The Online Photographer

Should Every Photographer Try Film Once?

A few comments on all the comments from yesterday...

First of all, I recommended the "Leica as Teacher" exercise for a specific kind of student, namely, the young beginner who is serious and ambitious, as well as willing and able to put a large amount of time and effort into learning photography for a period of at least a year. That's a tiny, tiny minority of all photographers. Secondly, I recommended it as a learning experience—part of that theoretical cohort's education, not a recommendation for ongoing practice. So no one need get in a bother about whether it's "the right tool for the job" or whether there are other ways to accomplish the same results, etc. Those things weren't, and aren't, the point.

But here's the reason for the recommendation: first, because using a manual, mechanical camera with a few simple controls and immediate responsiveness (such as minimal shutter lag with no optical viewfinder blackout) will teach the basics of camera controls and essential shooting skills like no modern electronic camera possibly can. The student would learn things like placing plane of focus and aperture and shutter speed choice rigorously and well. He or she would also be "taught" by the camera to time the exact moment of exposure without viewfinder blackout. Again, it doesn't matter that modern technology can take thirty exposures before the press of the shutter. The point, first, is learning the skill.

Thirdly, I specified B&W film for a specific and considered didactic rationale, and I meant it and I still mean it. It's because intensive drilling in learning to see luminances only—tone, or values, only—with the distraction and decorativeness of color temporarily but absolutely removed, will help most people to see better. And, with the aforementioned manual, mechanical rangefinder, B&W film is the only way to make such seeing the only option, which is essential for the learning process as I've conceived and described it. The fact that you "can" convert a color file to B&W in post is absolutely immaterial in this case: that just means you won't absolutely have to learn how to see in B&W. Again, I'm asserting that it's valuable for learning and I believe that. I believe it would pay permanent dividends for the rest of the photographer's working life.

These are visualizing skills and drills in fundamentals, invaluable for education. Naturally they do not need to be permanent choices, and no one's claiming they should be.

Here's my answer
But then, on to the question—should every photographer try film once?

Considering the educational experience of trying older methods (i.e., film), in my opinion it comes down to two things that experience tells me most students would enjoy and be interested in. One is looking through a view camera. There is no better way to comprehend what a lens is doing, and to understand, viscerally and with immediacy, what photography is capturing. The world seen on a groundglass is captivating, and enchanting. The other is seeing a print come up in the developer, an experience that a wide range of photographers remember as, if not formative, then at least a meaningful landmark of their introductions to the mystery and wonder of the art*.

Both of these experiences can be provided merely in an educational context. There's no need to make every student buy a view camera, and certainly no sense in recommending that every student learn darkroom printing. And of course, it should go without saying that it makes zero sense to suggest that anyone should build their own darkroom in this day and age. (Unless they're doing the "Leica as Teacher" year, but not necessarily even then—Ilford XP2 in an M camera, commercially processed and proofed and occasionally printed, would work fine for that.)

When I was a photography teacher (in the '80s), I provided both these experiences to my students. I brought my own view camera to school and let the students look at each other through it—it was unfailingly an excited, animated class that was memorable for most students, even casual ones who didn't have any real or abiding interest in becoming photographers. I also made a set of "perfect" negatives and, as a class, we went into the darkroom on the very first day of class and everyone made a test strip and a print—that was also a day that made students happy and "nourished their enthusiasm" in Ansel Adams's phrase.

These days, I might have students look through a 4x5 or 5x7 view camera in several settings indoors and then out, and then make a contact print from a pre-made "perfect" 4x5 or 5x7 negative. Depending on the facilities, that could take as little as two class periods.

Beyond that, though, for those not doing the "Leica as Teacher" year, I wouldn't see much need to do more than that with film. Unless of course you want to.

But those things are just cool, and would be fun and informative for most any younger photographer to experience (and it's too bad most of them will never be able to). That's not "just me"—I've heard variations on these themes from hundreds, maybe even thousands of photographers, across many years.

Mike

*We might add to this the experience of seeing a well-made large negative on a light box before making a positive of it (seeing Paul Strand's negatives was where Ansel had his own epiphany). A further exercise might be making and using a pinhole camera, as several readers suggested.

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Piotr B.: "Looks like I got pulled into shooting film, and I blame you.  :-)

"Your most recent post about rangefinder cameras (the one that featured the Mamiya 6 among others) sparked a new flame of interest in me. I always kinda wanted to try film and was always a bit intrigued by the mysterious beast that is a rangefinder. Why mysterious? I never used one. I even had no idea how the viewfinder works until very recently.

"And once I started reading more, I knew I'm in trouble. That Mamiya triggered my GAS and happens to be a killer combo. Film? Check. Rangefinder? Check. Medium format? Check. Wept a bit when I found out how much it costs. Found some other cool cameras and wept some more. After more digging and research, found that Fujica can be had for reasonable lump of money. So I'll settle for that.

"For the time being, I just bought an old, low end TLR (never used one before, BTW) on the cheap and just took out my first roll of film. What a weird experience, looking through that 'viewfinder.' And needing to wait to see my photos, even weirder.

"I liked what my failed attempt at OC/OL/OY challenge did to my skills, but I noticed I fell back to bad habits with the convenience of modern digital cameras (I did the challenge with Sigma DP2M, which, while digital, imposes limitations that are draconian for someone used to modern cameras). So I'm hoping that going film will do me more good.

