The Online Photographer

The Contax RTS II (Part II)

Sorry for the delay. However, as I sometimes take the trouble to point out, this stuff doesn't write itself.

Taking up where we left off...

In 1982, the year the Contax RTS II was introduced, the "heavy metal" rocker Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat onstage. What will now permanently be the bestselling album in history, Michael Jackson's Thriller, came out, in November. Martina Navratilova won 90 of 93 tennis matches, and North Carolina won the NCAA Men's College Basketball tournament with the help of a freshman sensation then known as Mike Jordan. AT&T, colloquially called "Ma Bell," was ordered to be broken up. A movie called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was helping Steven Spielberg earn $500,000 a day. On the Mall in Washington, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by a young unknown named Maya Lin, was dedicated. It was so stark that a figurative statue called "Three Soldiers," which was not part of Lin's design, had to be added two years later to placate detractors. (Lin's somber Memorial, now widely admired, is no longer controversial.) On January 14th, Air Florida flight 90 hit the 14th Street Bridge shortly after taking off from what was then called National Airport, and plunged into the freezing Potomac River, killing 78 people, including both pilots and four motorists on the bridge. A day later, "shock jock" Howard Stern called Air Florida on the air and asked to buy a ticket to the 14th Street Bridge, for which he was fired*. Thelonious Monk, Philip K. Dick, Leonid Brezhnev, and John Belushi were among those who died that year, as well as Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly the American movie star Grace Kelly. She died when she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage behind the wheel and drove off a mountainside. Instead of a "Man [or Woman] of the Year," which had been a big deal since the late 1920s, TIME magazine named the personal computer "Machine of the Year." In the U.S., a gallon of gas cost 91 cents, a loaf of bread cost 50 cents, and the average price of an existing home was $67,800. Argentina invaded the Falklands Islands. Dallas, M*A*S*H, and Hill Street Blues were on American TV, and the young standup comedian David Letterman's first (and still best) late night show, simply called "Late Night," debuted on NBC**. A new and high-tech type of music carrier called the Compact Disc, or CD, a joint effort between Sony and Philips, was first manufactured***. A computer scientist named Scott Fahlman proposed that a colon, hyphen, and close-parenthesis, like this: 

:-) 

be used as a marker for jokes. It became the first "emoticon," a word Fahlman coined—even though the Russian émigré author Vladimir Nabokov had proposed the same thing way back in 1969, writing, in The New York Times, "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket." 

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C....
Far less significantly—well, except to me—I accidentally applied to art school in 1982. I had become obsessed with photography, learning all I could about it on my own. And when I got going learning something, I really got going. I never received an academic degree, but when motivated I could be a ferocious autodidact. I once tried to teach myself Anglo-Saxon, for instance, and got further with it than you might imagine. After many visits to Industrial Photo in suburban Maryland—I would stop on my way home from the University of Maryland, where I was auditing a physics course in optics—I had carefully weighed all the options and finally purchased a Contax 139Q (for "quartz") and a Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens, which became my only lens for more than two years.

I was moonlighting at a framer's shop and met a photographer, a customer, who told me about the Corcoran School of Art's Open Program, where she had taken a class. I called the Corcoran, asked to be sent an application for a photography course, and had filled out more than two pages of the application out before I figured out that what they had sent me was an application for the four-year full-time program, which I hadn't even known about. Nothing much was going on in my life; I was living in a group house and working full-time as a handyman at Johnson's Flower Center, a garden center on Wisconsin Avenue, and working evenings and weekends at the frame shop. So I completed the application, was accepted, and entered the Photography BFA program as a second-year student in the Fall.

Naturally, when the RTS II came out and was covered in all the magazines, that became the "dream camera" I really wanted. But not really, because it was beyond my slender means, even though I had been working those two jobs. I considered at the time that the RTS II really should be considered a new camera on account of all its improvements and refinements, or what are now called "upgrades." The shutter on the original RTS of 1975 was known to have some problems, so the RTS II offered a horizontally-traveling new shutter made of titanium—I recall being cautioned never to touch it, as the titanium was very thin and a dented shutter could not be repaired. It inherited quartz-controlled shutter timing, which "trickled up" from my 139Q. I don't know how accurate it was—Dick, at Pro Photo, where most of the photographers in the Washington press corps had their cameras repaired, had a shutter tester, but testing cost $15 and I was a cheapskate. The RTS II had a fully mechanical backup shutter speed, 1/50th sec. (that's the control on the bottom right of the mirror housing, next to the lens), TTL flash, and this, that, and the other thing. You can research an exhaustive list of the differences as easily as I can (i.e., not very easily).

Thoughtful design, innovative tech, and careful engineering
But several things deserve mention. It's remembered that Contax eventually went to great extremes, in the RTS III of 1990 (which really was a completely different camera), to ensure film flatness. The engineers and product managers at Zeiss, one of whom I eventually met, were preoccupied by it, in order to better show off the superiority of their lenses. The RTS III's vacuum back sucked the film flat against the pressure plate before every shot, an engineering nicety that might have appealed to buyers conceptually, even though it's doubtful that any of them ever were able to detect the difference visually. This is almost lost to history now, and I don't know that anyone still cares, but that concern with film flatness was already being addressed way back in the RTS II. The back and film path were carefully engineered, with such features as an oversized, extremely high-tolerance pressure plate made of a special material, and an oversized takeup spool. 

Looks perfectly ordinary, but in this case looks are deceiving.

A lot of the differences were things that seem to have been of concern only in terms of "feature competition" at the time—for example, interchangeable focusing screens. The RTS II had no fewer than eight available! But who cares? Who could care? It was simply something that buyers were looking at back them, ticking off their feature lists as they did their shopping. Soon enough, it stopped mattering—feature proliferation was just about to take off in a much bigger way, as we'll see in the next post. The salient point on that score is that the RTS II shipped with a standard focusing screen that differed from the usual. Most cameras at the time had a central circle consisting of a split-image inside a microprism "collar." The RTS II shipped with a standard screen that had a center spot of microprism only—no split image. Of course, various other screens were among the seven additional options, including your choice of a horizontal or 45°-angle split image. If your heart's desire is to make yourself crazy, try finding those now. The RTS II lost some of those comparisons, too—for example, the flash sync speed, soon to become a competition, was only 1/60th, and several other pro cameras of the era featured exchangeable prism housings—only the Leica R4 and the Contax did not.

The RTS II shared with the RTS its then-unique electromagnetic shutter release, which was very light and very precise compared to the competition. At the time it had the effect of spoiling you for anything else, although it's difficult to recover that sense in today's world. I can't seem to find the spec, but my memory is that it offered the shortest shutter-button travel and the lowest shutter lag of any SLR at the time.

But the best features of the camera were both new on the II. Primarily, the prism and the viewfinder were all new, offering 97% coverage vs. 93% in the RTS, and .87X magnification. The prism was engineered with no corners cut whatsoever, and the view through the eyepiece is as close as it gets to perfection. It's bright, even across the field, "snappy" across the whole field (that is, you can detect focus easily anywhere, not the case on the later high-brightness screens). It's large, and offers decent eye relief (I don't seem to find a figure). Most of all, it's supremely clean—all you see is the world through the lens to the edge of the rectangle. In normal shooting there are only two red LED data points in the finder, the shutter speed on the right and the aperture underneath, both outside the image area—but you're not even presented with those unless you want to be. (If in use, exposure compensation, AE/manual mode indication, AE lock, overexposure warning, flash data and battery check are also visible.) It can stand as well as anything as the high-water mark of camera viewfinders, not just among SLRs, not just of that era, but of 35mm cameras overall. Shoot with it for a while and you'll see just how much we have lost with the insanely cluttered and confused finder views of most of today's digital marvels.

The other feature that's really nice and that I've never seen elsewhere is the very effective AE lock system. To see the finder information, you don't half-press the shutter—the information only briefly appears in the finder as the shutter is being pressed. Rather, you press a button on the front of the camera body to turn the finder information on—for 16 seconds, to prevent battery drain. The nifty thing is that there's a very handy collar switch around this button which permanently locks any shutter speed value once you activate it, and holds it until you switch it off again. It's highly convenient, very practical, and efficient. I'll go so far as to wax hyperbolic and say it's probably the best AE lock system ever devised.

And now the other shoe drops
The cameras that the RTS II competed with in its era were the Nikon F3 (1980—one of my studio partners had one, which he called Darth Vader), Canon New F-1 (1981—my brother bought one), Pentax LX (1980—I've owned several, and still have one now) and Leica R4 (1980—I've rented one of those too, although the one I bought for myself was the R4s). I'm pleased to report that after graduating from the Corcoran School of Art Photography Department, I got a job as a part-time teacher at a local college, and used that as a stepping stone to a full-time job as a high school photography teacher. Being paid a whopping $17,000 in annual salary (actually the equivalent of $47,600 now, which is hard to believe), I was finally able to buy a brand new Contax RTS II. Was it worth buying then? More importantly, what's the situation now—is this old camera actually recommendable to film shooters today? I'll give you my considered and informed, but hardheaded and realistic, opinion.

But before I do that, I have to say that, unfortunately, all of the foregoing, about the features and technology of the RTS II, is actually beside the real point, and doesn't matter all that much in understanding the camera. To put the RTS II in proper perspective and learn the actual significance of it and of the other top cameras of that era, stay tuned for Part III.

I hope you're enjoying reading this, even if, quite understandably, you don't care much (or at all) about old film cameras.

Mike

*I won't watch or listen to him to this day. If you don't naturally empathize with innocent travelers who suddenly find themselves trapped and drowning in freezing water after a traumatic impact, you're a psychopath, and that's the end of the discussion.

**"Still best," thanks in part to Letterman's head writer and then-girlfriend Merrill Markoe, who deserves credit for a lot of the original features on that show. I had been living without a TV, but I bought one specifically to watch two programs: the 1983 Super Bowl, and Late Night. I later bought a tiny B&W TV with a screen about the size of a piece of 4x5 film. Know why? Because I could put a small sheet of Rubylith—transparent red masking film—over the screen, and watch football games—and Late Night, often enough—in the darkroom.

***I bought twenty of them before I bought my first CD player.

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Rob Griffin: "Your writings on the Contax cameras and the RTS and RTS II are a wonderful read. Great stuff! From the mid-'70s to mid-'80s I worked full time at what I believe was the best camera store in Phoenix, The Guild. I think we may have been the biggest Contax dealer in the Southwest. Your impressions and thoughts about the Contax line are right on point."

Mike Cawley: "Wonderful! My first serious camera was the RTS II. Coupled with the W-2 motor drive, I felt like a real photographer. Didn't have enough $ to buy the III when it was introduced, but managed to handle it at a camera show. It had that same 'solid brick' feeling of quality like the II.

"Keep 'em coming!"

Tanks and Reels for Film Developing

Well, that was interesting. Learn something new every day?

Over the past couple of days I tried to write an article about my method of developing small-format film, a method I carefully built up over many years and through much research. I had everything worked out to a fare-thee-well. I figured it would be easy to write because I could do it off the top of my head.

And I found that...I couldn't. Reason? It's no longer on the top of my head!

It's been 22 years since I last developed film regularly, and some of the details I thought I would never forget, I've forgotten. Timings, dilutions, details about equipment and the history and lore of materials. I used to be able to recite it all without any effort.

I could still write that article, but I'll have to research some of it.

Elusive and rare
However, I made a welcome and unexpected discovery that I thought I'd throw out there for people who are developing their own film in 2022. One of the rarest and most elusive bits of darkroom equipment I've ever discovered is actually still available. I was very surprised.

A little background first. There are two kinds of developing tanks: the plastic ones, called Paterson-style, that look like this, and metal ones, made of stainless steel. Some people like one, some people the other. It's really just an Android vs. iPhone kind of thing. There's no right or wrong. It mainly has to do with which kind of reel is easier for you to load. I lean toward stainless. I never used plastic reels and plastic tanks except to help students with them, and I don't like 'em. The reason being that they only work right when they're absolutely dry. That's all well and good if you only develop one tank every two or three days. But sometimes you need to do another tank right away, and it's very frustrating to stand there endlessly with a hair dryer trying to get all the moisture out of the nooks and crannies of a plastic reel, only to find when you get in the dark that you didn't stand there long enough.

But there are problems with stainless tanks and reels too. The main one is that you need good reels in good condition. Cheap school- and group-darkroom reels bend if you drop them, so they're usually all bent up, or have been bent and bent back. If you manage a group darkroom, which I have done, you have to become skilled at fixing cheap reels and trying to get them more or less back into true. Being out of true is what causes all the problems. I swear allegiance to the beautiful reels made by Hewes in the UK. Which, by the way, I thought were extremely expensive when they cost $30 each! But you only need a few, and they will last your entire lifetime, and then the entire lifetime of the person who gets them after you. Not only are they superbly made and much heavier and stronger than typical stainless reels, but, crucially, instead of those infernal spring clips that most reels have, they have two little prongs in the center that fit into the sprocket holes of your filmstrip. Far easier to deal with. Now, here's the trick. What you do is to get into the habit of not winding your exposed film all the way back into the cassette before you remove it from the camera. To indicate that it's exposed, just fold the leader over. When you go into your dark closet or wherever you go to load your exposed film on the reels, you can get all set up before you even turn off the lights: clip the end of the roll square with scissors, then attach the film to the center prongs and get it started with a turn or two, all in room light. Then just set it there within easy reach where you can find it in the dark. Then, when you go dark, the hard part is already done, and you don't have to fumble with opening the cassette, cutting the film end, and loading the darned spring clip in the dark. Plus, Hewes reels are much easier and smoother to load because they're polished and smooth and dead true. Expensive, yes, but they'll pay you back every time you use them.

The tops
The other problem with stainless tanks is the tops. You do not want the common molded top that looks like this:

They can work all right, but they're cheap and will get damaged or start to leak sooner or later. These are marketed by Kalt and Omega and various other brands.

But you also don't want the classic old-fashioned stainless top:

The problem with those is that the light baffle only lets in a tiny dribble of liquid, and it takes forever to exchange solutions. I guess you get used to it if it's all you have, but it's a poor design.

So what do you want? The best one I ever found was marketed long ago by Kindermann in Germany. NOT the current Kindermann tank-top (sorry, but that's what it is), which is the plastic molded variety. The old one was much better made, of a rubbery material, with a top that fit and never leaked, and a design that allowed a free and easy exchange of liquid.

The problem was that Kindermann stopped making them twenty years ago. In the early 'aughts I went to great lengths to find and buy a second one, thinking I would one day continue doing darkroom work.

So here's the surprise: it looks like they're still available. If you go to eBay and search "Seki universal developing tank," you'll find a small two-reel stainless tank with a top that looks exactly like the old Kindermann one. I don't know what's going on with that; they all come from South Korea, so maybe Kindermann's original supplier was South Korean and either has some left over or is still making them, and is either selling them to a different customer (Seki) or selling them themselves (under the Seki name). I don't know. But it sure looks like that's the elusive top that I always thought was head-and-shoulders above any other alternative. 

To see if it's really the same top, I'd need to order one and compare it to the ones I have.

The Seki tank with that elusive top

They do seem to be providing them only with two-reel tanks. With my developing method, following the research of George Post, I leave a generous airspace for better agitation; my standard was to develop three reels in a four-reel tank, with an empty reel at the top. I would only develop one reel in a two-reel tank. Stainless tanks are pretty well standardized, though, so that the ubiquitous molded tops would fit them all. But you'd have to get a four-reel tank from a different source and see if the Seki top fits. I would imagine it would, but you'd just have to try it.

George Post, who did an impressive amount of research on 35mm developing, did find that the most even development was achieved by developing one roll of film in the bottom position in a two-reel Paterson plastic tank, with the empty reel on top and only half the recommended amount of solution so as to leave a generous amount of airspace. But I had great results adapting his principles to a four-reel stainless tank. I'm too lazy to develop one reel at a time and then wait 24 hours for the reel to dry.

This is all pretty esoteric. But it's not a PITA if you find it fun, which I always did. And you only have to equip yourself once. Unlike digital stuff, you can keep using film stuff pretty much forever. Anyway: three Hewes reels, one cheap eBay reel as a spacer, that Seki top, and a four-reel tank. That's what you want—if you prefer stainless and want the best.

Mike

For further reading: "Classic Printmaking for Fun, Part I" (June 2011.) (There was never a Part II. Or maybe the article I tried to write yesterday would have been Part II.)

