonderful assortment of work in this dozen+.

[JOHN GILLOOLY]

Really enjoyed this project and the selects.....

[Robert Roaldi]

I like Pierre Charbonneau's picture but that may be because I'm from Montreal and my father owned a 1956 Chevy Biscayne (that's a 1957 BelAir in the photo).

I saw Muddy Waters in a dumpy bar in London Ontario in February 1976. It was very cold that day and I remember worrying if my car was going to start when I left. I recognized two or three of the musicians later in the movie The Last Waltz.

[Pierre Charbonneau]

How flattering it is to have a picture featured here. Thank you Mike for your appreciation.

To follow up about one of your recent post on analog pictures scanned and film, I will point out this picture of the Chevy 57 is coming from a scan of a twenty years old actual fibre base print.

Best,
Pierre

[MikeR]

Very nice selection. I liked all of them, and each for different reasons.

[Stay warm up there, looks like the lake effects are aiming at you]

[Sean]

Francis Sullivan‘’s shot wouldn't look out of place in Larry Towell’s The World from My Front Porch. Mother's having a smoke break, but on her feet and behind a screen with her sleeping child in view. The pram blocking the front door is great symbolically. How many women have crossed the threshold into motherhood and heard a door close behind them

[Andrew]

When I read that Gordon Haddow's submission was a combination of two different photos, it made me very curious about how they were combined. Are there any more details available?