"And since I decided to torture myself with clunky mechanical contraptions, I also thought it would be a good idea to come up with some kind of a project to give this whole experiment some meaning. I'm kinda sick of shooting just to try to take some pretty pictures.

"But in the end, I consider the whole affair to be a learning experience. I just hope I will actually learn something, as opposed to realizing this whole photography thing was just a meaningless pastime of a bored man who really just wanted to play with some toys.  :-)

"So in time, I will either thank you or curse you.  :-)  "

Michael Ferron: "Though I started with digital I kept bumping into these B&W film forums. The talk of chemistry, technique, exposure and times fascinated me so in 2004 I bought a beautiful Nikon FM2 and gave film a try.

"Never looked back. I just recently purchased a Toyo Field 45 and am really enjoying the experience. Oh, the question? No, I would not recommend shooting film to anyone. It's very time consuming. But If the calling is heard the film will find them, says the 'on occasion' wise man (me)."

Paul De Zan: "Due to all of the rangefinder and film blather on this very fine free website recently, I've just loaded my M4 with Tri-X for the first time in about nine years. On one level: what a drag! I could have taken 36 pictures with any digital camera in the time it took to put film in this relic. On a different level: what a treat to handle this magnificent hunk of metal, like traveling back to the pre-electronic era, to the way the world once was. Pleasant as it is, this has zip to do with actually taking pictures and only half-zip to do with conventional film photography. Without the chemical darkroom process, which is absolutely going to be a bridge too far for most people these days, there isn't any real connection to the traditional silver halide-based experience. I'll shoot a roll, get it processed and scan to Lightroom; anything good will end up on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the experience of working with a mechanical camera and its manual focus and exposure control (which you can do with a digital camera if you're so inclined), it's very nearly the same thing as digital workflow, just with added cost and some (possibly gratifying) delay before seeing your results. Lovely as the relics are, especially to those of a certain age, it doesn't take a lot of Aristotelian pondering to understand why film was swept away as quickly as it was."

David Aiken: "The 'every' in the question mandates that the answer be 'no.' If the answer were 'yes' the statement being questioned would be a rule and as we all know, rules are made to be broken.

"The question is really how useful is it to shoot film as one element in your learning process. I started out shooting black-and-white film in the days before digital, and then I dropped photography for a long period. When I came back to it I bought a digital camera and discovered two things. First, I could no longer 'see' in black and white. Seeing luminance is an acquired skill as you point out, but it's one you lose if you don't keep using it, and I wonder how long you would retain it if you just shot black-and-white film for a year as a learning experience. Second, that I had to unlearn a lot of things which had become ingrained and which I found myself doing automatically. For example it took time to get out of the habit of exposing for the shadows and to start exposing for the highlights instead, to learn to stop worrying about crushing the shadows and to worry instead about preserving highlights. If you're going to end up shooting digital, then learning to shoot by shooting film teaches some wrong lessons as well as teaching some good lessons.

"I have to admit that much of my photographic 'taste' was formed by my experience shooting black-and-white film. Even though I now shoot digital colour, I still find myself processing for the mid tones and shadow detail with good overall contrast, and less saturation than many people seem to go for. But that sometimes makes me wonder whether I'm trying to recapture the look of film rather than trying to get the best that I could from digital. Film and digital have different strengths and weaknesses and I don't think that trying to get the best of one of them from the other is the way to get the best result that the other has to offer. Are the people who eventually get the best out of digital going to be those who have no experience of film? All of the photographers I regard as really getting the results I most admire from film had experience with film only (OK, Cartier-Bresson and maybe some others had experience with painting and drawing but no other photographic medium than film).

"Can experience shooting film be detrimental to getting the best results from digital? If it can, then how much experience with film is too much experience with film? Should it be avoided entirely or, for example, should those who do try shooting film shoot colour slide stock where they would have to learn to preserve the highlights rather than exposing for the shadows as you learn with black-and-white film? What is the best film experience for those who are going to shoot digital?

"I have no answers, just a lot of 'what if' questions. The best advice I can offer to anyone wanting to learn how to photograph is to try what interests you and to see what you learn from the experience but stay open to the opportunities that present themselves. You don't have to take advantage of every unanticipated opportunity but unanticipated opportunities that you do take up can become some of the most important steps in your life."

Don't 'Should' All Over Me

I've been following a thread over at DPReview that asks, "Should every photographer try shooting film at least once in their life?"

I'm on record saying that I think one of the best ways to learn photography is to shoot B&W film in a classic rangefinder Leica with one lens for a year, as an exercise. But that recommendation (despite the fact that a surprising number of people did it) is increasingly impractical.

So is there any reason to try film once, if you never have?

Looked at one way, my entire history in photography consists of trying stuff—all kinds of stuff—just to experience it, to demystify it for myself, broadening my horizons. Call it "deliberate dilettantism." It's been the way I've learned about the art of photography, rummaging around in the many rooms of its rambling mansion. So if I had never tried film, I'd try it just to try it.

I'll add a twist to it. I think the one thing everyone should try just once—if you're going to shoot film just once for the experience—is to shoot film with a view camera. If I were teaching photography today, I'd have every student spend a few hours with a view camera and make one successful shot with it so they could experience that. That would clean a broad window with a view into photography's origins, and into the experience of early photographers. (Of course I'd help them with technique, to help ensure success.) That would be worth the experience.

What's your take? Be sure to mention whether you actually have ever shot film before or not—a necessary context for your opinion!