Featured Comments from:

Ken Bennett: "When I was stringing for the AP I spent a a few thousand hours souping color neg film in makeshift darkrooms at major sports and political events. We used metal reels, and sometimes would put two rolls on each reel, with the emulsions facing out. I could load reels half asleep or even half drunk.  :-)  Probably can't do it anymore. Before we got the Leafax film scanners in the early '90s we made color prints for the portable drum transmitters. Making color prints in a hotel bathroom was an art form."

robert e: "Wow! Learning a new darkroom tip is the last thing I expected from this day. That one about starting a Hewes reel with the lights on is gold! Wish I'd known it when I was developing film weekly. I still have a couple of those beautiful reels, though, so maybe it's not too late. I've been curious about the new all-in-one baths anyway. But I'll wait to see what you have to say about the arcana of agitation."

Richard Alan Fox: "I developed film in tanks for approximately 40 years. I started with Kodak plastic aprons and ended with the Paterson reels and tanks. The key to a dry reel is to have many on hand. I gave up the darkroom 20 years ago and don’t miss it for a moment; nostalgia is best left in the forgotten past."

Mike replies: I hear you. Digital is so much easier it's impossible not to go that way. And yet, it has never been remotely as satisfying.

John Shriver: "I still love developing B&W film. Never liked B&W darkroom printing—too frustrating. My daughter got props at college in 2012 for arriving with her own Nikor reels and tanks and knowing how to load them. I've got all the small Nikor reels: Minox, 16mm, 35mm (20 and 36), 126, 127, 120/620, 116/616, 118, and 122. Used all of them but the Minox, 16mm, and 126. I also have two Hewes 35mm reels, which I got for a pittance at a yard sale. But two of them don't fit in the Q15 tank; you need a (rare) Q18. It's like riding a bike: once you have the feel for loading Nikor reels, you never lose it. (I will note that the larger sizes are fussier.)"

Steve Rosenblum: "Hewes reels all the way! Not only are they still being made in Everton, Sandy, Bedfordshire, but the manager will happily correspond with you regarding any questions. Also, if you want to 'split the difference' they make 35mm reels that fit JOBO and Paterson plastic tanks as well."

Bear.: "Oh for my lost youth and the time I spent acquiring expertise in arcane topics, now without purpose and utterly forgotten!"

Jeff Hohner: "Mike, you are a memory machine. So many of your posts cause me to remember intense, particular pleasures from my photographic past. In this case, the intimate relationship between fingers and film and development reel in the pitch black of the darkroom; gently guiding, ratcheting, cajoling the film strip onto the reel; understanding for a brief privileged moment that being unsighted doesn't mean not having a complete perception of a thing and a process in minute detail. The stakes were high. Getting those two or three dozen latent images (potential keepers every one!) onto the reel and into the tank was do or die. Once the film canister had been cracked, there was no going back. I can still feel/see the little round guide tabs at the opening of my Paterson reels (I was a plastic guy) in my minds eye as clearly right now as I did in the dark 40 years ago."

Chris Nicholls: "Big fan of your 'Not much of a system System' and Barry Thornton's excellent articles on the use of contact prints to guide the approach to good negatives. I still have a copy of the article I sourced from LuLa, and learned so much from your writing. I'm down to a couple of rolls of film in six months now, but still enjoy a little quiet time in the darkroom. Keep it up."

Eric Peterson: "I weep with joy that I can send now my Texas Leica Tri-X to a good lab close by. But I thoroughly enjoyed today’s TOP. It recalled memories of some early roll film efforts. I think I used Rodinal, but holding that wet film up against a light for the first peek was just a magical transforming experience. Keep on truckin’!"

Malcolm Collier: "We (myself and parents John Collier Jr. and Mary E.T. Collier) always preferred FR plastic tanks although we also used steel a lot. FR reels were loaded the same way as steel reels and had the advantage of being less prone to film getting out of alignment on the reel. They could also be loaded when still damp. But they went off the market a long long time ago.

"But what I really am sending in is my mother’s comment about digital photography after 50-plus years of developing film, often in remote field situations. When I asked her what she thought of digital photography her immediate words were 'No more dish washing!'"

Richard Alan Fox: "Developing film in tanks was much like washing dishes by hand. [Richard, did you and Mary Collier know each other? —Ed.] Developing RAW files on a big screen and printing on an inkjet gives me the greatest image making satisfaction I have known, post exposure. One more thing regarding the Paterson reels, they adjust to hold 35mm, 120 or 220."

Sroyon (partial comment): "John Szarkowski once said, 'The hard part isn’t the decisive moment or anything like that—it's getting the film on the reel.'"

Luke: "So many awful memories, so much time wasted, so many late nights. Digital is so much MORE satisfying, with the ability to instantly see the results of changes in processing."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Tanks for the memories, eh? I’ve never had a strong urge to develop a roll of film. I took a short swing at color printing 40 years ago but quickly (mercifully) snapped out of it when my first wife threatened mayhem."

David Brown: "When I was doing basic darkroom workshops (stopped with the beginning of COVID and then just 'retired') absolute beginners would develop a roll of film and make prints all in one day. The single hardest part of every workshop I ever held was teaching and loading the blasted reels. The facility where I taught (Dallas Center for Photography) insisted on steel reels, which I agreed with; but plastic would have been much better for a beginner. IMHO My answer to the plastic vs. steel debate was always: Steel is better if you don't drop them; plastic is better if they are kept clean and dry."

Mike replies: If you drop a Hewes reel it will simply bounce, and you won't be able to detect any damage.

Doug C: "Hewes really won me over when they custom-made for me four 220 reels for JOBO 2500 series tanks, which are larger diameter than any of the above-mentioned systems. I really am still amazed that they were willing and able to do that. I had purchased a large supply of slightly outdated 220 film and found it was extremely difficult to load on plastic reels (one more thing to look out for). I was also amused that they had no way to process a credit card charge except through the pub next door. So that's how it showed up on my tax records. They were a bit expensive, or massively cheap depending on your attitude about custom work."

Tom Burke (partial comment): "Good post—I enjoyed it. Shows me how much of an amateur I was!—I’ve never heard of Hewes reels, despite a.) living in the UK all my life, and b.) being a voracious reader of Amateur Photographer during my film-developing days. I simply don’t recall ever seeing the name."

Mike replies: They might have been marketed under some other name over there. They were marketed under the name "King Concept" in the USA for many years; in fact I had known about them by that name for quite some time before I ever heard the name Hewes UK.

The Worst Exhibition Lighting I Ever Saw

My new picture "One Gull" highlights the problems of controlling viewing environment for pictures. It is, first of all, exaggerated modestly in order to preserve the feeling of what it was like to stand there and experience the sight; that is, the primary goal was something other than a judiciously objective recording of the relative luminances of the scene.

Small problem: looking at my computer screen in ambient daylight, it looks too dark.

I work on the front porch of my small home. I have a family room that could be converted to an office nicely, but it's a former one-car garage and the WiFi stubbornly refuses to reach it, regardless of various repeaters and extenders placed in various spots—and anyway, it, too, has too much daylight, with windows on all four walls. The ambient light on the porch (which has wondows all along three walls) is bright, and varies throughout the day as the sun passes through its arc and filters through the trees. This is what led me to abandon my 27" 2011 iMac four or five years ago and invest in a NEC MultiSync PA272W monitor*: the Mac's screen was reflective, and looking at it all day was frustrating. The NEC has a hood and a non-glare surface, and works much better. New Mac displays (their word for monitor), especially the nano-texture glass models, have much better glare control, I'm told.

Typically, I work on pictures on the computer in subdued lighting in the evening, after sunset. I have a color-corrected light placed in back of my monitor, and overhead light in the living room comes through the windows between the living room and porch illuminate the keyboard adequately. In this environment I can see tones much better, and I typically correct for the way pictures look in this environment. However, with "One Gull," the values of the sky on top and the water of the lake are delicate; a little change too much either way either closes the picture down or opens it up too much. With many pictures I compromise, seeking an average, because, of course, I can't know how you're viewing the picture, or how anyone else is—you probably have a color-calibrated monitor, but a lot of people don't. Either way, I don't know if your workspace is brightly lit (in which case this picture will look too dark) or has subdued lighting.

In the dark
This was always an issue with darkroom printing as well. When galleries and museums used strong viewing lighting, it was usual to try to reproduce that light level, minus a little bit as a fudge factor, for controlled viewing lighting in the darkroom, where the prints were made. But now, museums, at least, have adopted dim, murky lighting as a cost-saving measure [UPDATE: this is wrong, it isn't done for cost saving] (which is truly cutting off the nose to spite the face, but I've already ranted about that several times elsewhere), so pictures printed for bright viewing light look terrible. The worst, most catastrophic exhibition lighting I ever saw was a Paul Strand show in Chicago; Paul printed strong, bold darks, with a tonal palette tilted toward the lower end, and under murky Sav-a-Buc lighting the shadow contrast vanished and the highlights** just looked depressed and gloomy. Put a bright light on the same print and it comes alive. (But you should not let a museum guard catch you using a flashlight to inspect a print, and please don't ask me how I know that.)

When viewing exhibitions of B&W prints from film in museums and galleries, I could often tell you what the printmaker's darkroom inspection lighting was like. If the print tones looked tepid and the darks were too elevated, pale and weak, it meant they were judging their prints under lighting that was too dim. If the prints were too dark and the shadow contrast clotted up, I knew that their darkroom printing light was overly strong. Personally, I usually tried for just the right intermediate balance; at one school darkroom, where I couldn't control the viewing lighting, I would wander around looking at the wet test print in a tray under different light levels: over by the window, in a shaded corner, under incandescent lights, under fluorescent light. Of course, after a while I had a firm grasp of what I wanted and I didn't have to do that.

Anyway, if you would like to see "One Gull" (here's the link again) as it probably should look, try turning the lights down or off in the room in which you have your computer, and see how that looks.

Prints and sales
The only way to really make sure the tones are right is for the artist, who gets to say, to lock them down in an immutable medium: the fine print. As you know if you've been following along, we're going to have a print sale of some of these monochrome prints soon; I've been through the JPEG review with the master printer who will be making the prints, and the set of guide prints will be shipped to me for review this week. This sale will follow the time-honored strategy I developed years ago, which has served us very well (and has been copied or adapted here and there around the Internet): we take pre-orders for a short period of time, close the order window, and only then make all the prints in one batch. This makes it efficient to produce the prints while also keeping the price-per-print quite low.

But the scale has changed over the years. TOP's audience has consolidated to a smaller group of more committed readers, and traditional photography in general is getting less popular and less "status-y" in the general culture, in this age of Instagram and Facebook, of color as the default, of phones as the most ubiquitous cameras, and of printmaking going the way of the dodo (how terrible to be the go-to metaphor for the utter annihilation of extinction! Poor dodo). We're never going to reach the heights of the go-go years of the 2010s again: we had one sale in which we sold well over 700 prints, and another that grossed over $130,000 (most of which went to the photographer). The conditions for that level of success have vanished.

So I'm thinking of a new method, one much more similar to the gallery model: making a very small, limited run of prints of my best B&W pictures from the Sigma fp(m), and offering only a handful for sale—but offering them more regularly and more often. Let's say we do it every Friday. On one Friday I might offer a custom 17x22" print of "One Gull" at $495, but limited to say, seven prints; and then the next Friday there would be another image offered. Miss one you like? No matter; keep an eye peeled for the next. Finally find one that really speaks to you? Jump on it. I could tailor the number of prints based on what I imagine the popularity of the image might be: for "Corn at the Harvest," which everybody seemed to like, I could have, say, 13 prints made, a large run; for "Little Girl with Alpaca," which is not the sort of picture most people would display on their walls, maybe only two. For images that don't sell out right away, they would simply remain available until they do.

I have no idea if that would appeal; the proof of the pudding is to eat it, and the only way to test this idea would be to try it. We'll see.

At least it's not an impulsive idea: I've been considering it for years.

Mike

*I looked for a current model, but it appears NEC doesn't really make one. They appear to have scaled back on color-correct monitors for photography; their representative suggested the NEC EA271U as being an appropriate replacement, but, although it has higher resolution, it has less color gamut. Specifically: the EA271U covers 73.6% of the Adobe RGB color space, 69.5% of NTSC, and 95.1% of sRGB, whereas my monitor, which "feature[d] enhanced color accuracy," covered 99.3% of Adobe RGB, 94.8% of NTSC, and 146.4% of the sRGB color space. So it's not really a replacement, which is why I'm not linking to it. The EA272F-BK-SV 27" comes with built-in Spectra-View calibration like mine did, but has a color gamut similar to the business model. I can't find an NEC monitor with the color accuracy of mine, although I—and the rep I talked to on the phone—might be just missing it.

Probably grist for a future post: current recommendable monitors for photographic work.

**"Shadows" is the term of art for the dark areas of B&W photographs and "highlights" is word for the light areas.

Jim Meeks: "I've worked in museums for 36 years now...it's not a cost cutting measure to exhibit works on paper in dim light! It is a means in which to preserve works for future generations. Works on paper (photos, prints, drawings, etc.) are sensitive to light and deteriorate when exposed to UV, bright light and even infrared. I've seen many, many examples where something has been on display for a long time and the paper turns brown, colors fade, etc. You might not like the light levels, but please stop saying museums are trying to save a buck on our light bills."

Mike replies: Nothing personal Jim, but why bother preserving works for future generations when nobody between then and now will be able to see them properly anyway? The reductio ad absurdam of this principle is to store everything locked away in darkness all the time. What good would that do? I'm a photographer. I was a printmaker. I want people to look at my work and to be able to see it the way it was intended to be seen.

Even the Niépce Heliograph is "Currently on View" at the Harry Ransom Center.

Sal Santamaura: "It's doubtful museums made that change to save on electric utility and lamping costs. LEDs rendered any potential savings minuscule. Rather, conservators' influence transcending that of curators is the likely culprit. As a result, institutions will prolong the life expectancy of prints that no one will be able to see as intended. Thereby ensuring fewer and fewer visitors will return, thus endangering museums' survival and putting the prints at greater risk than they would be from a few more lumens."

Keith B.: "NEC has given up on providing wide-gamut monitors after their merger with Sharp Corp. The current equivalent (through specs comparison) of your [now] old NEC PA272W is the EIZO ColorEdge CS2731. It is sold with calibration puck for about $1,350. If/when my NEC PA271 needs replacing, this is what I'll get."

Bear.: "I have the luck of doing two exhibitions in a row in the same gallery space—the second was significantly better than the first because I figured out that I should work backwards from the lighting to the prints. I'm planning a third for later 2023—which I have yet to shoot—so I will start my consideration of the process in camera. Ahh luxury...."

Jeff: "One of my favorite exhibits, at MOMA, in New York, in 1996, featured Roy DeCarava prints. Thank heaven that the curators ensured appropriately adequate lighting; otherwise I would have not been able to see the gloriously dark and rich tones. I’ve collected vintage silver/platinum prints, and printed my own work, since the '70s, and display lighting has always been a priority. Viewers often under-appreciate, or are completely unaware of, the importance of this issue. It can make the difference between what seems a mediocre picture/print, and one that 'sings.'"

Greg Boiarsky: "If museums are reducing lighting to preserve prints, they're doing both the prints and patrons a disservice. First, as you've noted in a response above, is the problem of preserving the art but not allowing the patrons to enjoy it. Second, the primary causes of print degradation are UV light and free-radical airborne chemicals. UV light can be controlled with filters or by using low-UV lighting sources. The free radicals can be controlled with air filters and other airborne pollution controls. Second is the fact that almost all modern photographic prints are created using pigments rather than dyes. Pigments are inherently more stable than dyes and require much less babying. Also, modern photos are usually printed on low-acid or acid-free papers.

Steve Rosenblum: "The incredibly dim lighting at museum photography exhibitions also drives me crazy. I so look forward to seeing actual prints instead of reproductions in books, and then I get there and it feels like I'm viewing the prints with my sunglasses on."

David: "At the co-op darkroom I used to belong to, there was a viewing board just outside the darkroom entrance. It was lit by an overhead spotlight which simulated gallery lighting. You placed the wet print, or test strips, on the white board to view the print or compare the tests. I am not sure how accurate the light source was in comparison to gallery lighting. But at least it was a consistent, even lighting. I do miss printing at that darkroom. The sink was large enough that you were sometimes processing with three other people, and there were often really good conversations (photo-based or otherwise)."

Joseph L. Kashi: "About the most egregious example of misguided lighting that I've seen occurred in a university gallery where the museum-grade medium intensity halogen lights had been replaced by a motley mixture of compact florescent bulbs and other mismatched lighting. It was explained to me that the faculty 'wanted to save the planet.' We did find some of the units 'liberated' by faculty but the gallery lighting was significantly degraded."

Kye Wood: "Prints in very limited numbers? No. Great prints beautifully printed in very limited numbers? Most definitely, yes. You'll have to lean on publishing positive feedback from your buyers, to help push prospective purchasers to commit. If running a software company taught me one thing above all else, it's the importance of perceived value. Your best most discerning customers are your priority. You share their aesthetic and speak their language."

Luke: "Re poorly lit visual displays: It's like a zoo with 'natural habitats' for the animals to hide in, so the paying public can't see them."

Adam R: "Dim lighting is the car bra of the museum world: By trying to preserve something so it looks good at some indeterminate point in the future, you succeed in making it look awful all the rest of the time."

Medium-Format Film Cameras Today

A reader/friend wrote to ask about medium-format film cameras. I thought rather than recycle my aging information and opinions right off the bat, it would be fun to open it up to the experts and mavens among you.

So, any thoughts on recommended models; cost, affordability and value in the current environment; repairability issues; best practices; your preferences? Any other thoughts?

He shoots an old beat-up Leica M film camera and a used Leica Q2. He reports he "takes more and more" of his photos on film, and asks, "if I bought a Mamiya 6 or a Pentax 67, isn't it possible that it would just break and be 'bricked'?"

I'm on deadline today for the NY'er and cranking on that, so the comments might be a little slow in posting. I'm having a lot of fun, though, although this particular assignment feels a bit like landing a narwhal with a fishing rod....

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

Original contents copyright 2020 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.)
Featured Comments from:

Jason Randolph: "It's Hasselblad 500 C/M for me. I don't use it as often as I should, but it hasn't disappointed me yet. I bought a couple of them before the prices went to the stratosphere, plus a few lenses. They were popular enough that finding one is easy. Regarding repairs, I know there are still shops that service them, though I don't know how the supply chain for parts looks these days."

Benjamin Marks: "I haven't shot a roll of medium format film in a decade, which is pathetic really, given that I have some cameras sitting on the shelf (an older Hassie 500, Rolleiflex, a Pentax 6x7...all the goodies). 'Bricked' covers a lot of ground, but my general assessment is that as long as your buddy sticks to cameras without electronics (or minimal e.g. the light meter in the MF Fujis) he should be fine. There are still specialty repair shops working on this stuff: David Odess in Randolph MA for the Hassies, Frank Marshman in Harrisonburg VA for just about anything, Sherry Krauter and Don Goldberg for Leica (and now Youxin Ye too). This was pro gear, most of it, and pretty robustly made. It is stuff that was, in general, designed to be repaired. I'd say, 'go for it!'"

Jim Grey: "I think Yashica TLRs provide a ton of bang for the buck. My experience has been that they are robust—if they have not been abused during their life, they are likely to be in decent working order today. They were common enough that there are still a few shops that will repair and CLA them if needed. People seem to gravitate toward the Yashica-Mat 124, but I think the sleeper Yashica TLR is the Yashica-D. It doesn't have an onboard meter, and you have to manually cock the shutter, but its 80mm ƒ/3.5 Yashinon lens is plenty sharp and creates a lovely, swirly bokeh."

T G McKenna: "I'm partial to my Mamiya RB67. The interlocks prevent me from doing something stupid, and it's been trouble-free for the past 16 years. Cost? Unknown—I've never thought of replacing it. Value? Absolutely."

Film Processing Craft: Adjust and Adapt, or Master the Materials?

First of all ("first off," as people like to say now—to which the Ed. in me wants to shout, leave the off off!), I have to apologize for comments again—I have compiled the "OCOLOYs" comments twice and each time I manage to screw up and kill them off the post again. I frustrate myself. I work on being organized, but let's face it, it is not a native aptitude of mine. Anyway, I wanted to follow up on the film post. I've located two experts who might be able to help answer the question of latent image stability—one lives in the Los Angeles area and works for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I knew him in the old days, but apparently I'd have to pay to find his telephone number. The other is just up the road in Rochester. (I tried emailing.) There's been a tad bit of confusion in the comments—what we were talking about is the lag between exposure and development, which is a different thing than the proper storage of unexposed film, or than archival processing, or than the permanence of negatives.

It's not rocket science—wait, yes it is
I wouldn't mind writing a bit more about film photography. I have a great deal of experience and practical knowledge stored away in my brain. But let me just say this: one thing I definitely learned in my years of editing a magazine about techniques is that generalizing across materials is a minefield. Perilous. A fool's errand. When you do an experiment, you have to accept that you have only tested those exact materials under those exact conditions. You cannot blithely extrapolate outward and make breezy pronouncements about how all such things behave. So many variables affect the results that when David Vestal and another photographer tried to duplicate each other's processing methodologies at long distance in order to solve a problem, they couldn't replicate each other's results, even after trying to chase down every variable they could think of. Something was still different.

There are two common ways to cope with this, and which you prefer might have to do with personality or psychology more than anything. The first is to let the fur fly and not worry about it—use whatever comes to hand, process it however seems best according to whatever advice you can find, and adjust and adapt. In fact we might even call this the Adjust and Adapt Method. In one of Ralph Gibson's darkroom books he told of a photographer who timed his film development by smoking a cigarette and rolling the tank around on the floor with his foot. As soon as the cigarette was done, so was the film. (I think it was a he. Might have been a she.) These are the freewheelin', what-me-worry types. The other is to pick a couple of common materials and incrementally master them, by a continual process of experience, experimentation, and learning. Let's call that the Master the Materials Method. That's what I chose to do. I picked two films and two papers, main and backup (only one developer because I could scratch-mix it from its constituent chemicals if my supply of the pre-mixed packages ever got interrupted), and learned them thoroughly, through-and-through. I may not have known nearly as much about your materials, but I sure knew mine front-to-back and soup-to-nuts.

By Frederick H. Evans. Platinum paper was integral to
Evans's vision and craft.

The disadvantage of the Master the Materials Method is that we're dependent on manufacturers for the continuing supply of said materials, and the more knowledge we have, the more vulnerable we become. I took self-defensive maneuvers when I merely imagined that Kodak Plus-X might be discontinued, and ended up leaving it behind more than twenty years before it was actually discontinued. Did you know Frederick H. Evans gave up photography when the supply of commercial platinum/palladium papers ended because of importation problems caused by WWI? When Oriental Seagull paper stopped being exported in from Japan for a time in the '90s, one master printer was so bereft and distressed that I had to field a cascade of anguished emails and distraught phone calls until he finally found a substitute. All of his printing expertise had been worked out in the context of how that paper behaved and responded. Without it, years of hard-won skills evaporated. Not just a loss—a blow. These sorts of problems were common to hear in my world at the time. We knew, for example, that Agfa had quietly changed the formula for Portriga paper long before they announced it. Alarmed Portriga fanatics poured out their hearts. (I finally got Agfa to admit and explain: environmental issues.) Michael A. Smith was so attached to Kodak Azo contact printing paper that when it was discontinued he invested in having a substitute manufactured independently. Linda Connor used to speak in lectures about her worry that Kodak's printing-out paper, called Studio Proof, would be discontinued (she used gold chloride toner to make the image permanent). Sometimes these are issues of artistic continuity—it might not have been the case that Linda couldn't find another paper, but just that a changeover of materials would create a sudden, unwanted change in the look of her prints.

This is the reason for my longstanding "philosophical" stance that what I want is for photographers to have what they need to do their work. What I personally want for myself is only one little corner of that. I want everybody to have what they need. Whatever enables their creativity. Whatever enables them to keep using their knowledge and keep practicing their craft the way they wish to and choose to.

Awesome Leitz
Mastering Materials was a heck of a lot of fun, I'll say that. I really enjoyed it. I could expound at length on the differences between enlarger light heads—Ilford XP2 looked like a completely different film if it was enlarged with a cold light head or the awesome Leitz Focomat II, the Duesenberg of enlargers, which was a true condenser enlarger with very collimated light. I had a standard for the age of my D-76 stock—I wouldn't use it if it hadn't aged for five days and I wouldn't use it past 45 days old (it was still good enough at 90 days, but I was conservative). The reason is that the activity of D-76 changes with age. I could have told you all about it. Think it's different with digital? Well, people here wouldn't think so. We know that sensors have been changing continuously, that Photoshop or Capture One take time and effort to master, and that expert printing with the latest inksets and the most beautiful papers is as far as can be imagined from just "pressing a button and the print comes out."

That's enough brain-dump for today. Sorry if this is tl;dr—I didn't have enough time to write short.

Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 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.)
Featured Comments from:

Charles Daniels and Latent Image Deterioration with Film

I'm hearing a lot about an article on PetaPixel about "Master Blaster" Charles Daniels, longtime emcee of the Boston Tea Party and a devoted photographer of the rock bands he rubbed elbows with. It's reported that he has approximately 3,200 rolls of undeveloped film from the salad days of rock and roll.

I hope the film can be developed, and it's highly likely that usable images can be salvaged from most of it, but, just as an aside...storing pictures as undeveloped film is a very bad idea. The latent image on exposed film isn't stable. The microscopic bits of exposed silver halide that will be metalized in the reduction (development) process and become the "grain" in B&W negatives or get replaced with dye clouds in color ones continue to slowly migrate around in the emulsion after being exposed, degrading the initial report of the scene in front of the camera.

Some of my latest writing is being fact-checked, and I'm finding that the only source of some of the things I think I know at this point is, well, my brain, and the gray-matter hard drive isn't all that stable a storage medium either, turns out. While I don't remember where I got this information, for a long time I had an established habit of evaluating information for "best practices" and settling on what I thought was most supportable when I examined the evidence, and I tended to set those "takeaways" pretty firmly in my mind. So while I can't document this to a farthing's worth, it's probably close. In any event, here are the search results from the gray matter.

What I learned is that the latent image on black-and-white film is at peak integrity for about six hours after exposure. Then it goes through an initial period of deterioration lasting days or weeks; then it tends to mostly stabilize again, and further deterioration becomes slower and more gradual...but continues.

Personally it took me a long time to realize that exposed film wasn't stable. The initial clue came because I used to test films to write about them for photo magazines. (I was also a beta-tester for the T-Max films developed by Dick Dickerson and Sylvia Zawadski of Kodak. I was told at the time that with one of them—pretty sure it was the 400—I was the first person outside of Kodak to receive a roll to shoot.) Of course rolls of unexposed film had expiration dates, which should tell you something. It took me a while, but I noticed that sometimes the pictures would look great when I tested the film, and then sometimes not quite so great when I was later using the film for my own work. It finally dawned on me that a possible reason was because, when I was testing, I would often develop the film within mere hours of shooting it, whereas, when I was using it later, sometimes I'd go weeks or months before processing it (as you know, I can be a procrastinator). So that's why I started looking into it and learned what I just told you.

Could I find the source of that information again, reliably? Maybe. I still have a pretty good library of darkroom books, albeit in boxes in the barn. It's more probable that I heard it directly from Dick and Sylvia—Sylvia was a leading emulsion scientist and Dick was the head of black-and-white products at Kodak—or from one of the experts who wrote for Photo Techniques. Professor Phil Davis was the de facto technical editor of the magazine, and although he wasn't a scientist he was more rigorous than some scientists are. He once told me that half the stuff he learned he wouldn't publish, because he wasn't prepared to defend it rigorously—he'd only done the experiments for his own edification and had satisfied his most critical audience, himself. (Ctein has told me he often does much the same thing.) But I got to hear about all these tests and experiments that he refused to write about for me. I think I was in a sense his point man, because I'd take Phil's conclusions and wade into the fray and wield my sword about, while he surveyed the battle from a distant hilltop with binoculars, figuratively speaking. (When testing the pop hypothesis that "fixer is heavier than water and sinks to the bottom of the print washer," a canard promulgated by a prominent snake oil salesman at the time, Phil mixed stock fixer and water 1:1 and let the bottle sit for a year before very carefully removing samples with pipettes from the top and bottom of the bottle and testing them. He tested and measured everything, even when theory alone was more than robust. He was patient that way.)

Anyway, I always meant to try out the hypothesis and see for myself: expose two rolls of Tri-X of the same test scene, then develop one of them as soon as humanly possibly after exposure—like, have the chemicals mixed and waiting while I shot—and then wait, say, three years, or five maybe, before developing the other roll, and then compare the prints.

I never did that two-roll test, but here's a way you can see some of the effects of latent image deterioration for yourself. If you have access to a library. You've probably heard that Garry Winogrand, d. 1984, left behind thousands of undeveloped rolls at his death. The Museum of Modern Art had them all developed in the later '80s with a grant from its benefactor Springs Industries, and some of the work was included in the book Winogrand: Figments from the Real World, published 1988, reprinted 2003. So that's one example: if you look at the pictures reproduced in that book that came from the undeveloped rolls, you'll see for yourself the effects of the deterioration caused by delayed development. Such pictures tend to have mealy grain, lowered resolution, and flattened-out highlights due to fog (fog is most evident in the gradual darkening of the clear parts of the film, but it affects the entire negative), and they lack the brightness and clarity of well-exposed negatives. Fog can also decrease shadow separation.

Color film generally does even less well than B&W film with long delays before development, developing spots, strange blooms of apparent flare, color shifts, fading, and more.

The above is the best I can do just going from memory. This is not a post that would get by the fact-checkers; but I guess you get the gist.

Anyway, there's no reason not to proceed with the project of getting Charles Daniels' film developed, because pictures don't actually depend on technical quality to be "good"—maybe some of them will even be "better" because of the effects of aging. The badness of bad pictures can be good. Or at least neutral, if the pictures still contain information that's wanted. The illustration below is a daguerreotype (a word that Ted Orland quipped "cannot be spelled correctly"). Dags had notoriously fragile surfaces, and sometimes the characteristic damage can be charming in a "distressed antique" kind of way.

The badness of damaged pictures can be good. Or at least not bad.

But if you do happen to want the best from film, use fresh film and develop it promptly.

I did—after learning these things, I got my sluggard procrastinatin' habits by the horns and took to developing my film as a sort of nightly chore. I developed three rolls at a time, so I would develop every time I accumulated three rolls, which was usually within a few days, sometimes as long as a week.

Things were so much older then, they're younger than that now.

Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 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.)
Featured Comments from:

John Krumm: "I developed a lost roll of grainy black-and-white film from our wedding in 1992 a few years ago, and yes, they were somewhat foggy, but by adding contrast digitally, and some careful sharpening, they actually made a lovely little book with small prints. Would never bother with large prints though."

Mike replies: That's a great example John. It clearly shows the degradation of the film, but it also shows that pictures are still pictures even though their quality is technically degraded. I think they are still quite successful photographs.

The Troubles With Film

[Comments have been added, Saturday 8:50 a.m.]

-

Disclaimer: This post is for people who for whatever reason want to shoot with film or are interested in it. It's all just my opinion. You're the boss of you, and you do what you want to do, and power to you.

My opinion is a version of something Carl Weese once said: digital imaging was the Coming of Age of color photography; black-and-white was already perfect.

A corollary is that black-and-white is neither native, nor particularly natural, nor done very well (except by a dedicated and skilled few) in digital. With film, color methods and materials were difficult and complicated, and, with the exceptions perhaps of Kodachrome (no longer available) and dye-transfer printing (no longer practical) also never terribly attractive. (And both Kodachrome and dye transfer were certainly difficult and complicated—end-users just didn't see the difficulty and complexity.) Many people had aversions to one color process or another: I thought Cibachromes were garish and more or less the opposite of the qualities I appreciated; John Szarkowski reportedly refused to acquire carbro prints for MoMA because he thought the process was so alarmingly ugly. Well, now, in digital, it's black-and-white methods and materials are difficult and complicated! I just received some prints in the mail from Richard Man, a wonderfully skilled B&W printer, and he has been working for a long time to perfect his digital and hybrid B&W. To be honest, I don't know why people would go to the trouble of shooting color film with old cameras, especially 35mm cameras. Why would they do that—because they want to spend more on something that's less practical and looks worse? If you're going to work in color, digital imaging is for you. If you're going to shoot film, work in black-and-white. Those conclusions just seem logical and sensible to me. Of course, if you don't agree, like if you want to shoot bushels of color neg film in old Leicas like Bill Eggleston, or if you like the look of some particular color film, you do you. This is just my 2¢, like I said. But when I say "film" I'm talking mainly about B&W.

High ISOs
Assuming you want to shoot film (this is not the old film vs. digital debate), what are the actual problems with it?

I'm going to set aside expense, because different people have different price sensitivity. A lot of people have lots of money, and some people don't have much at all. So talking about expense really has nothing to do with the activity; it has everything to do with individuals' own circumstances, to which I cannot speak meaningfully when talking to a room.