Mike

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Mike Plews: "Right on. Digital photography is wonderful and I don't want to go back but I also feel sorry for photographers who have never stood over a tray and watched an image come up. It's what hooked me back in 1962 and it still gives me a thrill.

"Try taking a view camera somewhere photographers gather, like a national park. When you come out from under the dark cloth don't be surprised if there are folks waiting to politely ask if they can take a look.

"Thanks for the prod Mike. I may just have to dust off the family Toyo."

Nathan DeGargoyle: "'Try everything once, except folk dancing and incest.' —Thomas Beecham."

William Schneider: "Once upon a time at Ohio University, a regular assignment in beginning darkroom classes required usage of a view camera instead of what most students already owned—film SLRs. The purpose was to teach them the basics of photography, and to open aesthetic doors by using a slow approach. One person that I know confessed hatred for those assignments. To avoid using a view camera, he used slow, grainless film in his 35mm SLR on a tripod, developed carefully, and made enlarged 'contact sheets' that included darkroom-created sheet-film borders to fool the professor. He might have learned as much with this labor-intensive workaround as he would have by just using the view camera. In that case, the assignment still worked."

Mark Cotter: "As an English teacher who has also taught photography to 16–18 year olds in the UK, I agree that shooting film at least once is a good idea. It's instructional about the history of the medium, makes students appreciate what they can do in Photoshop, and makes some good links to those PS skills and the darkroom. A colleague of mine (who also taught the same students) was all for experimentation in PS. I took the line: can it be done in the darkroom? Students did more of the latter and less of the weird and wonderful after developing and learning to print their own film.

"As for using a view camera? It's one thing I haven't done and I have always wanted to learn how one worked. I see it as a gap in my knowledge of how the medium works."

Steve Jacob: "Life is short, and there are so many things I should do (apparently). So I have decided to prioritise them. This one is now penciled in for June 2036."

Ed Kirkpatrick: "Building and using pinhole cameras ranging in size from large garbage cans to 35mm film canisters using both photo paper and film taught me more about optics, light, and composition than all the years of using various 'real' cameras combined. I agree, those new to photography should explore film as well but the act of designing and building and using a basic pinhole camera teaches from a different and really hands-on perspective."

Tom Bell: "Well, in this, as with music, I am being led back to the future by my children aged 20 and 25...they both have Pentax ME Supers and now the lovely little Olympus 35 RC rangefinders. They are more patient than their father...and they are making good use of all those lovely Pentax K primes!"

Rod S.: "I shot 35mm film for 20 years, then 6x7cm medium format film for 15 years. For the last six or seven years, I've shot mainly 4x5-inch large format for ancient architecture, my serious subject matter. Over the same time period, I've used digital Fuji (X100, X-Pro1 and X-T1) for perfunctory and non-serious photography.

"With that perspective, here's my take:

"I don't think it's very useful trying film 'just once in your life.' For someone who knows only digital photography, the single experience, or even a few, even under guidance, is likely to be dominated by uncomfortableness at best and inferior results or failure at worst. And they will feel justified in dismissing film photography thereafter because they can now say truthfully that they tried it.

"The big problem with the question is that 'film' and 'film photography' for the vast majority of people consists of shooting rolls of 35mm, or rolls of 120 in the manner of 35mm. Which is, essentially, hand-held point and shoot. In that context, 'film' is just too much like digital with inconvenience added for no substantive benefit.

"Using 4x5 inch large format film for the last six years has transformed my practice and my appreciation of photography. I now routinely achieve results deserving of exhibition. Large format requires a particular focus, a particular discipline, a particular intent. The result itself, with practice, can be a particular look, a combination of formality, resolution, richness of tone. To not experience all that is to a photographer's loss.

"I am disappointed that most photographers are reluctant to swim out beyond the shallow end of the pool and experience a weightless tumble in the deep water. I understand that reluctance because I used to be one of those people. I was wrong.

"Somewhat concerned that my dedication to large format is somehow limiting me, some time ago I bought a used Phase One P45+ digital back and two Schneider Digitar lenses for my Cambo technical camera body. But life since then has been busy, and I'm yet to overcome the technical complexities (digital sensors cannot accept light incident from low angles, so the newer lenses have much smaller useful image circles). It's been easier to buy more large format lenses."

Steve Smith: "There is a similar argument with live sound engineering. I started on analogue mixers and learned digital fairly late in life (50). I'm happy with both. I know a few engineers who have never used analogue and would be confused by it. There is no need for them to use it, but I think it would help with their understanding of how both types work—same with film and digital."

Steve Caddy: "I did the OCOLOY exercise as prescribed, with an M6 and a 35mm ƒ/2, and it really was a great teacher.

"There are a certain lessons that are brought home by being forced to work slow—with a very simple, very manual, very direct camera (a view camera just takes it to the logical end).

"The first three months of that year produced many of the worst pictures I've ever taken, and it was particularly cruel to look forward to a shot that I thought would be great only to find out I'd screwed it up somehow (or the subject had blinked) days later, but toward the end I had learned to be one with that little camera and was consistently producing the best stuff that I'd ever shot. You ruined me for other cameras that year, Mike, and I've been condemned to the M system (now digital) ever since.