As I see it there are three main problems with film these days.

One is that film isn't fast enough.

I remember a period in the growth of digital when digital cameras couldn't do high ISOs. My Sony F-707 (2001) could barely provide a usable result at ISO 400, and 200 was a lot better. I recall hearing seasoned professionals opining online that they would consider switching to digital "as soon as digital does high ISOs as well as film." (Italics mine.)

Well, that's solved now. Larger sensors do higher ISOs better, but you can get mainstream APS-C cameras that will provide excellent results at ISO 1600, and some legacy-size sensors ("full" frame, a ridiculous name) will yield good results up to ISO 6400. (Most sensors, however, yield optimum results in a range of lower ISOs, usually from base to about 800.) If you think my numbers here are too low, well, I have high standards.

Film can't keep up. Digital is several stops better in most cases. Since film speed was always a headache in the old days, the advent of a solution has just made the headache that much worse.

I can remember when art photographers (well, in the D.C. area anyway) started feeling like they could depart from the old trusty Kodak VPS (ASA/ISO 100) and start using ASA 400 color films. Until T-Max P3200 came along in the mid to late '80s, Tri-X and HP5+, both 400 ASA films, were the best you could do for speed, and photographers swanned around with all sorts of generally self-defeating schemes to "push" them to be able to shoot at higher shutter speeds. The highest ISO I ever shot with film was 1000, with P3200. (The "P" in P3200 stood for "push.") If it had been ISO certified, it would have been an ISO 800 film, pushable to two stops. I pushed it a third of a stop. I got excellent results with it that way, but then I was kind of a virtuoso.

Lens speed
A second problem with film is that, apart from 35mm (and why would you want to use miniature format now?*), the camera lenses aren't fast enough. Although there are exceptions, most medium format lenses top out at ƒ/2.8, and most view camera lenses at ƒ/5.6. In addition, older film lenses weren't as good wide open as modern lenses are. Consider for example the Fuji GS645s 6x4.5 cm camera that Ben Marks mentioned the other day. That "wide" version of the GS645 folder had a 60mm ƒ/4 lens that was really good...as long as you didn't shoot it wide open, where it was pretty useless. So what that meant was that the camera, which was designed to be small, light, and portable, effectively had an ƒ/5.6 lens! So, bring your tripod along. Which kinda defeated the point.

Tone über alles
A third problem is that people scan film now. It's not inherently a bad idea, but it's usually badly done. It's badly done in the great majority of cases. It's not that peoples' scanning skills are poor. They will proudly tell you that scanning captures exactly the information in the negative, all of the information. And that's true. So what's the problem?

Taken from an article about the pioneer of sensitometry Loyd Ancile Jones

The problem is the film curve. Originally called the H&D curve, for Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield (a short but nice biography can be found here); Kodak assigned an angle to the straight-line section of the curve in the '30s and called it Contrast Index; later it was known as the characteristic curve. It plots density against exposure. And the problem is that it is not linear! Nor does it account for human perception. To correct it, it needs to be counteracted by the paper curve, which is also not linear. The matching of the film curve to the paper curve is essential to get the best results from film because that's how it was designed to be used. So to reproduce exactly the information on the film is a bollix; it is a tragedy; a mistake; it misrepresents the tones; it is ugly; it sucks.

A few film photographers now understand how to introduce the counteracting paper curve to the scanned negative file (I explained a basic method here and boy, am I prolix. Sorry). Most camera pointers out there on the wilds of the Internet don't. There are actually two reasons why the typical scanned film photography commonly seen online is ugly, and this is the main one. The other is that it takes some experience to come up to speed with exposure and development, and it was well known in the film days that newbies were often not up to speed yet. This is of course still true of people trying film today. I often see, for instance (accompanying bad-looking B&W JPEGs supposedly representing film photographs), reports of truly dubious film-developer combinations ("stand developed in Rodinal" seems to be a popular crime). Newbies. Led down the garden path. Not enough experience yet.

What's worse—the icing on the fallen cake—scanned B&W negatives tend to have compressed highlights. Since highlights are the single worse feature of digital capture (now thankfully being ameliorated by the high-megapixel FF and large- [AKA "medium"] format sensor cameras), this just makes a known problem worse.

+   =   +   =   +   =   +   =   +   =   +

So those are the problems with film circa 2021, as I see it. Of course that's not to say that there aren't people out there doing very fine work with film; there are. There are also people doing perfectly fine work scanning. (You don't have to protest. I know you're out there.) They're in the minority, is all I'm saying. Just because there are problems doesn't mean everyone is affected by the problems.

Of course, I suppose good workers in any craft have always been in the minority, and traditional photography is a beautiful craft. And an ancient one, dating back to just before 1839 (our Year Zero).

Eye and heart
So now let me say a few more words about this, under the principle that once you are up on your horse you might as well ride it. (Here it might be a good idea to return to the top of this post and read that first sentence again).

There is no longer ANY need to be practical with film photography. That is, you do not need to have a handy, portable camera; digital cameras can be as portable as your pocketable phone. You do not need to "push" film to achieve higher ISO speeds, at the lamentable expense of the beauty of the image; just look at DxOMark's "Sports" rankings (which, by the way, have nothing to do with how useful a camera is for shooting sports; it's just what they choose to call low-light capability) for the leading high-ISO contenders**. And please, don't try to mimic the look of digital images using film. Film photography has its own beauty. Go for that.

I would suggest, if you choose to master film, that you shift your priorities to go for the maximum beauty of the medium. Don't try for fine grain; just use a bigger negative and enlarge less (nobody cares about film grain in 8x10 sheet film, n.b.); grain is a concern with high enlargements. If you don't like it, just enlarge less. Don't push it; give the film all the exposure it needs to look best. And so forth. Ignore all the tweaks and strivings and conceits we applied when film was all we had.

Trying to achieve the maximum beauty of the medium is the only thing that makes sense to me today, in 2021. Do it however you see fit, though, for your definition of beauty...Carleton Watkins'  pictures are beautiful but so are George Krause's.

George Krause, Fountainhead.
Original prints for sale at his website, at the link.

Finally, don't be afraid to settle on your own style. That's one of the big advantages of black-and-white film photography—it has a very broad range of interpretative and expressive possibilities. This encompasses both techniques and also concerns. Don't mimic. Be yourself. Go for what satisfies your own eye and heart. Be as quirky and weird, or as classic and formal, as you wish to be.

I could go into that all that at great length, but it's already almost 1:00 p.m., so it'll have to be a different day.

Have a nice weekend! I'll be back here on Monday, and here's hoping you will be.

Mike

*I'm joking. Don't kill me.

**Note that DxOMark leaves Fuji out of its rankings—calumny by omission!

Products of the Week

Which one is best? Panasonic S1R (47.3 MP), Sony A7R IV (61 MP), Canon R5 (45 MP), Nikon Z7 II (45.7 MP), or Leica SL2 (47 MP)? You know the answer.

The above are links to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

Original contents copyright 2020 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.)
Featured Comments from:

Andrew: "Re 'If you're going to work in color, digital imaging is for you. If you're going to shoot film, work in black-and-white': I couldn't agree more. That's my current approach to photography and I've never been happier!"

Leonard Metcalf: "I hope you do come back to this and go into it in great length…I still see them as two different mediums. Film / digital. It helps me separate out their differences and celebrate the strengths of each."

Stan B.: "Wouldn't disagree with anything stated, although for what it's worth, for someone (like me) who uses wide angles and can have such a wide variety of minute details and various lighting scenarios all in one image, a hybrid B&W film and digital printing workflow provides a more than acceptable compromise balancing image quality and ease/superiority of image manipulation/editing that analog only yields to the absolute masters of darkroom printing.

"Speaking of B&W mastery, Mimi Plumb's 'The White Sky' is on exhibit at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco. If anyone wants to experience the absolute beauty that is traditional black-and-white photography, aesthetically and technically (35mm B&W analog, far as I can tell)—I urge you to see these prints first hand whenever possible...one visit is the equivalent of 9,000 YouTube videos on how to do B&W right."

Mike replies: The White Sky is yet another photobook I will never own, and I'm unhappy about that. It sold out very quickly. By the way the prints at Koch are inkjets from vintage negatives, looks like. When done well, these can be even a little better than darkroom prints.

John Sparks: "I have recently been playing around with film.

"In the pre-digital days, I was trying to get the best, most perfect, most beautiful print I could and went from 35mm to 645 to 4x5 to 8x10 and finally settled on 6x7 as the best compromise between quality and the kinds of photographs I wanted to make. I have printed for professional photographers, had prints in museum shows, and sold prints.

"Then came digital. At first it really wasn't good enough for me, but replaced the snapshots in color that I had been doing in 35mm. Then in 2008, I got a Sony A900 and it became good enough for just about everything. I stopped using film. I have better cameras now (even my Panasonic G9 is better than the A900). The photographs are technically great and easy to print. I have some B&W prints that I like as well as some of my prints from 8x10.

"The current digital cameras do everything that I was trying to do when film was the only choice.

"Now, I playing with film again. I'm not trying to do what I did in the past. I don't want to make the most perfect prints that I tried to make with 8x10 or 6x7. I can do that with digital with ease. I want to make the prints that Mike calls ugly, some of which actually work and look beautiful. I want to see tons of grain. I want to see the warts that were hard to work around in the old film days. I want to have to work hard again. I don't want the film prints to look the way the digital prints look. I also don't want to make them look the way I wanted to make my film prints look in the days before digital."

Mike replies: This has a parallel in the history of furniture making, as recounted by Prof. David Pye in The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Apparently surface perfection was once highly valued until machine finishing, which could be more perfect much more easily, came along. Then, handwork that showed roughness, variability, and the inherent nature of the materials began to be treasured above smooth perfection and high finish.

Bob G.: "I going to have to comment and put my two cents out there for whatever it’s worth. I’d like to agree with most everything you say on this comparison, but like to add that the end result of the archival medium of having a film negative seems to me better than having a digital file. I have over a hundred years of old negatives by my grandfather and his camera to copy and print; the tones are wonderful. Digital files are a pain to keep copying onto the most recent media or method in vogue. But, I follow your argument that color is now in the digital world and black-and-white makes better images in film, by shooting color with my digital cameras and shooting and developing B&W with an array of vintage and modern ones. I always have the two when I’m out shooting. As long as the final result is a print, the plan works. Film negatives and color digital files hopefully will back these up for the future."

Mark: "Well you said all that much better than I ever could. I get a lot of enjoyment out of BW film photography and darkroom printing, and will most likely continue. Hobbiests/amateurs do all sorts of things with less-than-optimal gear. My steel-framed bicycle doesn't match up against the latest carbon fiber machines by any measure, but it didn't detract in the least from my ride this morning."

Ray Foxlee: "An interesting post, especially to those of us wholly or partly wedded to film photography. My journey with film is now in about its 60th year and despite that many years, I certainly don't count myself an expert at dealing with film. I shoot digital as well as film (scanned and printed digitally!), and in many respects I agree that digital is the way forward for colour, but the fact remains that I still can't replicate the colour palette of Kodak Portra through the digital process, at least to my satisfaction. That film, especially shot on my Rolleiflex, is just beautiful—at least to my old eyes. I don't doubt that a darkroom print would look even better than the hybrid process that has to do the job these days.

"Film for black and white?—absolutely, especially medium format and larger. Old style films like FP4+ still have a magic that is both hard to beat and also define, especially when using some of the fine older lenses, such as the Zeiss Planars.

"But it is not just a 'film' issue to many who stay with film, as the simplicity of using film cameras comes as a relief, when compared to the increasingly complex digital camera experience.

"The 'price' paid for using film is often a steeper learning curve in achieving a satisfactory result. A case of 'no gain without pain'?—perhaps!"

My Own Favorite Format...

[Comments have been added, 1:02 a.m. Friday.]

-

...Is 645. Loaded with B&W film. Ha!

I'm kind of being funny. But it's also sort of true.

Curiously, I've never shot 645. Well, I have, but only briefly and sporadically, with borrowed cameras, rented cameras, loaner cameras for review, or friends' cameras. And once when I asked at a camera store if I could wander around the neighborhood with their store demo and shoot a couple of rolls. They let me.

Mamiya 645 Super System

The reason I've never shot it is that I could never quite find a 645 camera and lens I liked. I tried them all, though.

A couple of years ago I almost took the plunge and switched: I borrowed a Pentax 645 from John Sarsgard (thanks again, John) and, using an adapter, mounted my Schneider-Kreuznach Xenotar MF 80mm ƒ/2.8 on it (picture in this post). The lens was made for the Schneider Exakta 66. Focus confirmation worked with the manual-focus lens, and I came within millimeters of pulling the trigger and going ahead...but the cost of film and common sense prevailed! I recovered my sanity just in time to prevent yet more needless expenditure. (I spend too much money not going back to film.)

The closest I ever came to 645 was my year with the Exakta 66. It's a square format SLR that had a waist-level finder, but for some reason I always cropped my pictures to a 645...vertical. It wasn't really a conscious decision, it's just the way I saw with that camera. Then, once I had a bunch of pictures in that orientation, I wanted the future pictures to match, so I just kept shooting that way.

645 cameras were klunky and big and not much fun to use. The fun came in the darkroom, where those big negatives sure were a pleasure to print.

Pretty sure I'll never shoot film again. But there's one way I'll shoot 645 as I disappear into the sunset: If I were rich, and I could pay someone else to develop the film and make the workprints! Then I might. But that won't happen.

...Except in my imagination, where I enjoy the process.

Mike

Products of the Week

Which one is best? Panasonic S1R (47.3 MP), Sony A7R IV (61 MP), Canon R5 (45 MP), Nikon Z7 II (45.7 MP), or Leica SL2 (47 MP)? You know the answer.

The above are links to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

Original contents copyright 2020 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.)
Featured Comments from:

Niels: "I seem to recall that you once wrote favourably of the Bronica RF645? It must have been short lived. I don't encounter many, if any, users in the film forums I frequently visit."

Thom Hogan: "'Format' is a terrible word, because it's a stand-in for multiple things. First, there's sensor size, where biggest you can afford and will use should always win, and then there's aspect ratio, for which the camera makers have always taken shortcuts. I want a 2:1 aspect ratio, minimum. Closest I can get on anything I'd use is 16:9, because that's what the digital TV negotiations produced. Of course, now I'm paying for pixels I don't use, because the die size dictates 3:2 or 4:3."

Kirk Decker: "I got a Mamiya 645 1000s my second year of college. It was an early model that didn't have interchangeable backs, but it was a non factor as I was coming from 35mm. I loved that camera. I had it for a very long time, shot a ton of weddings with it. Eventually I succumbed to the lure of the Hasselblad, but I still occasionally cruise up and down eBay gazing longing at the 645's."

William Cowan: "You are, of course quite right about the 645 film format. Since I first had my hands on one 20 years ago, I have always felt that the Contax 645 represents the peak of film camera development. (YMMV.) Zeiss lenses, autofocus, flash exposure evaluation, removable back and easy choice of portrait or landscape, but most importantly Contax handling. It is just a pleasure to use. So, until I cannot carry it any more...."

Stephen Cowdery: "Nice to see the Mamiya M645 system pictured. It was one of my favorites except (as you noted) for shooting verticals, with the WL finder on it was almost impossible, and the prism finder was awkward and bulky. "

Chris Kern: "I recently acquired a sample of the first 'serious' camera I used as a teenager, my father’s prewar Zeiss Contax rangefinder, and I have been shooting black-and-white film after a hiatus of half a century (sic). I pay a local lab to develop the negatives—I don’t have the patience to start developing film again—which I scan at 3600 dpi and post-process in Adobe Lightroom. I find I can make 12x18-inch prints from the scans with excellent results. Film has its own esthetic: a combination of texture and tonality that I’ve found challenging to replicate in an all-digital workflow. A couple of samples: a recent view of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington and a United States Park Service crew winterizing the C&O Canal tour boat at Great Falls Park in Potomac, Maryland."

Tom Duffy: "I was a longtime owner of a Contax 645. I bought it when it first came out and kept it and my three lenses until last year when I traded it all in on a Canon R5. I thought it was the best camera system that I ever owned except for the very slow autofocus, the horrible battery life (10 rolls of 120 per battery), the weight with the battery grip and prism, and constant depth of field limitations handheld. :) If not mounted on a tripod, I could always get better, i.e., sharper results with a 35mm camera. I tried to use it as a 'grownup' 35mm camera and as a 'baby' view camera. It didn't work well as either. A medium format SLR's strength is in studio portrait work. I still use a Fuji 6x9 rangefinder which has much to recommend it."

John Sarsgard: "You're welcome. Last time I used it was for black-and-white portraits for a woman who worked at MoMA and had fond memories of the darkroom from art school. She wanted portraits with her fiancé made on film. I used Tri-X 400 and developed it in XTOL, Kodak's last, and in my opinion, best film developer. It was great fun on a splendid day in Central Park, and almost as much fun later in my darkroom. However, I did scan the negatives of choice and made the prints digitally. There was a weird shortage of 120 Tri-X at the time, and I had to pay $15 per roll!"

Daniel M.: "The best and satisfied experience I got in using the 645 film format is with the Fujica GS645 Pro (EBC 75mm), a small folding camera, very compact and lightweight that worked nicely with Fujichrome slide films. The rangefinder was precise and I brough the camera even for motorsport reportages. Only good memories! (Although I must add that you had to be careful with the Fujica GS645 since the folding mechanism has appeared to me a bit fragile.)"

Richard Skoonberg: "I used a GS645 for many years for weddings and portrait work. It was a love affair with its big bright viewfinder/rangefinder and 220 film, and it folded into a clamshell that could fit into a coat pocket. So easy to use. Later when I was no longer doing weddings, I sold it on eBay for more than I paid for it. I needed the money to pay tuition for my daughter's first year of college. Such is life."

Mark Sampson: "In 1979 I was hired as a yearbook portrait photographer, and the studio issued me a 645-format Bronica ETR-S, for shooting group photos and 'candids.' I worked with that camera for the two years I had that job, and enjoyed it; handled well, didn't break under hard use, and provided fine image quality. I was unable to shoot much with it for myself, and that job didn't pay enough to buy one of my own, but I always liked the format and the camera."

Hugh: "4x5 film shot vertically is now the perfect format. I’m surprised you hadn’t noticed. Put the processed B&W negative on your iPad, snap it with your phone, invert the photo so it’s a positive. Exactly the right format to upload to Instagram at 1080x1350 pixels, complete with the black border, notches, and TXP320 in the margin. Instant artistic credibility.  ;-)  "

Les Myers: "Your 645 Mamiya system gracing this column is exactly like the one I have. I love it!"

Darkroom Rat Riddle

[UPDATE: The answer is in the Featured Comments below. Look for Joel Entin's comment. —Ed.]

-

I spent yesterday posting some stuff on Craigslist and eBay. Trying to raise a little cash to help offset my taxes a bit before the big hit. (This is always a challenging time of year for the self-employed.)

I'm wondering how many people "get" my eBay handle. Probably not very many. You know how sometimes you'll see a car with a personalized license plate that seems to mean something, but you can't figure out what? I used to stop people and ask them. Sometimes the meanings were an "inside" secret, like a family nickname. My cousin used to have the plate "CSWY GRL" because Barry Manilow, the singer, customarily chose an audience member to join him onstage so he could sing "Can't Smile Without You" to her, and at one concert my cousin was the chosen one. For many years the plate drew numerous comments from other "fanilows," the name for Manilow's fans, out in public. But of course nobody who wasn't a fanilow would know what the plate meant.

Anyway, my eBay handle is:

txind76121

Anybody know what it means? Hint: might help if you're a former darkroom rat.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Daniel (partial comment): "Pretty sure it is not your North Dakota Taxi drivers license number."

Mike replies: No....

MikeR (partial comment): "The d76 part may refer to Dektol 76."

Mike replies: Nope! Dektol was a print develop and didn't have numbers.

Ian Hunter: "FP4INID11!"

Mike replies: Made me laugh  :-)  . You must be from the UK.

Ian Hunter: "I am indeed from the UK! I have a fridge full of FP-4, ID-11 in stock and a darkroom with three enlargers. I am a bit of an eccentric I admit."

Mike: The good kind.

Emil Aaltonen: "If it weren’t for the hint, I would have guessed it was a reference to a taxation index...."

Mike replies: Right, it isn't that.

Dan Khong: "I'm guessin' tx = TriX in = in d76 = D76 developer 121 = 12 minutes, single use.....or perhaps this fellah Mike's assets in US$ millions!"

Mike replies: Close but not quite on the first guess, and as for the second, all my assets are intangible, damn it. Things like kindness to animals, the wisdom of many years, and my taste in B&W tonality.

Joel Entin: "Hello Mike, As a former darkroom rat as well, I couldn't help but chuckle at your eBay handle of txind76121. Has to be Tri-X film developed in D-76 diluted one-to-one. Most of my black-and-white film photography was with Plus-X film developed in D-76 diluted one-to-one at 68 degrees for 8 minutes. I still have the negatives from the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s."

Mike replies: You got it (as did a lot of others as well).

Working with students as young as seventh graders, I never used the x:x format for ratios...I always wrote "1-to-1" and if the numbers were different I always specified which one was water; for instance, "1 part developer to 2 parts water." Always on the lookout for possible ambiguity so as not to confuse....

c.d.embrey (partial comment): "Best California vanity plate I've seen recently was CLOKWRK. It was on an Orange Honda."

Mike replies: Funny. Just as it happens I was watching YouTube videos about Kubrick last night until late. Someone made the point that critics never liked his films when they came out but usually by the end of a decade they had reversed position. One said that Kubrick himself had made a chart logging various critics' changing reactions to 2001: A Space Odyssey over the years. On one side were pasted the original negative reactions and on the other side were later appraisals calling it a classic and a landmark and a masterpiece.

I never did see A Clockwork Orange. I was scared off by people calling it "shocking" and "violent."

Malcolm Leader: "Best plate I ever saw was UEVOLI—which only makes sense in the rearview mirror."

V.I. Voltz: "Tri-X film in D-76 developer diluted 1+1. It is quite arresting how quickly this has gone from being something anyone who is interested in photography would know to an esoteric piece of arcana."

Mike replies: I'll second that.

Mani Sitaraman: "It's brilliant, Mike! But, I must confess, the second it clicked in my mind, I was hit by a giant pang of nostalgia, in the original Greek sense, of a sharp pain felt for something left behind. I don't know why; I do miss it all. The formulas, the sometimes exhausting long sessions in the darkroom, the sense of slight disorientation when you emerge back into the rest of the world. I must be bonkers."

Mike replies: If you are, then I am. I have that νοσταλγία and it never goes away.

Luke: "Barry Manilow has fans?"

Mike replies: A great many, mostly women, most middle-aged, and many very devoted. I'm not one, but I could tell you stories, via my cousin. She paid $3k to meet him for 15 minutes, for example. And that did not include the plane ticket. That is far from the most extreme example.

Mike Plews: "Great idea. I may start going by txpinhcb."

Mike replies: Wouldn't that have to be txpinhc110b?

Sunday Support Group: Let Photography Be Thy Vocation

Friday:

Mani Sitaraman: Mike Johnston doesn't have a darkroom? Truly, we are living in the end times.

Well, we might be, Mani, but me not having a dark room is only because all the rooms in my small Gothic Revival farmhouse (built c. 1888) have windows. As for a darkroom, I don't think my lack of what my friend Nick Hartmann once called "the room-sized photo accessory" is quite as portentous as the rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem or the birds flying backwards and like that.

Looking back, it's been the norm. I seldom had a darkroom in my life. I've used a parade of workspaces, from professional and school facilities (some of which were very nice, some of which were dank and cavelike) to the most crude and rudimentary workarounds.

Here's a brief sampling of a few of my actual own darkrooms:

When I lived in downtown Washington, D.C. I tried to press into a service the closet area of my tiny studio apartment, using a rubberized blackout curtain to keep out all the light (as well as all possible air circulation, which was a problem). A board across the tub in the adjacent bathroom served as "the wet side." I had to use a tiny super-amateur beginner enlarger because it was the only thing that would fit on the built-in dresser. The largest print I could make was 8x10. That attempt at a darkroom proved too crude and awkward even for me, and I got no work done there. Fortunately I began teaching shortly afterward and gained access to various school darkrooms.

In Oak Park, where I lived in a "vintage" apartment that a friend of a relative had saved from the wrecking ball, my kitchen was half kitchen and half darkroom. The wet side was a melamine-topped table; the huge Saunders 4500II enlarger sat perched precariously atop a freestanding single cabinet with a countertop. It would move with my footfalls on the floor, so I learned to stand very still for a minute or so before each exposure, to quiet down any movement. I counted off exposure times using an electronic metronome set to 60 beats per minute, so I worked to what sounded like a ticking time bomb.

When I lived in Woodstock, Illinois (where the movie "Groundhog Day" was filmed), I used a small patch of the basement that hadn't been finished. It was dark and dusty and had cobwebs in all the nooks and crannies past the area I cleared out for myself. The ceiling was so low that I had to sit down to work at the enlarger, which was right next to the furnace. I could only work after dark, which was easiest in the Winter months. Before doing any darkroom work I had to turn the heat way down, because when the furnace shuddered to life it made the enlarger table vibrate. In contrast to the one in D.C., though, I was reasonably productive in the darkroom in Woodstock.

In Forest Park, a near suburb of Chicago, I lived for a time in a beautiful rehabbed loft, in which my darkroom was the intended powder room with all the furnishings removed. The enlarger went on a cabinet I built in the doorway, so I had to turn sideways and suck in my gut just to get inside. However, it had a ventilation fan, and I could work at any hour of the day, and Xander was very young and going to bed early. So I was quite productive there too. When I sold the loft I had to remove the bathroom and turn the space back in to a powder room.

Backstory
There's one moral to this story which might so far be hiding.

Just out of curiosity the other day, I compared the pool money list to the one for golf. Briefly, here's a rundown:

The top money-earner in pool in 2020 was Dennis Orcollo (pronounced "or-COOLio") of the Philippines, who earned $84,000 and change. Top golfer: $7,344,000. Or, about 87 times as much. The top female pool player earned $10,000, the top female golfer $1,668,000.

In fifth place, pool: $40,000; golf, $5,100,000.

To get to the first golfer who earned less than Dennis Orcollo, you have to go all the way to Satoshi Kodaira of Japan, who is 214th on the men's list in golf.

The lesson seems to be that you shouldn't encourage your kid to play pool. If anything, nudge them in the direction of golf. The income ceiling is higher. (My own son's sport is rock climbing, but he arrived at that all on his own.)

Similarly, is it a good idea to encourage a kid to become a photographer? Peter Lindbergh and his like notwithstanding, I'm not sure it's the greatest choice of profession any more (if it even was then). Although some of you within the sound of my voice are examples to the contrary. At the very least, I would guess, if you want to make a living at it, you have to accept that it's a business and you need to treat it as such. A friendly local couple approached me recently to tell me that their daughter really enjoyed macro photography and was thinking of becoming a professional macro photographer. They were curious as to whether that was a good career choice.

Me: She'd probably do better if she decided to be a professional water-skier.
The man: But she's 36.
The woman: And she can't swim.
Me: Great, so the analogy fits even better.

(Okay, I didn't actually say that out loud. I was polite.)

I think I was in my 40s when it really hit me that a lot of the guys I'd grown up with could afford better cameras than I! That didn't seem fair. I was the one who had sacrificed to be a photographer. They had become stockbrokers and doctors, lawyers and engineers. That's when my standard advice to wannabe full-time photographers shifted: maybe it's a better idea to remain an amateur, and go make your money some other way.

That's probably what I should have done if I'd wanted a great darkroom. But I had fun, anyway.

Bug of the apocalypse
By the way, out of that wettish darkroom in Woodstock one day, quite improbably, across the carpet in the adjacent office, stalked the most outlandish insect I have ever laid eyes upon. It was some exotic sort of hard-shelled multi-legged creature about an inch and a half long. Vaguely resembling a multicolored miniature version of the AT-AT's in The Empire Strikes Back, it walked with its thorax well up off the ground and moved like the priest in a funeral procession. I captured it, examined it for a few hours, then let it go in a field, without, unfortunately, having the slightest idea what it was, or what its normal habitat was, or even if it was a native species, an escaped pet, or something sinister I would have been better advised to destroy. I've never even been able to find a picture that looks anything like it. Still one of the weirdest animals I've ever encountered in the real world. How it got into my house I'll never know.

Maybe it was an omen of the end times, I don't know. I certainly can't explain it any other way!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

Book of interest this week:

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, Edited by Sasha Wolf
(clicking on the link above takes you to Amazon)

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Featured Comments from:

Crabby Umbo: "It's virtually impossible to make a living in photography these days. The paradigm has changed so much, there is no path to solvency. Even in the heyday of my self-employment in the '80s, I was living hand-to-mouth while grossing decent money, while my friends in the business were relying on spouses' medical insurance and 401k's to make sure they weren't going to live in a box when they couldn't work anymore. You could write a 40-page paper on why, but I'll just cover a few points.

"I remember reading a while back, that photography was now one of the worst-paying professions in the U.S., and that between 2004 and 2014, average income had dropped $10k! In my last management job, 2013–2017, my average photographer made $10k less than I was paying the average photographer on my staff in 1995! The 2017 staff were also less qualified and less skilled by a long shot!

"The majority of photography jobs available today in commercial and advertising photography are in e-commerce. Did you get into photography to take stuff out of box, clean it up, and shoot it on a white background all day? I didn't. And in fact, I know of situations where companies have hired temp people with no photo experience at all to do this.

"One of the key killers of the professional photography industry is the 'good enough' mindset. Forty years ago, no art director I knew would hire a pal to take a picture for a job, even if they were good. The attitude was 'I'm a professional, and I'm working with other professionals.' Now, if a millennial art director can have their cat press the button on their iPhone, without getting out of their chair, it's all good! I was chatting with a West coast food photographer one time, who was opening a gallery in fly-over for his retirement hobby, and he said: '...when the latest group of art directors decided they could push a table up against some windows, shoot a picture with their iPhone, and they couldn't see the difference a professional food stylist would make...well, it's all over, isn't it.' Yep it is.

"As for film, I'm a film guy through and through, and I would love to shoot more, but my current small apartment is impossible to process film in. It's also one of the sootiest places I ever lived. One day after cleaning my closed, sealed bathroom, by the next day, there was dust and soot all over the place, from I-don't-know-where. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen.

"I would shoot judiciously, and use professional labs, but it's almost impossible to find high-quality labs to just process and proof; they all want to process and scan. By the time some millennial has dragged your film through a film gate on some scanner, and scratched the living hell out of it, it's not worth the trouble and cost. Where are the pristine, high-end, high-quality process-and-proof labs? You can't imagine how many people have recommended labs as 'great,' who think nothing of scratching the hell out of your film. Almost any recommendation from the Internet is one of these labs! Vintage lab owners, where are you?!"

Gary Nylander: "I worked as a newspaper photographer for 41 years, working for three different small-sized newspapers in Canada from 1976 to 2017. It provided me with a good living and I thoroughly enjoyed my work. I wouldn't want to be starting out today trying to make a full time living as a photographer."

Sunday Support Group: Mike's 'Forward to Yesterday' Experiment, Update 1

["Sunday Support Group" is a weekend feature in support of serious projects and madcap enthusiasms, whether on the part of readers or Yr. Hmbl. Ed. It is not always on topic.]

-

Just a brief update: for my Quixotic (see lower illustration below) back-to-film "learning experience," I've decided to go against my longtime mindset and go ahead and use multiple cameras—both 35mm and 120. More about choices when things begin to sort out. But I'm immersed in things like shipping cameras out for overhauls and trying to find a place that can rebuild the batteries for my Rolleiflex 6008AF. (Yes, money is leaking from my bank account already, and I haven't processed a single roll of film yet.) I've also borrowed a Pentax 645NII (thanks, John S.) and am doing some experiments with an adapted lens on that.

Prices of film cameras have gone up quite a bit since the later 2000s and early 2010s. Another big change is that eBay is now listing auctions from Japan in the main search results—they used to show only local (US) results up top and segregate International results in a following section. You can select N. America or USA only in a preference menu in the sidebar, but it's no longer the default.

So I've seen a lot of Japanese auctions...and I have to say I am shocked at the brazenly dishonest descriptions used by many Japanese sellers. Non-working, parts-only cameras that are described as some species of "Mint" (as if there were more than one). Cameras that are thoroughly beat up described as "Exc+++++." (Five plus symbols seems to be a common convention, despite being as addleheaded and unnecessary as five exclamation points.) I was once lectured by a German buyer for describing a Leica M4 as "Mint" because he found a pinhole in the chrome plating of the top cover. When I admitted I couldn't see what he was talking about on the returned camera, he recommended that I inspect it as he had—with a magnifying glass! Using one, I did find the pinhole. The camera had almost certainly come from the factory that way.