"There are other lessons that are learned much faster by working fast and being able to think, try, see and repeat—that build the experience of cause and effect. Estimating exposure by eye, then checking the meter, then checking a test shot (and seeing a histogram) a few times a day is much more instructive than estimating the exposure, checking the meter and waiting days to seeing the test image and comparing it to some abstract notes. It's just torturous.

"I never fell in love with the darkroom process in the way that many people talk about—the magic of seeing the image appear was nice, but never compelled me—but do remember feeling that the physical presence of photographs and film, and being able to 'make' them, had a certain slightly awesome power in it. I felt that long before digital hit the scene.

"I'm on the fence as to whether everyone should shoot film at least once, but I feel very strongly that everyone should make their artistic practice a physical one, at least for a while. I don't think you can really make a book without making a physical dummy, or a physical flat plan. And I suspect that physical editing, with little prints on a wall, is superior in many many many ways to the digital version. The digital way is faster, but I'm not sure it's more efficient in terms of a time/quality equation.

"Print. Print. Print."

Canon Discontinues Last Film Camera

Canon Camera has quietly announced that it has "decided to end sales" of its last available film camera, the once pro-level EOS-1v.

As I understand it (as explained to me by a high level Canon employee a long time ago), when a camera company decides to keep a "legacy" product in stock, what happens is that one last large run is made, and then the product is sold out of NOS (new old stock), with the outflow regulated by gradually raising the price. With demand ebbing at the same time price is rising, the NOS supply can last for quite a long time, meaning that the product remains "available new" for years longer than an ordinary product lifespan. There's no way of knowing when the last "new" EOS 1v's were manufactured, but chances are good is was quite a long time ago.

All things considered, as with Kodachrome, it's quite admirable that the company managed to keep this product available for so long.

Canon also announced (if my reading of the auto-translation is correct) that it will entertain service requests until 2025, but that repairs might have to be refused after 2020 if parts that are needed have been depleted.

Canon, then called Precision Optical Industry Co. Ltd., created its first film camera prototype in 1934. According to Wikipedia, "The name Canon comes from [the] Buddhist bodhisattva Guan Yin (観音, Kannon in Japanese), previously transliterated as Kuanyin, Kwannon, or Kwanon in English."

Canon film cameras are shown and listed at the Camera Hall of the Canon Camera Museum (online).

Mike
(Thanks to Canon Rumors via Phil A.)

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Paulo Bizarro: "This was the epitome of the EOS 1 ethos. I remember seeing the camera ina shop and thinking: I got to have it. It was the only camera that elicited this type of reaction with me."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Around 2009 or 2010 I bought a (well) used EOS 1v just to get the idea of how the 1D cameras evolved. I only shot about 5–10 rolls through it but boy it sure felt solid and had that press-camera durability just like the 1Ds I was using in the day. (I still have the 1v, in fact, lying sadly dormant.)

"I’ve read it reported elsewhere that the last 1v was made in 2008."

McD: "My favorite camera...ever."

If You're Looking for that Classic Film Look, Try Classic Film

Friend-o'-TOP Steve Rosenblum wrote yesterday:

For those who like the look of older motion picture black and white negative film, Eastman "Double X" negative film (5222) can be purchased rolled into 35mm canisters from places like the Film Photography Project. They buy large reels of the motion picture film and then load it into 35mm canisters for sale. There are a number of articles and forum posts online about it as well as images on Flickr. This film stock was used in Schindler's List, Casino Royale and many other films to achieve that classic look. It was introduced in 1959. I hope to try it myself soon.

Very interesting! I did not know any of that.

Double X (which originally preceded Tri-X) is sold in batches of 19 rolls for $133 or as single rolls for $7. There are over 14,000 "examples" on Flickr, but see below.

Note that there's no "magic" B&W film—the "look" of a B&W film is dependent on how you handle it, and your own judgement.

B&W photos will look different if they are scanned, scanned with a curve adjustment, or printed on paper. Photo paper has a sensitometric curve of its own, and the film curve and paper curve were originally designed to be complementary. I don't know enough about B&W cinematography to know how film shot for movies was made into projection copies and how tones were handled in the process, so I can't tell you about that. But with stills, the result online is that very often when you see B&W JPEGs from film, you're not seeing the film as it was intended to look and as it looked back in the "classic" days of film photography—you're seeing the film response curve only without the necessary paper response curve added. This typically leads to an ugly, "soot and chalk" rendition of tones that, very sadly, is now coming to be thought of "the classic B&W look." To believe that, viewers need to be "tone-blind" just as some people are "tone-deaf."

Just as important is the "FDP combination" you choose and the way you process the negative. "FDP" stands for film-developer-paper. All three have an effect on tonality. Generally, even with "variable-contrast" paper, the highlight tonality is fixed and doesn't change much with changes in grade (filter number), so it's essential to pick a film and developer than gives you the tonality you want from the materials.

And lastly, how you process and print a negative has a large effect on expressive tonalities. The extremes might be what I call "the British style," where the film is underexposed and overdeveloped, with, perhaps, highlights dodged and shadows burned, on the one hand; and, on the other, the "full-scale" look, which requires the opposite—overexposure and underdevelopment, with (perhaps) highlights burned and shadows dodged. The two extremes will result in very different looking photographs even from the same scene shot with the same equipment and the same materials.

We discussed tonally different interpretations of the same image in this post, as well as in many other posts over the years, for instance this one. (I have to note ruefully that both of the linked posts are labeled "Part I" and I don't think either one received a Part II. Damn slacker blogger!)