The above camera was advertised as "Exc+++++" on eBay by a Japanese seller. Really?! The rewind knob is brassed. The rest of the camera looks just as bad. The gold standard for camera condition descriptions is KEH Camera in Atlanta, and I'm not sure KEH would offer that camera at all—they only buy good stuff to start with, so this would probably be a reject for them—but if they did, it would surely be listed as "UG," which is their lowest rating and means "Ugly." But let me just ask you—if you were a brazen scoundrel and were going to call such a camera "Exc," would you have the cojones to then add one plus sign, much less five of them?

I saw one camera that had paint worn away above the strap lug that was described as "Unused"!!!!! Wonder how that happens!!!!! The nerve of those jerks!!!!! They ought to be ashamed!!!!!

(Heh.)

Anyway, if an eBay listing for a film camera says "from Japan," your caveat emptor warning lights and sirens should go into full-on mode. Disgraceful.

Like homing pigeons
Thanks to a reader who wishes to remain anonymous but who knows who he is, I was able to recover most of the darkroom equipment I de-accessioned in 2014 when I moved from Wisconsin to New York. Imagine—to sell that stuff off and then having it come home again. This was a great (and improbable) stroke of good luck, and my grateful thanks go out to him.

Courtesy Public Domain Review

The windmill scene from Don Quixote, 1648 Frankfurt edition

A while back I bought a brand new in the box Saunders/LPL 670 enlarger from a school that had a number of them they were getting rid of. Since the enlarger came with a 50mm Apo-Rodagon bundled with it, I now have two. Which I don't need, but I can't bear to sell one without testing them against each other. I've also purchased a used 80mm ƒ/4 Apo-Rodagon for enlarging 120, and negative carriers. I'm still pretty far away from the first print in the basement.

I've chosen the film and paper I intend to start out with, but that requires evidence to make a final decision about, so I'll leave that for a later update. I'm aiming to be making prints by May—which, knowing me, probably means July.

That's all I know for now. I do need to reread the windmill scene in Don Quixote, I think!  :-)

Mike

P.S. Sorry this appears so late in the day. I thought I had published it this morning but inadvertently neglected to.

UPDATE Monday morning from raizans: I've also been appalled by how bad it's gotten in the last few years! Here's a slightly edited post of mine from Photrio (APUG forever!) on this issue:

There have been some podcast episodes and Youtube videos discussing recent changes in the market for film cameras on eBay. Apparently, non-Japanese sellers based in Japan have started selling cameras in poorer condition for the export market. Looks like demand really has grown a lot, and it's now worth scraping the barrel! Meanwhile, high demand within Japan for film cameras in good condition means that it makes more sense to sell them domestically.

The bad thing is that the non-Japanese sellers are ruining the reputation of Japanese sellers in general by inflating condition labels and trying to sell at higher prices; I've seen items take over a year to sell at these inflated prices. They also might be taking advantage of inexperienced buyers who don't know how to evaluate condition very well, i.e., members of Gen Z who are just getting into film photography.

Here's what the condition ratings really mean these days:

"Unused" = Like New or New Old Stock, sometimes down to Exc
"Top Mint" = Mint to Minty, sometimes down to Bargain
"Mint" = Exc to Bargain
"Near Mint" = Bargain to Ugly
"Exc +++++" = Ugly to As-Is

Mike replies: Thanks for that explanation, raizans. That makes sense. To other readers: see the Featured Comments below for some specific recommendations from other readers of honest Japanese and Japan-based camera dealers. I can't vouch for them myself, but I trust my readers.

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Jonathan Hall: "Bellamy Hunt (AKA Japan Camera Hunter) has great service where he will source used cameras in the Japanese market. It's a much better option that rolling the dice on eBay. Just fill out the form on his website telling him what you want to buy and how much you want to spend and he'll email you back with options. I picked up a Mamiya 6 with 75mm lens described as 'Mint–' but for the life of me I could not find the minus. With shipping and PayPal costs it still came in at the lower boundary of the crop on eBay."

James Simmons: "On the other hand, Mike, there is a Japanese eBay trader called Mapcamera who are very KEH-like in their condition standards. I've purchased two used Fuji items from them, and the condition was better than their conservative descriptions. Highly recommended."

Hélcio J. Tagliolatto: "I guess you will receive several suggestions, but allow me to recommend these eBay sellers from Japan, who, in ten years of shopping, only sent me top-notch equipment:

Sakai Camera Trade
Musashi Focus US Store
Sanpou Camera
Tokyophoto

"I experienced pleasant trading with these sellers."

The Very Modest Film Commitment

When I asked the question about film the other day, I was stung a bit by my friend Jack's comment: "I predict you will walk away from it in days if not weeks, just like you did with your full plate experiment."

Ouch, but okay. Fair's fair. I have a sordid history of "bailure." (That's a word I made up for a failure that involves bailing out...you know, like marriages that end within weeks. Bailure!) I shot a few pictures with the full-plate camera (the "Single Use Device"—search if you want a refresher) and I already knew enough...I realized it wasn't going to be my future.

It's going to be a little more difficult to do that with this experiment, but what I've decided to commit to is...no drum roll please...twenty rolls. Will I know by then if it's something that scratches the itch? That cures what ails me? Don't know, but at least that's a reasonable, achievable goal, a not-very-ambitious ambition I can hope to complete.

Twenty rolls in a month is a bit optimistic—that's one and a half days per roll—so I'm going to give myself three months to complete the objective. We'll check back in with this topic by May 25th.

And I really hope I will have avoided bailure, because am I ever gonna get some kinda #[email protected]% if I fail.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "LOL, in the theoretical and highly unlikely event of bailure, I dare say all would be forgiven if there were a TOP article outlining it all written with humour, a touch of nostalgia and heartfelt mea culpa. Although TOP readers would reserve the right to a good ribbing, and maybe one I-told-you-so, but anymore than that would be unsporting. Hope you have fun!"

Nigel: "Mike, As one of your Patreons, I am always delighted by whatever you do. It's a license for you to take whatever tangents, go down every zig or zag, write about pool, food, post controversial cartoons, really, whatever. You won't get shite from this corner if you don't make a self-set target."

Clifford Gwinn: "I bottomed out with digital and needed a reboot so I turned to film. I shoot 35mm, medium format and digital at any time and in no particular order. I also started using my iPhone more. Instead of passing judgements and judging quality, I realized I just like making images. Each tool has its “'itness' and I enjoy that. I try to maintain a consistent look with moderate success. It is all good because foremost, I like making images and different tools keeps me fresh. Mike, load the film and enjoy. Never say I could have shot this on film or digital. Every image has its own merit."

Alex Mercado: "'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' —Samuel Beckett. Sometimes taking a step backward can be useful for understanding how far one has gone forward from what is remembered a classical or romantic time. You’ll likely revert to an older workflow, but rethink parts of it with a modern bias, as well as question some of your current digital train of thought. I think with a project like this, bailure would not be a failure in a detrimental sense; you will have only failed better."

Dogman: "If I were a betting man, I would wager the majority of that brick of film will still be intact come May 25."

Andrew Lamb: "Not so modest. Twenty rolls by 25th May is a steep target, IMHO. If I was on a film kick, I certainly wouldn't have shot 20 rolls in that time. Why bother with an arbitrary date? One polite suggestion is that you shoot twenty rolls, without a deadline, and see you how feel at the end of the project."

Kirk Decker: "When I started shooting film again, after a four- or five-year absence, the thing that surprised me the most is that it was not at all like it was when I shot film on a daily basis. The casualness, and comfort, of photographing hundreds of weddings and portraits on film without instant feedback was gone, replaced by a powerful uncertainty as to what was actually being recorded by the camera. For a while I took a digital camera with me to check exposure and composition. (Steve McCurry did the same thing when he shot the last roll of Kodachrome.) I made the same mechanical mistakes I had made as a kid when I was learning how to use a camera—shot two hours worth of macro flowers in a light rain without making sure the film was engaged in the take-up spool—popped a camera back open with film still inside. That said, I enjoy shooting film. I enjoy the Miata like feel of a Hasselblad or an F2 in my hand. Film isn't some magic thing; it is not instant art. But, for me, the act, itself, of shooting film, the way it has changed how I experience imagemaking, has been an artistic experience on a personal level."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I rather like your coinage 'bailure' (the word, I mean; not so fond of the actual thing it describes!).

It sounds to me like you're somewhat struggling with your ideas of yourself as a photographer. That's exactly the sort of place where trying something can be highly informative. And, if you bail after a dozen rolls and know something important you didn't know at the start, it's not a failure. (As a blogger and rather good writer, your personal struggle here can be good pay copy, of course; you pretty clearly know that.)

"Apologies if I've told this story before. In 2001, I'd been bothered by going through contact sheets of portrait shoots and finding sequences of very similar expressions and poses; with little point to the multiple shots. This was for me still the film era, so wasting shots that way was especially annoying. So I set myself a project; I took the studio lighting and backdrop to a party being held in a couple of hotel suites by my local SF club, and the 4x5 camera, and set myself the task of shooting portraits of a bunch of my friends using only one film-holder each (two sheets, two shots). The results were productive; some portraits I thought were actually good, plus no pairs of sheets that were nearly identical  :-) . I was reasonably effective directing the subjects, and taking my time (my basic photographic habits are documentary; directing things like that is not what I mostly do). I even think I've benefited some in my work since then.

"So yeah, sometimes a weird experiment, or trying something different, can help you get over, under, around, or through a block in your work."

Dye Transfer and Me, Part V: So Many Hacks...and Finally, Money!

Part 5 of an Uncertain Number

Words and pictures by Ctein

Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV

I was turning out excellent dye transfer prints by 1980 (Malcolm Gladwell's nonsense about 10,000 hours notwithstanding), but there were still many parts of the craft that vexed me. Matrix development was a tricky thing—for everybody, not just me. Developing three large sheets of film in two minutes with a fussy developer was not a good recipe for consistency or uniformity. Matrix film's unhardened gelatin emulsion is converted to hardened gelatin wherever it is exposed to light and developed with a tanning developer*. Wash the processed film in hot water and the unexposed/unhardened emulsion goes down the drain. That's what makes the "printing plate" that soaks up the dye.

Tanning developer isn't stable. The stock solutions consist of a developing agent (Part A) that gets mixed with a base activator (B) just before use. By changing the A:B ratio between 1:1 and 1:6, one could get a contrast change of about ±1 paper grade. 1:2 was normal contrast. The stock solutions would last for years, but you had to use the mixed developer within a few minutes, according to Kodak literature Freshly mixed developer was a very pale tan that oxidized within a few minutes to the color of strong tea. After half an hour (or after use) it looked like ink. Definitely not stable!

Dye Transfer and Me, Part IV: Where Most of the Work Is

Fig. 1

Words and photos by Ctein

Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Part 4 of an Uncertain Number...

In Which There is More Hacking of Process
My first meeting with Frank McLaughlin in 1978 was a high point in my life. Frank was warm and welcoming and knew everybody in the dye transfer world. Frank introduced me to Phil Condax, Louis's son and a curator at the Eastman House—we also became lifelong friends—and Tom Rankin and the other folks at Frog Prince, a commercial dye transfer lab in San Francisco. Frank knew there was strength in networking and he made certain we networked.

Frank brought in Bob Speck, who developed the dye transfer process for Kodak under the direction of its inventor, Louis Condax. Pretty exciting! Bob and Frank pored over my prints and gushed fulsome praise, to a degree that anyone with a smaller artistic ego than mine would have found embarrassing (I coped). They declared they had never seen better dye transfer prints. I expect my feet didn't leave any footprints as I was departing Kodak.

Frank's favors didn't stop with introductions. He put in a word about my work with Kodak's public relations department which, a few years later, produced its own substantial rewards, and he introduced me to my biggest and best clients. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Fig. 2.

Dye transfer changed what I photographed. This print medium could handle anything I could record on film, and that was a lot. Color negative films had an exceptionally long exposure range, well over 10 stops of straight-line curve. I could photograph in the middle of the desert, at noon, and make prints that held detail in the highlights and the shadows (figure 2).

Night photography was—and still is—one of my passions, though not the way it was usually done back in the era of available darkness, pushing films to their max. In college, I'd begun to wonder what kind of photographs I'd get if I went all the way to the other extreme—slow films, processed for minimum grain and maximum tonal quality. The first time I saw what urban landscapes at midnight looked like on Panatomic X, I was hooked.

Fig. 3.

When I moved to color and medium format, it was the same. It demanded patience, a flashlight, and a good book. Occasionally the exposures were only a few minutes; figure 3 ran 45 minutes. I discussed reciprocity failure last column—contrast went up, and the scenes were contrasty to begin with. Well, that's what contrast-control masking and dye transfer were for. I dealt with previously impossible-to-print-well negatives like figure 1. That vein of work continued throughout my film and darkroom career, culminating in the Christmas in California series.

Dye transfer was a "hi-fi" printing process that exposed problems the same way a really good sound system reveals a poor recording. I loved telephoto lenses (still do), and long lenses are prone to lateral chromatic aberration—the color fringing that occurs towards the edges of the frame because the lens produces red, green, and blue images of slightly different magnifications. Before digital image processing, which made the fix simple, it was something you lived with. I could ignore it in smaller prints, but I was printing large in dye transfer. Worse, the high color purity of the dye transfer process made those fringes more obvious. Worst, color fringes in a dye transfer print look like bad technique! It takes a technical eye to distinguish lens aberrations from mis-registered color separations. This would not do.

I measured the exact amount of the color fringing and calculated how much I'd have to raise or lower the enlarger head to compensate. It was a millimeter or so over a throw distance of about a meter. When I printed a negative made with my 300mm lens I carefully adjusted the enlarger head between the matrices to compensate for the aberration. Mostly, it worked. I rarely got perfect results—enlargers really aren't designed to be manipulated that way with any degree of precision alignment—but there was much less color fringing than there would have been if I done nothing.

Other complications—I've mentioned that one of my misconceptions was that dye transfer prints would be technically the equal or superior to chromogenic prints in all respects. Among other delusions, I expected dye transfer prints to be as clean and flawless as a well-executed Ektacolor print.

Oh my, but that is to laugh! We're talking about a process that involves multiple generations, large trays of liquid dyes, rinses and washes and multiple hand transfers. Why in the world I ever imagined that would produce spotless and flaw-free results, I have no idea.

Any bits of dust on my negative or contrast masks produced a white spot in the matrices that would have to be retouched out of every print I made. You can bet I went to great lengths to be as clean as possible, and sometimes I achieve perfection...but more often, not. Further, any bits of dust or air bubbles that got trapped between the matrix and the receiving paper would keep the dye from transferring to the paper, leaving a little bright red (minus cyan), green (minus magenta) or blue (minus yellow) spot that also needed to be retouched.

If a bit of grit got embedded in a matrix or it got scratched, then there'd be a little bright spot or streak to spot out of every print thereafter. Manipulating large sheets of soft, wet emulsion for print after print, stuff would happen. Even careful craftspeople aren't perfect, as much as we'd like to be.

Little particles of dye precipitated out of the liquid baths. If they settled on a matrix and weren't entirely removed in the rinse step, those dye specks would transfer themselves to the receiving paper to create a minuscule pinpoint spot of pure cyan, magenta, or yellow. Fortunately, the yellow specks were invisible to the human eye, but the cyan and the magenta? Not so much. They had to be bleached out, and the cleared spot retouched in with dye.

Sometimes there were only a few. Sometimes there were hundreds. Very rarely were there none. Dye specks like that are so common in dye transfer prints that it's one of the more reliable diagnostics for telling if what you're looking at is a dye transfer print. Peer really closely and the odds are good you'll see a primary-color speck somewhere in the light areas.

So, spotting had to be done. A lot of spotting, and I wanted it to be perfect, because I didn't know any better. Nobody knowledgeable was trying to turn out perfect dye transfer prints. (Okay, almost nobody—Frank Tartaro's lab in New York was as obsessive about this as I was.)

It helps that the dyes used to make a dye transfer print are the same ones you use for spotting and retouching. Any finishing work you do can be flawless and invisible, if you're good enough. And your brushes are good enough. I'd buy six or eight 000 brushes to find one that produced the perfect pinpoint spot of dye. I coddled those perfect spotting brushes, but over the course of my career I wore out several generations. Lots of print spotting!

Potassium permanganate selectively removes cyan dye. Happily, that was the most common dye speck. I tried the finest spotting brushes I had, but they made far too big a blotch. I can't recall what inspired me, but I discovered that toothpicks, whittled down to a needle point, proved ideal. I could take out a spot a tenth of a millimeter across and leave the surrounding area almost untouched.

It also helped that I'm phenomenally nearsighted. In my youth, without my glasses my "infinity" working distance was only four inches from my nose!

Permanganate left a brown stain that I removed with sodium bisulfite applied, again, with a sharpened toothpick. Then I had to quickly wipe off the bisulfite with 1% acetic acid, because bisulfite itself would start to bleach dye if left on the print.

Unfortunately there wasn't a strong selective bleach for magenta. There was a general-purpose bleach that would attack all three dyes—it was Kodak's R-18 B&W film reducer formula. R-18 is a mixture of potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid. It bleached great, but it turned out to have problems that I discovered only when I went after the other "dirty" part of dye transfer—stained borders.

In theory, the totally clear parts of the matrix film, where there is no gelatin emulsion to carry the dye (see process description) should print as pure white. Well, they don't. Usually they'd carry a few CC of dye density over to the print paper. Even though I'd figured out how to get sharp borders on my prints' image areas, the surrounding borders would usually have a faint dye stain. Some people considered it a mark of the process. I considered it unattractive.

After I made a print, I'd bleach the area around the image with R-18 bleach, removing most or all of the dye from an inch or three around the image to provide clean white border suitable for framing. Then I'd wipe that whole area down with sodium bisulfite, rinse it off with 1% acetic acid, and dry the print. Nice.

What I didn't realize was that the sulfuric acid in the reducer was creating residual sulfur compounds in the paper. I was turning archival paper into non-archival paper! The paper started to turn brown and get brittle where I'd applied the bleach. Fortunately for me, the the consequences of that became apparent in less than a year and I hadn't sold any prints yet. I needed a better solution—pun intended.

I dug into the chemistry and decided that it wasn't sulfuric acid in particular that was important, it was that it acidified the potassium permanganate. Perhaps glacial acetic acid would do—it wasn't anywhere as strong an acid as sulfuric but if it drove the pH low enough....

It did. R-18C (for Ctein flavor) worked just as well as the Kodak formula and it meant I didn't have to contaminate my prints with sulfuric acid. Not so incidentally, it also worked just as well as R-18 as a film reducer. I passed that information on to Kodak, although I don't think it ever made it into the literature. Now you know.

Why have I spent so much time talking about print spotting and finishing? Because that's where most of the work is! After the first print, I spend far more time on that than on transferring prints. That's the reason I've had to put something like a thousand hours into preparing prints for the upcoming sale.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Film Processing Labs?

Photographer Ed Westcott, Department of Energy photo, 1947

Ed. Note: A thread got going in the Comments last week that was off the topic of the post but is interesting nonetheless. The subject is the availability of film processing labs in the post-film era. I'm splitting off the topic here in case anyone has anything else to add on the subject.

Yiorgos: "Mike, Another related issue that I hope you might take up is the dearth of film processing labs. Even in NYC where I live it's now difficult to find a good lab that will develop and scan film well and affordably. I've tried mailing my film to labs, but that adds many days and additional costs to the process. Perhaps TOP readers can come together to identify and support the good surviving labs. Perhaps, too, TOP can develop relationships with these labs and earn some extra revenue when TOP readers patronize them. Just a thought."

Mike replies: I've been told there's a very good one in Rochester, New York, near me: Edgar G. Praus Productions. I've never used them myself but my friend Earl has and several people have recommended them to me. They're a national lab now and take in work from all over the country.

Eamon Hickey: "I'll second the comment by Yiorgos. I started shooting some film again two years ago, after nearly 20 years of not touching it. I've been shocked at the lab situation. Shouldn't have been, obviously, but it truly has been shocking. There are almost no pro labs left, and many of the ones that remain have drastically lower standards than was once a minimum requirement for a serious lab. Only Duggal here in New York still feels like an expert pro lab you can trust. I recently had occasion to use a venerable pro lab in a major U.S. city—supposedly the place to go in that city for pro and serious film photographers—and it was shockingly badly run. I feel lucky that, eventually, I got my film back undamaged. Every mid-sized or larger town in the Western world had at least one lab that was ten times better as little as 20 years ago. Did I say I've been shocked? I've been shocked."

hugh crawford: "Accurate Photo Shop on 5th Ave. in the South Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn has a great reputation for developing and scanning. Brooklyn is crawling with photo labs these days. Also check out Gowanus Darkroom. It's sort of a co-op / darkroom rental / custom lab mashup."

Does anyone else have anything to add about these or other survivor labs?

Mike
(Thanks to Yiorgos, Eamon and Hugh)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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I won't be posting any Featured Comments for this particular post, lest my selection seem like an endorsement or lack of inclusion seem like the opposite. Please see the Comments section for everyone's comments and recommendations!

Dye Transfer and Me, Part III: Sweat and Tears

Words and photo by Ctein

Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Part 3 of an Uncertain Number...

In Which Our Hero Doth First Engage the Great Yellow Beast with Stealth and Guile
When we left off in Part 2 (and mid-1976) I had written to Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak about my ongoing and unsolvable-by-me problems getting good prints out of the dye transfer process. It was an act of desperation. It paid off.

Frank's reply answered all my questions, included a "DT care package" of every related publication Kodak had, and concluded with "The dye transfer process is complicated and sometimes frustrating, but...keep at it. If I can be of any assistance, please let me know."

Fortified, I plunged back into the learning pool. By the end of the year I had the process under control (no, not "mastered," never mastered). They were small prints and artistically insignificant, to teach me how to manage the process and it. The art would come later, after I learnt craft.

Finally, the big moment—my first full-size (20x24-inch) print for my portfolio. I chose this photograph (figure 1) because I knew it would benefit from dye transfer's unique qualities. I needed a long density range to render everything from the disk of the sun to the near-silhouette Saturn/Apollo 17 vehicle with appropriate brilliance. In addition, the Ektacolor print was monochrome orange. I knew there was more of a range of hues than that, and dye transfer, with its excellent yellow (see Part 2) was the ideal medium for this photograph.

Fig. 1

I ordered a box of 16.5x21.25-inch Pan Matrix Film, the largest sheet size it came in. Not quite large enough for a 16x20 image area, not if I wanted big enough borders to handle the film, but close enough. It would've been nice to have 20x24 film, but it was already fabulously expensive—800 current bucks for 25 sheets.

Into the darkroom! I spent a day making test strips, nailing down the correct exposure and color balance. My first process innovation had been controlling the color balance using the dial-in filtration in my enlarger's color head. The usual way to control color balance was to vary the relative exposures for the red-, green-, and blue-light-exposed matrices. I knew how to color balance this way, but it had disadvantages. I had to do annoying calculations to make fine color shifts as appropriate RGB exposure adjustments. More significantly, exposure times much beyond 90 seconds would induce reciprocity failure.

Photographers think of reciprocity failure in film as being about time. Really, it's about intensity. The lower the light level hitting the film, the less effective the film is at recording it. Reducing the light intensity by a stop reduces the recorded image by more than a stop, because the weaker light isn't recorded as efficiently as the stronger.

Reciprocity failure causes contrast to increase. A one-stop luminance difference in exposure might become a 1.1- or 1.2-stop effective difference in what the film records, or worse. The lower the intensity (the longer the required exposure) the stronger the effect. This would be very bad news for color separations. They all have to have the same contrast or you'll get color-crossover in the highlights and shadows, even if the midtones are correct.

Many of my exposures were going to be a lot more than a 90 seconds. Well, I couldn't get rid of reciprocity failure, but I could equalize the exposure times by dialing color filtration into my enlarger's color head. For example, if the red exposure was half that of the green and blue, dialing 30CC (one stop) of cyan filtration into the color head would make the red exposure time match the other two. Yes, with very long exposures there'd be an overall contrast increase, but I had tools to correct that.

This worked beautifully. My most extreme case was a dense negative of a very high contrast subject which needed a very strong contrast-reduction mask. I wound up with 12-minute exposures, but the print looked gorgeous.

Okay, enough about my cleverness. It's a new day; it's time to make my first big set of matrices.

They are horribly dense, badly overexposed. What happened?!

In my enthusiasm, I'd forgotten to stop the lens down after focusing. There went $100 worth of film.

Matrix Set 2. The exposures are just fine, but two of the sheets of film stick together in the developing tray and I can't get them apart fast enough (developing this stuff was hard). There's a big blotch in one of the matrices.

Another $100 worth of film. Grrr.

Set 3: The exposures are good, the development feels good. As I rinse the magenta matrix in hot water to remove the excess emulsion (see the process description), the entire image slides off the film! I'd accidentally exposed one of the matrices wrong-side up, and that's what happens if you do.

At this point my memory fails me. I can't recall what went wrong after that...traumatic amnesia, I'd guess. All I know is that I went through four —that's right, four—more sets of matrices, and there was something wrong with each and every one and it was different each time.

What I do remember is being in tears. I'd expected that very expensive box of film would get me (optimistically) a half dozen finished prints, but I had zero. I gave up for the day.

The next day, calm and less tearful, I went back into the darkroom, took a deep breath, centered myself as much as I could, and made Matrix Set 8. It was good. My first successful portfolio print, achieved through sweat, blood, and tears.

Okay, no blood—there were enough of the other two, thank you.

Fortunately, I never had another experience remotely like that first one. Occasionally I would screw up a set of matrices—galling, and expensive—but the majority of the time everything went fine. In fact, I can't remember much about my dye transfer printing for the next year, it was so uneventful. It's what they say, no news is good news.

Not that I didn't come up with all sorts of little questions; and in early 1978 I sent a long list of them off to Frank McLaughlin. He courteously answered most of them and encouraged me to continue writing him. I did, and we quickly struck up a friendship that lasted for the rest of his life.

Correction: something noteworthy did happen in June of 1977—my first professional publication, an article on contrast masking color negatives, appeared in Petersen's Photographic, the big photography-craft magazine in the US (circulation: 300,000+). It was an article Bob Nadler at Camera 35 had wanted, but it had taken me a couple of years to get around to writing it and by that time Bob had moved on. That taught me an important lesson—never, ever put off writing an article that an editor has asked for! I sent the orphaned article to Karen Sue Geller at Petersen's, who bought it and launched my writing career.

As I wrote back in Part 1, one of the reasons I had a five-part series for Petersen's Photographic, "Dye Transfer for Beginners," in 1980, was so that no one else would ever have to go through the hell I went through climbing learning curves I didn't even know were there when I started. There was a second reason. I was scheming.

I met up with Bob Nadler in early 1978 when he was in San Francisco on a book tour. On hearing of my success in learning how to make dye transfer prints, he told me that Kodak was thinking seriously about killing off the process or, at the very least, eliminating shipments of anything less than professional-lab quantities of supplies. Think thousands to tens of thousands of current-dollars minimum orders. That would eliminate the likelihood of anyone new taking up the process—a slower path to demise, but no less certain.

That would not do. With Frank's off-the-record and sometimes tacit support, I approached Petersen's later that year with the idea of a five-part series on making dye transfer prints. Karen had also heard the rumors and said she'd be on board with me doing that...but only if I could guarantee supplies would be available in reader-affordable quantities. I said I could. Technically, that wasn't true at that moment.

Okay, nothing technical about it.

My then-partner Terry and I made annual driving trips cross-country each fall, so a few months later I was in Rochester meeting Frank for the very first time. I told him that he could tell Kodak that Petersen's had "committed" (nudge nudge, wink wink) to running a series on dye transfer. Frank was a loyal Kodak employee, but he was more loyal to dye transfer. Our co-conspiracy worked. Kodak management bought it and canceled their plans for discontinuing or drastically restricting product availability.

"Dye Transfer for Beginners," Part 1 of 5, appeared in January of 1980. Through a scheduling SNAFU (Paul Farber's, not Karen's), Part 2 did not appear in the February issue but was delayed until March. The magazine got no fewer than five letters from readers asking what had happened to the second installment, which was incredible!

I know how funny that sounds in these days of instant Internet communication. It was different back then. When all correspondence with magazines was by mail and there was no such thing as a "Web presence," letters from readers were few and far between. It was significant when an article got even two letters from readers. Five? That was unheard of. We had a hit on our hands and dye transfer was safe for another few years.

It was my first joust with Kodak. It wasn't going to be my last by any means, and I won them all, save at the very last. Okay, a few beyond the very last. Yes, friends, more dirt will be dished. Stay tuned to this channel.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dave: "Ctein, Thank you for writing this series! Such interesting tidbits about the dye transfer process, along with a fortuitous series of events that allowed you to learn the process and practice it for years. The columns read as though they were part of fictional story, but you persevered by learning the process, asking questions to your contact at Kodak, figuring out a way to prolong the manufacture of dye transfer materials, and more to come! Even though I know nothing about dye transfer, this series fascinates me with all the twists and turns of the story. I commend you for continuing after the first results were disastrous and expensive! I can almost imagine how you felt when that expensive box of film was depleted without a decent print—'traumatic amnesia' indeed! I'm eager to read the next part in your series."

Sunday Support Group for that Rare Darkroom Rat: Enlarger Dealz

You're not looking to buy a brand new B&W enlarger.

Know how I know? Because no one is looking to buy a brand new B&W enlarger.

But consider this. For people who want to practice old-fashioned, obsolescent film / analog / traditional / opto-chemical B&W photography (whatever you want to call it) from soup to nuts, start to finish, it's not the film or the chemicals or the cameras but the enlarger that might well be the bottleneck going forward.

The reason is that an enlarger is one of those devices that need to be serviced and supported by the company that made it. You might need different accessories as your needs change (different lamphouses, negative carriers, lensboards, etc.); parts might break and need replacing; bits that wear out or age (bulbs, electronic components) might wear out or age and require service. It might seem simple to buy a disused enlarger on the secondary market, but you'll probably have to choose among dinged-up, dusty devices more or less in pieces in a box, which could turn out to be missing who knows what part or accessory that you will end up needing to get the danged thing up and working. 

So why not just buy new then? Several companies are still selling new enlargers. One—one of the best (I've always been a fan)—is LPL of Tokyo, which here in the United States always sold its products rebranded by importers. Saunders or Omega, principally. You can buy one new.

...But there's a hitch. They've become shockingly expensive. In 1983, the condenser version and the dichroic (color head) version of LPL's mid-line 670 model, a.k.a. the 7700, sold for $289 and $459 respectively. (Source? A page that includes a review by none other than Ctein!) B&H's current prices (and these aren't much higher than the factory-direct prices from Tokyo) are $2,473.95 for the condenser model and a rather eye-widening $5,595.99 for the colorhead model, without lenses (the significance of that last comment will become apparent below). That's not for LPL's best enlarger, mind you. That's for its mid-line good-enuff everyday meat-and-potatoes medium-format / 35mm model. I don't know about you, but in my area pretty decent used cars fetch those prices. Unless you're rich—not wealthy, not well-off, but rich—it would be silly to pay that, considering those enlargers will very soon have a residual value of a few hundred dollars or pounds if you're lucky.

So if you're not rich, you're pretty much forced into buying used. New is out.

Easter egg
Or is it? Maybe not absolutely, at the present moment at least. Should you happen to fall in that fraction of a fraction of a fraction of Photo Dawgs who might actually consider buying a new B&W enlarger, here are two opportunities for you.

One is that Freestyle is closing out the Kaiser VP 9005 condenser enlarger. That one's for printing B&W with manually-inserted gelatin VC filters, but it's made in Germany, it's beautiful, and if you're a home hobbyist you won't be the least bit inconvenienced by having to use gelatin filters. And you can get it right now for only $759.99. That's without a lens. How great a deal is that? Great enough that I'd write this post on TOP about it even though none of you are in the market for it! Just on the off chance of making one fellow Dektol-breather out there blissfully happy. Fingers crossed.

And if you want one of those highly inflated LPLs? There's something for you too. An overstock outfit in Brooklyn has nine LPL 670 enlargers—again, the plain-jane condenser version—brand new in sealed boxes, for $849 or best offer.

That sounds maybe a tad dear compared to a used one (remember, new they cost $2,474), but there's an Easter egg in the box. These are kits—each of the nine enlargers comes bundled—packaged—with a lens. What might be easy for anyone but darkroom rats to miss is that the lens is no ordinary lens. It's Rodenstock's very best lens for 35mm, the Apo-Rodagon-N 50mm ƒ/2.8, a lens that alone sells for $671.99 new (and can be used on your digital camera too, by the way). Even on eBay they go for $300–400. You might have heard of legendary enlarging lenses for 35mm such as the Apo-El-Nikkor 105mm and the Leitz Focotar 40mm, but I know people who have compared them directly who say that the Apo-Rodagon-N 50mm can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those legendary paragons of yore. It's the 35mm enlarging lens that graced my last darkroom. I chose it by buying three top enlarging 35mm enlarging lenses and pitting them directly against each other in careful tests. With those nine enlargers now on eBay, it's in the box.