Personally
Me? With absolutely no disrespect intended toward B&W film fans—more power to you!—my opinion is that you could spend an awful lot of time investigating films, developers, and papers, and learning the craft, to get just the expressive tonality you prefer for your own work...only to then be shoved kicking and screaming back to Square One again by the discontinuation of one of your chosen materials. (It's happened to many famous photographers over the years—from Frederick Evans giving up photography when WWI interrupted the supply of commercial platinum/palladium paper, to Bruce Barnbaum's initial panic when Oriental Seagull stopped being imported from Japan.) It's not that hard to pick a mainstream film, and then learn to scan and apply the proper curve corrections, and I'm not saying it wouldn't be fun to happily experiment semi-randomly with many different kinds of films and developers and papers or scanning methods; knock yourself out. But for me, my preferred rig for B&W is a Fuji X-T1 (available used) with a 23mm ƒ/2 lens and Nik Silver Efex Pro. (The camera and lens aren't really critical, but I'm telling you what I use.) Then you can just diddle and dabble until you get the tonalities just right; and nothing's cast in silver.

Although if I were shooting B&W film, I would certainly make enlarger prints on 8x10 RC paper and then scan those to put my work online, rather than scanning negatives directly.

But suit yourself! Just don't naively think you're going to get old-timey Hollywood movie tonality by buying any particular film, because that is, shall we just say, unlikely.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve)

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Open Mike: New Old Film!

Kodak Alaris, the imaging division of the old Kodak that was spun off to satisfy the demands of the UK pension fund, has continued to produce both black-and-white and color films. Recently it re-introduced the famous T-Max P3200 in 135 size.

Which makes me feel old—I remember when the film was brand new. In fact I remember it before it was brand new—I was an official beta-tester for the T-Max films before they were released to the public.

I don't claim expertise in very many areas, but I was an expert with P3200. Dick Dickerson was the head of B&W products at Kodak when it was developed, and Sylvia Zawadski was the emulsion scientist who led the development team. Dick and Sylvia became consultants after they retired, and I enlisted them to write articles for Photo Techniques magazine. Although the magazine has gone the way of all things by now, they went on to write many articles for it, most of them after I left. Sadly no longer online.

The first thing you should know about P3200 is that it never had an ISO rating—at least in the old days it didn't. It was never submitted for the protocol. Depending on the developer, it tested as either an E.I. 800 or E.I. 1000 film. ("E.I." is short for "exposure index," the proper term for a film speed that does not have an official ISO rating, or for a speed that departs from the official ISO rating. Used in a sentence: "I shoot ISO 400 Kodak Tri-X at E.I. 200." This is not conventional with digital but it's proper with films.) I preferred to shoot it at E.I. 1000. You'll get a little more speed out of it with T-Max Developer, and that works well, but I preferred straight (undiluted) D-76 because I liked the grain better.

Another thing you'll hear is that it has "huge grain" or "golf-ball grain" or other such clichés, but that's not true. Properly used it has visible but pleasant grain structure that can be quite moderate. It can look very nice and perfectly tolerable as long as the film is exposed, processed, and printed correctly. Yes, you can make the grain look excessive and/or ugly if you try, or if you just don't know what you're doing, but then, I could make Tri-X or even 100 speed films look grainy too if I wanted to.

You might also hear that it's not sharp because no grainy film can be sharp. Also not true (or, again, simply ignorant). That's confusing micro resolution with sharpness. Actually P3200 can have a very high subjective impression of sharpness and very good contrast. In fact, grainier films look sharper than fine-grain films, depending on your definition of "sharpness." It just won't resolve as well as a slower film. But the number of pictures that actually need high resolution to either function for their purpose or look good is very low.

Another tip: there's no need to store it in the refrigerator. Makes no difference. But keep it away from stray sources of radiation—the legend was that when Kodak first developed it, they stored the stocks in a disused salt mine to minimize the effects of background radiation! Unconfirmed. But I can tell you that if you pull a little bit of film out of the cassette and set one of the old radioactive Takumars on it in the dark, it will record fog within a few days. It does fog easily, so handle accordingly. Keep it in the can in the camera bag, don't let it roll around loose.

A few recommendations for use:

• Don't shoot with it at E.I. 3200.  :-)

• Develop it immediately after shooting. Silver halide crystals "migrate" in the emulsion after exposure, and many films that  are allowed to sit for long periods of time after exposure lose contrast and edge sharpness and the quality of the grain can become "mealy." This is especially pronounced with P3200. As a test, I shot two rolls of P3200, developed one within the hour, and let the other sit for a year (or was it two? Ah, memory) before developing. The difference was eye-opening. Many B&W films will look their best if processed very promptly—an advantage granted to pros and testers, the only two groups who routinely processed film very soon after exposure even if they didn't know they should.

• Don't bother shooting it in good light. It doesn't do very well outdoors in daylight—at least, I never liked it. Shoot with a slower film in good light and reserve P3200 for "available darkness," where it excels. 

• Be mindful that enlarger light sources can have a large effect on the appearance of a film. Roughly speaking, the range from collimated to diffuse goes: point-source, true condenser, partial condenser, dichroic-style, cold light (actinic/fluorescent). The test I did—and used to have prints for—was that I printed the same Ilford XP2 negative with a Leitz Focomat II (true condenser) and an LPL 4500 (dichroic style). The difference was not subtle at all—the two prints looked like they were made with two completely different films. I suggest light sources at the diffuse end of the range for printing P3200.

• Beware other peoples' developer recommendations—you never know what qualities other people are looking to emphasize. In particular, many people will recommend developers based solely on getting higher speed out of P3200. That's a bad strategy, in my opinion, and anyway it's completely moot now, when you can shoot a high-DR FF camera at ISO 5000 and get excellent B&W. Shoot P3200 for the joy and the beauty of it—it can be a lovely film if skillfully used—and shoot digital if you truly need high ISOs. Back to P3200, try a few developers with it and go with what looks best to you. Or at least I should say, if you try a recommended developer and don't like it, don't give up, try something else.

I'll probably think of a few other things to say as the day goes on, except that I have a full plate today. I'll edit later if anything else occurs to me. I might go out to the barn and crack open a few portfolio cases and see if I can rummage around and find some T-Max P3200 prints to show you. Don't hold your breath.

Oh, and, visitors, you do not have permission to copy this whole post and stick it on a forum somewhere. It's copyrighted and that's a violation of copyright law. You're of course welcome to link back to it if you care to—the URL you can use is:

https://tinyurl.com/y9dfrc92

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. writes about anything he wants, and yes, this is sometimes indistinguishable from any other day. But that's the format and I'm stickin' to it, dang 'er.

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John Camp: "Interesting. Do silver halide crystals also migrate in slower films? What would this mean for the thousands of undeveloped rolls of film supposedly held by Garry Winograd's estate? Are they slowly degenerating, or is the actual problem low enough that it won't make any difference given his style of shooting?"

Mike replies: Actually that's an excellent example. The undeveloped rolls Garry left behind (about 9,000 if memory serves, although my memory for numbers is notoriously bad) when he died in 1984 were developed and proofed under the supervision of John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art with the help of a grant from Walter Elisha of Springs Industries in the late '80s. John presented about two dozen of those pictures at the end of the book Figments from the Real World (the reprint is still available and not too expensive) and if I remember correctly (my copy is out in the barn, alas) you can see even from the reproductions the effects I'm talking about.

Richard Man's Scanning Services

Your fellow TOP reader Richard Man would like you to know about his new commercial scanning service. He offers two tiers, Bulk Scanning and High Quality scanning, and suggests, "Bulk scan your collection, then select the images you wish to make high quality scans of. Best of both worlds!"

For his bulk scanning, mounted slides are scanned using a PowerSlide 3650 with optical 3,600 DPI resolution, and 35mm film is scanned using a Pakon F335 with optical 2,100 DPI resolution.

High quality scans are made with a Hasselblad Imacon 848 Flextight scanner at 6,300 DPI (35mm), 3,200 DPI (medium format), and 2,040 DPI (4x5). Richard says, "the Flextight scans are the highest-quality scan one can make without resorting to drum scanning (which costs 4–6X or more), and the difference between a Flextight image and a drum-scanned image is very minor."

Here's the link. If anyone uses Richard's services (I haven't), by all means report back and let us know how it went!

Mike

(P.S. TOP wasn't paid for this post—just lending a hand.)

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Are Pro Film Cameras the Least Desirable Cameras?

Nikon F5: its capabilities are no longer in demand

Reader John to me: Do you know anyone in your vast collection of friends who might make good use of a Nikon F5? I’ll never do film again and it’s just sitting there on a shelf, staring at me. I would be willing to let it go for the low low price of…uh…nothing. But, I don’t want to give it to someone who'd just flip it on eBay. I could do that. I would like to get it to somebody who’d use it.

Me to reader John: Hmm. Nice offer, and I will have to think about that.

It’s a bit of a paperweight…they go on eBay for only $350 pretty consistently, which as you know isn’t a lot relative to its original cost, and they burn through batteries, meaning it has to be someone who’s willing to cycle rechargeables. And there’s no real call for its talents of high frame rate and focus tracking and so forth.

I think your wisest move might be to find a school program that's still oriented toward film and donate it to them. It would be the kind of thing that kids and newcomers might be interested in experiencing without wanting to own. If it belonged to a school or a community program, it could be a shared loaner and a lot of people could find out firsthand what a big pro camera feels like.

It's an interesting question. It's probable that cheap, bad cameras might be the least desirable cameras in the world, but it's possible that the relative position of "pro" and "advanced amateur" (AA) film cameras have flipped in the days since digital. Pro cameras might actually be less desirable than their AA brethren.

Inverted values: The Sinar on the left was more expensive new,
but less desirable now

That seems to be happening with view cameras...wooden folding field view cameras are still sought after, but professional monorail studio cameras—which were more expensive and of higher precision when they were new—are not as useful to anybody now. The Swiss Sinar P2 on the left was one of the best and most expensive professional cameras when it was new, but it's being offered by shueido on eBay right now for $1,379, while the older style American Deardorff 5x7 (with 4x5 reducing back) on the right is being offered by irohas for $2,780. (Both of these examples appear to be priced at the high end of the range.) Their relative desirability has been flipped upside down.

Is it possible that, among good cameras, late model professional film cameras might be the most unwanted orphans?

But if you know of an educational program still based around film that might want to add reader John's F5 to its arsenal, let me know, and I'll put you in touch.

Mike

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Tom: "If the F5 is undesirable then I probably own the most undesirable accessory for it, a Forscher Polaroid back. Can't have put more than a couple of packs through it before digital came along."

Mike replies: You have seen me and raised me! That's even more of an unwanted orphan.