Enough of this now, this fine Sunday. You might think this post is off-topic (!) since so few people do their own darkroom work now, and even fewer don't already have their own schtuff. But while it might not be of practical value, it's fun, for me anyway, even if in a nostalgic sort of way.

Mike

"Sunday Support Group" is an eclectic series of discursive digressions on topics random and sundry, offered in the hope they might help various subsets of our readership in their work and their ambitions, or that they might contribute to our mental, spiritual, psychic or physical contentment. It appears, as the title suggests, on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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Patrick Medd: "Eccentric as it may seem I'm currently in the process of building my own darkroom. This will be the fourth time that I have had access to a darkroom but the first time that it will be a dedicated room in my house. I have more than one enlarger lying around in bits but this time I need to be able to print 4x5 and so I'm looking for an enlarger that can do that.

"Here in the UK the original manufacturers of De Vere enlargers are still active in some form (www.deveresecondhanddarkroom.com) and will supply you with a refurbished enlarger which they can still service (for the moment—I don't know how many young people starting out in life these days are thinking 'I know, I'll train to be an enlarger engineer—a job for life if ever I saw one'). So that's the route I'm heading down. Obviously it all costs money, but it's a sound investment and there's no doubt in my mind I'll always be able to get my cash back out of the project  ;-)  ."

adamct: "The interesting thing for me is that unlike others who may have wanted an enlarger in the past but don't want one now, I don't want one now, but am likely to want one in the future (when, of course, a new one in good condition will be impossible to find)! I got started in film photography, but I got in just as digital was taking off. I was a young lawyer, working long hours at a law firm. I never did my own printing—after using labs for a while, I eventually bought a film scanner and did the hybrid thing for a while. But I've always wanted to try analog printing myself, and it is exactly the kind of thing I can see myself getting into...when I retire. At that point I will have the time and space to do whatever I want. But now? Even I can't justify buying one now (and I can justify just about any foolhardy purchase related to my hobbies!). As a certain photo-blogger is prone to say: 'Oh well...'"

A certain photo blogger replies: At the various darkroom magazines I worked for, I always identified a healthy subset of the audience as what I dubbed "re-entry photographers," borrowing the term from what used to be called the women's liberation movement—a re-entry woman was a woman who re-entered the workforce after her children were grown and had left home. Re-entry photographers were just what you're talking about: people (mostly guys of course, but a significant number of women) who had maybe taken a photo course in high school or college and had always appreciated it and wanted to do more of it, but had to wait until retirement to do so. The magazines always fretted about the average age of their subscribers—it was very high, in the 50s age range—but that was because advertisers have a knee-jerk preference for younger audiences. I never worried about it because I understood that darkroom work as a home hobby was much more viable for people who had both money and time (not to mention homes!), and that meant retirees to a large extent.

It's fair to say most people didn't like darkroom work. From my own audience here, my rough estimate is that one out of ten photographers who had to do darkroom work in the past enjoyed the experience and the craft of it, and the other nine thought it was a chore and are glad not to have to do it any more. But I was one of the 10%. For people like me, it was enjoyable, relaxing, and rewarding. But we were always a minority, and now very much more so. Still, I continue to think it's a viable hobby for the few people it suits. The fact that it's difficult and involved isn't a drawback if you enjoy it and are satisfied by it; my brother facets gemstones, for heaven's sake—he taught himself to do it when he was 14—and I know a guy who makes fine knives. Neither of those things are easy or convenient, and neither are necessary in order to end up with jewelry or a knife!

Bill Bresler: "Buying a new enlarger? It's tough to give them away. Nothing sadder than the sight of a 23C with color head sitting at the curb on garbage day. The college where I taught a photo class or two for 16 years shut down their darkroom. Fifteen Beselers and a couple of 4x5 Omegas went into the dumpster."

Curtis: "Dear Mike, If I remember correctly, you first recommended the Kaiser enlarger a couple of years ago. And, you are right, it is indeed a wonderful piece of kit. I bought one earlier this year and set up a tiny darkroom in the back of my wife's studio space. It's just for fun—really, I just play around trying to channel my inner James Fee and enjoy having the chance to make art in the same space as my wife. So, thank you for these niche recommendations!"

Mike adds: Interview with the late James Fee by Dean Brierly. (Note that in the picture of James he's standing in front of a Beseler 23C as mentioned by Bill above.)

Steve: "Mike, I’ve been reading your blog for years. I loved the Leica challenge and ended up with an M3 with a 5cm Summicron Dual Range lens. My situation has changed after several years of digital and I’m ready to get back in the game. I bought the LPL enlarger. I’m looking forward to a long Wisconsin winter in the darkroom. Do you have any suggestions for a darkroom instruction book? I’m that 50 something year old guy who took a few college photography classes. Thanks for all your posts."

Mike replies: Big question! I learned from David Vestal's The Craft of Photography, and was pleased to get to know David personally in later years and to enlist him as a columnist for Photo Techniques magazine. The standard (and simplest) instruction book back in the day was Henry Horenstein's Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual (third edition); Henry was at Harvard back then and is now at RISD (pronounced "RIZZ-dee," the Rhode Island School of Design). A personal favorite was Jack Coote's book for Ilford, Ilford Monochrome Darkroom Practice: A Manual of Black & White Processing & Printing (third edition). I used Ilford's fixing technique (and Ilford papers) and found Jack's discussions of variable-contrast paper and practices helpful. There are books that take you much deeper into the arcana, but save those for later. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter There.

By the way, you didn't ask, but I'd recommend starting out with Ilford RC papers. They're very good, they have excellent permanence, and they're much easier to use than fiber base papers that you have to run a washing routine on and that really need to be flattened in an expensive drymount press after drying. After washing you can immerse RC prints briefly in a bath of distilled water and a few drops of Edwal LFN (four ounces will last you till about 2050) and hang them from their corners with wooden clothespins to dry. I'd also recommend liquid film and paper developers...saves you the chore having to mix powdered chemicals. Aside from that, the best advice with B&W film is something John Szarkowski himself once said in my hearing: "expose enough and don't develop too much."

Not THAT Kind of Enlarger, Please

This is just a question for the 6% of the 11%—the 6% of you who still do your own developing and printing out of the 11% of you who still shoot film—but hey, we care about everyone. Just wondering—if you're a member of that small minority of readers who liked darkroom work, either now or in the past, did you ever have a favorite enlarger? I'd love to hear about it.

Illustration courtesy Darkroom enlarger.svg

This is really stupid, but eBay is now inserting "sponsored" suggestions at the beginning and end of every page of search results—that means ads—and guess what the sponsored ads are for when you search the term enlarger? Well, you can guess. Insert your own joke here.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Chris: "Every Sunday morning for 15 years in my photo club's darkroom I fired up the Durst M605, with Schneider and Meopta lenses. It was my favourite enlarger because that's all there was. But I did get to love it, and I miss it sorely now I only do digital, because I knew exactly what I could get from it, without having to rely on a piece of software."

William Schneider: "An Omega D2 that I purchased at a surplus sale for $62 back in the 1970s is still in my darkroom. It isn't the most feature-rich enlarger but its utter simplicity makes it very easy to repair and improve. I've added things like smooth-running ball-bearings to replace the plastic lift bushings. I fabricated a very stout baseboard reinforced underneath with 2x2 aluminum angle, and made a filter drawer that worked with my VC-specific cold light head. Oh, yes. I added a good-luck supervisor that has overseen a thousand prints. With all those personal touches, I know that Omega D2 inside and out and can't give it up."

Ilford Multigrade RC Deluxe Photo Paper

Written by Oren Grad

What goes around comes around: What’s so special about the new Multigrade RC Deluxe paper?
Ilford’s most widely-used darkroom paper, Multigrade RC Deluxe, has been revised for the first time in 25 years. (The previous version was called Multigrade IV RC Deluxe, typically known by darkroom workers as "Multigrade IV RC" or "MGIVRC"; the new paper is called simply Multigrade RC Deluxe, dropping the IV. We're abbreviating this to "MGRC.")

In its announcement, Harman Technology noted that the emulsion has been redesigned “from the ground up.” An accompanying technical sheet with a detailed comparison of the new MGRC with the Multigrade IV RC paper it will be replacing makes clear that, as was the case back in 1994 when Multigrade IV replaced Multigrade III, the update represents a major change in the characteristics of the product. The differences will materially affect both printing workflow and print appearance.

Through most of the contrast filtration range—00 to 3—the new paper is slightly faster than the old. However, unlike prior generations of Ilford Multigrade papers, the new MG RC loses little speed at grades 4 and 5. No longer will it be necessary to double exposures when transitioning from grade 3 to grade 4.

Paper contrast has changed as well. Grade for grade, from 00 to 3, the new paper is contrastier than the old. At grade 4 they are matched, while at grade 5 the new paper is slightly softer. The overall range of contrasts achievable has been slightly reduced, with the extremes of the range slightly truncated at both ends. DMax has been slightly increased, from 2.05 to 2.15, and the color of the silver image has been changed from the neutral/cool to neutral/warm. The new paper is also said to be more responsive to both selenium and sepia toning.

No more kink
But most important of all from my perspective, the shape of the characteristic curve has apparently changed. To appreciate the significance of this, we need to take a brief detour to understand what was distinctive about the predecessor product. The tabular-grain films that began to appear in the late 1980s—Kodak T-Max 100, 400 and P3200, and Ilford 100 and 400 Delta—tended to have straighter characteristic curves with increased highlight contrast compared to popular older-generation films such as Kodak Tri-X. They also tended to be more sensitive to changes in development time and temperature. There is, to be sure, considerable variation within the breed. For example, with suitable choice of developer, T-Max 100 can be made to have a gentle shoulder in its curve, and the Ilford T-grain films were somewhat more forgiving in their response to development changes compared to the T-Max films. On the other hand, T-Max 400 was relatively difficult to tame, and tended to produce especially “hot” negatives with steep highlight contrast and a very high maximum density, particularly in the hands of less-skilled photographers. In the hands of typical users, these films often produced negatives that were relatively challenging to print on the black and white papers of the day.

Multigrade IV RC Deluxe was designed to make it easier to print these negatives, especially for less-experienced photographers, for commercial laboratories where efficiency was critical, and for those more experienced photographers who preferred to print relatively “straight” with a minimum of local manipulation. But the way it achieved this was heavy-handed: the characteristic curve has a distinct “kink” in the midrange, with contrast becoming abruptly lower in the upper midrange and extending into the highlights. This does wonders for getting the full tonal scale of “hot” negatives on to paper without darkroom heroics. But it often has pernicious effects on negatives made with shouldered films such as Tri-X, resulting in prints with excessively flat, lifeless upper-middle tones.

Now back to the new MGRC. Subtleties in the characteristic curve can be a bit difficult to parse in Ilford’s charts because of the lack of fine detail and the way the curves for the different contrast grades are superimposed. However, it looks as though the kink is gone. The text accompanying the curves refers to “a straighter curve shape and more uniform contrast response.”

Deluxe delight
For those who have tailored their choice of film, exposure and development to the characteristics of MGIVRC, and especially for those who have relied on it to tame “hot” negatives, the new paper’s combination of a straighter characteristic curve and contrast that is higher through most of the filtration range is likely to pose some challenges.

But as a die-hard user of Tri-X roll film, I’m delighted to see this. Back in the day, Multigrade III RC Deluxe had been my main paper for RC printing. But MGIV RC was such a poor match to my negatives that after 1994 I moved on to other papers, keeping some MGIVRC on hand primarily for occasional problem solving with especially difficult negatives.

I’m looking forward to testing the new MGRC Deluxe; if the published technical data is an accurate guide, I can see myself using a fair amount of it.

Oren

My longtime friend Oren Grad, polymath of all things photographic and a gentleman and scholar, is the reason TOP exists—it was Oren who suggested I try my hand at blogging when my life was at loose ends back in 2005. —Mike the Ed.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Oren Grad. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Sal Santamaura: "Re 'I’m looking forward to testing the new MGRC Deluxe.' Me too. I just ordered a box and will soon print some negatives (made with the annual special order 6-1/2 x 8-1/2 HP5 Plus that recently arrived) on it. My use of that film and format are both Oren-inspired. Thanks, Oren.  :-) "

Dave Karp: "Yeah, Oren is the reason I own a whole plate camera too. I got to HP5+ on my own though. Oren, are you going to look at the fiber base papers too?"

hugh crawford: "But but but it's RC."

Mike replies: I believe I started making prints in 1980, when I was 23. I still have most of them. Know what has held up the best? Ilford RC prints. Even the carefully toned and archivally washed fiber-base fine-art prints look just slightly dingy after all these years. Many of my Ilford RC workprints, on the other hand, look just like they did the day they were made. Just sayin'.

New Film? And the Rising Sun

The word on the street is that there's a new film coming from Ilford, to be announced next Thursday. Watch this space.

What I want in my secret heart of hearts is a new film camera. I've long envisioned Pentax (now owned by Ricoh) launching an updated version of the classic Spotmatic, with a few features updated to modern spec. Such as, a 100% viewfinder, K-mount, TTL metering, an aperture-priority setting on the shutter-speed dial, and one new feature...a spot-metering button! Which the original was supposed to have (hence the name) but never did. The camera should not have anything on it that any modern or digital camera could do better. Just what is essential for exposing one frame of 35mm film beautifully and enjoyably. No motor drive, no flash. I guess a self-timer is okay, as long as it was mechanical. (Would it be possible to design a camera to use only B&W film? I guess that's not possible....) 

Great attention would have to be paid to two things: the visual "snap" of the viewing screen for easiest manual focusing, and superlative smoothness for the film wind lever. It should be very quiet*, and have built-in diopter correction, because add-on diopter lenses can be lost and wouldn't be available in the future.

In my mind the new camera would be called the "Rising Sun" and would have a small Japanese flag enameled where the marque name usually goes on the front of the pentaprism. It would be deliberately an homage to the classic metal, mechanical, manual (MMM) cameras of Japan's glorious past. I once defined the "Age of the MMM SLR" as being from 1959, when the Nikon F was launched, to 1978, when the electronified Canon A-1 came along. Although the A-1 seems pretty simple and straightforward by today's standards. Maybe 1985, then, as an endpoint?

Asahi, the original parent company of Pentax, launched the first Japanese SLR in 1952, although no Asahi camera was called "Pentax" (originally a model name, not a corporate name) until 1957.

Would a new film SLR for the early 2020s sell?

Well, of course it wouldn't. But it's lovely to imagine it would.

To the honor of Japan!

Mike

P.S. This post sets a record. The first line is the only news, but I just can't put up a post with two sentences in it, a mere 22 words. All that unfulfilled promise activates my loquacity gene. The rest of the post is filler, making this the most unbalanced ratio of content to filler of any TOP post ever. (I know what some of you are thinking. But be nice, now.)

*By the way, the loud shutter on the Pentax LX—its big failing in my book—was a feature, not a bug. In those days pro SLRs were supposed to be loud because models had learned to key to the sound to change poses. You'd get into a rhythm with the model, shoot-pose-shoot-pose. I think it was when the Nikon F4 came out that professionals were complaining the shutter was too quiet...models couldn't hear it.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Eolake Stobblehouse: "I'd love to see a new Spotmatic. In fact it was the gift of a Spotmatic which started me collecting old film cameras."

David Dyer-Bennet: "Well, if you built in an orange or red filter you could at least vastly reduce the camera's utility with color film :-) ! "

Mike replies: That would do it! K2 filter though. To think, I used to rate PX at 64 and put a K2 filter over it. It's a wonder I ever got a sharp photography in anything but full sun.

GKFroehlich: "From my perspective, you've nicely described the Nikon F3! It even has a mechanical shutter speed (1/60, I believe) in case the battery dies. However, it is missing the Japanese flag. By the way, each time I upgraded, I kept a single example of the older MMM (or MM) film camera, so I still own 1 each of the Nikon F2, F3, F4s, and F5. Never bought an F6, and never kept any older digital camera when I upgraded to a newer model."

Rodolfo Canet: "This post truly rings home: I've started digitizing my film photography these days, and all of it was shot with a...Spotmatic F! An example of just a couple hours ago. Nevertheless, my dream is different than yours. I wouldn't go back to 35mm film but the only way to get the 'look' of real medium format (6x6 to 6x9) without robbing a bank would be shooting film, but there's no new cameras to be bought nowadays. I dream of a nice, humanly-priced 6x7 film camera. Yes, I know that something called 'second hand' exists...."