Jim Grey: "As a guy who's collected film cameras for more than 40 years I can say that the semi-pro cameras are usually much, much more pleasant to use than their full-pro counterparts, without significant loss of functionality."

Scott A: "Considering the comments from a few weeks ago it is interesting that my daughters' school program is still based around film, one of the reasons being because it is cheaper. Apparently film and chemicals are cheaper than the computers, software and printers they would need, and need to continually upgrade, to stay relevant.

"Two of the other noted benefits being the extra deliberateness required when shooting with film and delayed gratification. Apparently this is something the school really values as teenagers are too dependent on instant gratification and the inherent delay created by using film is good for them. Unfortunately for me I am stuck in a quandary. I have a pile of digital cameras but long got rid of my film ones. I am loath to purchase a film camera just so my daughter can take the photography elective."

Digitizing 35mm Slides and Negatives

The Leitz Aristophot with some of its accessories
(Note: you don't need one of these)

-

Written and Illustrated by Henning Wulff

Digitizing slides or negatives can be a huge pain. The best way to get optimal quality used to be, and sometimes still is, to use a dedicated film scanner with its attendant software. Popular examples are the Nikon Coolscan series, such as the 5000 and 9000 models, which are now rather long in the tooth and need old computers or third-party software to work. The other problem is that they are slow, and even though the 5000 and its predecessors had batch feeders, they were too finicky to not need constant supervision.

A current solution, and my favorite solution, is to use a digital camera to digitize film. I'm going to concentrate on 35mm film here, as larger film is often better handled by other methods.

Vs. scanners
Photographing 35mm slides and film using a digital camera has a number of advantages over using a slide scanner. Mainly, it's a lot faster. As I (and probably many of you) contemplate digitizing thousands if not tens of thousands of images, time becomes a factor. Also, speed equals less boring. Digitizing is not very high up on my list of exciting things to do. I don’t want to digitize everything, but I don’t want to stop just because I ran out of time. Secondly, the files will be in the camera raw format, for which I have good software with a decent UI, and the raw files are relatively compact. Scanners need scanning software, which is almost universally clunky, and produces TIFFs, which, while they can be imported into the same processing software, are huge. They are probably the most universally readable files, so that is in their favor, but they are big, with the attendant problems that creates.

Camera and lenses
Which camera; which lenses? Macro lenses from the last couple of decades are generally very good to excellent and can almost universally extract the maximum of information out of most film of 25 ASA and up, as long as the lenses are operating within their design parameters. Current macro lenses for direct mounting to cameras are almost all designed with floating elements and for reproduction to 1:1, so are suitable. For slides, particularly in cardboard but also plastic mounts, flat-field reproduction is not critical as it's impossible to get the film flat unless they're removed from their mounts and placed in glass carriers. That's a huge pain that most people aren't going to put up with. Negatives are easily placed in glass holders, but then negatives are in general often not as "sharp" as slides.

I have a couple of different cameras at my disposal, from Micro 4/3 to full frame. The FF cameras (including a Sony A7rII) obviously have the highest sensor file quality, and the Micro 4/3, particularly the earlier ones, have a 16mp-sensor producing lower file quality. However—and this is the crux of my argument to generally use the Micro 4/3 cameras—the sensor size is not the same size as the film size. This is important, because it is necessary to focus on each slide separately, and that means manual focusing for the FF cameras. It is optically impossible to focus at 1:1 with AF, in whichever format. Thirty-five millimeter to FF digital is 1:1 imaging, so focusing has to be done manually by moving the camera or slide/negative. Thirty-five millimeter to Micro 4/3 is 1:2 imaging, approximately, so focusing can be done using the lens's autofocus. This speeds operation hugely.

In general, I use an Olympus E-M5 Mark II for copying with a Panasonic/Leica 45mm ƒ/2.8 Macro lens. If I want to get a bit higher file quality I use an Olympus E-M1 Mark II [currently on sale] with an M.Zuiko 60mm ƒ/2.8 Macro, but the differences are minimal and are rarely visible. I find it slightly clunkier to use for this purpose. On Kodachrome 25 it’s just noticeable on the most demanding slides. For very fine grain B&W film it's worthwhile to use the Olympus's multishot (i.e., pixel shift) capability, which results in effective 40–60mp files, but for slides and B&W films over 32 ASA I've not found this to be worthwhile. But multishot/pixel-shift is still faster and more convenient than switching over to FF, and results in similar quality.

Lighting
For lighting I'm using a color-corrected fluorescent lightbox or an incandescent light source, with a couple of high quality acrylic diffusion panels between the light and the film. The final diffusion panel is about 5cm behind the film. This avoids additional dust problems. The only important thing is that the light has to be truly continuous in wavelength and duration.

All cameras are calibrated with the X-Rite Passport ColorChecker, and for unconventional items I shoot reference images of the ColorChecker or color patches/gray scales under the same light sources as the lightboxes to make sure I have a solid basis for correction. I often deviate from that in processing, but at least I have a common base.

Stands
The camera gets mounted on one of two stands: either a wall mounted Bencher copy stand or an adapted Leitz Aristophot. The Aristophot was intended for reflected and transmitted micro photography in the range of 1:1 to 20:1 and lenses of 12.5mm to 120mm were available for it. It is usually used with a Leica MD camera or 4x5 camera (included). Depending on age, the focal lengths, names and apertures differed slightly. I have the 25mm ƒ/2.5, 50mm ƒ/2.8, 80mm ƒ/4.5 and 120mm ƒ/5.6 Photar lenses for it as well as a Zeiss Orthoplanar-S 60mm ƒ/4 and an Olympus 38mm ƒ/3.5. All these lenses are excellent, but the longer Photars are best in the range near 1:1. These do not outperform the Olympus 60mm ƒ/2.8 Micro 4/3 lens for slide copying, although for slow, high-acutance films they are worthwhile. However, the stand seems to be made of solid steel and although not that big, weighs about 60 lbs.

Alignment starts with good levels and a glass-mounted Kodalith negative. A couple of shots tells me what corrections have to be made.

Shooting technique
I usually shoot at ƒ/4 for glass-mounted slides and ƒ/5.6 for plastic-mounted slides. Occasionally ƒ/8 is required for cardboard mounted slides or other problematic film. At 2:1 (the Micro 4/3 magnification ratio), the depth-of-field is greater than at the 1:1 ratio required for FF cameras, so you gain a bit there, but of course the shorter focal lengths mean that diffraction creeps up sooner, so ƒ/8 is definitely the limit and ƒ/5.6 is better. Sometimes with wrinkly slides a compromise is necessary.

In summary
When practical considerations like using autofocus and the speed of workflow are taken into consideration, using a Micro 4/3 camera with one of the macro lenses made for it is an excellent option for digitizing 35mm slides and negatives.

Henning

Henning Wulff, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is a retired architect and commercial/architectural photographer with a background in physics. He has used/shot many, many cameras and systems, from Minox to 8x10, and used to enjoy darkroom work. The only continuous thread in his equipment over the years are Leicas—since 1962.

©2017 by Henning Wulff, all rights reserved

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Marcelo Guarini: "Many thanks for sharing your technique Henning. I have a Pen F and the ZD 50mm ƒ/2 (with adapter) and the 60mm ƒ/2.8, and a couple thousand selected Kodachrome 25 slides. I have a Durst enlarger stand that I will adapt for the job. Thanks again."

Moose (partial comment): "You have missed a crucial, at least to me, aspect—dust, dirt, scratches, etc. The better dedicated film scanners, and even some flatbed scanners with illumination and holders for film scanning, have an IR channel which allows automated dust removal. This is, in my awed opinion, magic. No spotting!!"

Steve Hutchison: "I have been using a similar method to digitise slides for myself and family members. Results vary depending on the source material but some of the more recent Kodachrome 64 from 25–30 years ago looks excellent. The worst are the Agfa slides which are very purple and seemingly always with fungus. The speed of this system is what makes it attractive however, I can do a box of 36 in less than an hour including tidying up in Lightroom and uploading the resulting images to Googledrive for my father in law to download and relive his memories from 50–60 years ago, and that is the magic."

Geoff Wittig: "Excellent post! I have some thousands of 35mm slides, only a relative handful of which I have scanned. I still have a working Minolta Dimage 5400 scanner which is very good at extracting all available image data, but egads, is it slow and clunky to use, and on my current desktop the only software that works with it is Hamrick's 'good enough' Vuescan, which is pretty tedious, although I can't complain about the price. I'm feeling more than normally obtuse after reading Mr. Wulff's explanation, as I have all the requisite gear to do this, but never thought to try! (Smacks self on forehead)."

Dennis Moyes: "Honestly, you're really going to waste time doing this when there are reasonably priced, high quality service bureaus that will do it for you? I for one have better ways to spend my time."

Mike replies—even thought it's not his article—: Devil's advocate on that: Do you really want to ship your most precious irreplaceable slides and negatives off to some anonymous service bureau? Speaking just for myself, that would drive me completely crazy.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I tried a service bureau. The idea is good, but the price was not that minor, and I was not happy with the results compared to what I produce myself. And a more professional service bureau would have been even more expensive. (what sort of prices do you get good results for? Maybe I just didn't hunt well.) They seemed oriented towards producing 8-bit adjusted scans in sRGB, whereas I want 16-bit unadjusted scans in ProPhoto space (I want them to get the data out of the film and leave the rest to me). Also, the workflow is better if I get to decide what to scan as I'm running things through the scanner; I don't scan as much, and more of it is the right stuff."

Gerard Kingma: "An addition—how about medium format? I've literally written the book on scanning (shameless plug), and I shoot Fuji Velvia slides with my Hasselblad and an A16 645 back. Projection on the wall is the end product, and there's still nothing quite as marvelous. However, for print and web use, I can't feed the framed slides into my Nikon 9000 scanner. There's no holder for 6x6 slide frames. So I reproduce them with a Canon M2 on a tripod, with the slides on the light table. Here's the thing: I take two pictures, one of each half of a slide, and stitch those together in Photoshop CS5 > Automate > Photomerge > Reposition. The merge is seamless and it effectively doubles the resolution to about 35 MP. It works."

Darkroom DAYdream

By the way, speaking of darkroom dreams, my darkroom daydream was echoed partially by Alan Carmody: "My darkroom dream (recurrent) is that I find a used 8x10 enlarger for pennies, set it up and use it to make 2X-enlarged 16x20 proof sheets. An actual dream, which I've had a few times, well into the digital age and 20 years after I last used a darkroom. It's a dream from which I wake quite happy."

In my darkroom daydream, which is predicated (naturally, as daydreams often are) on sudden vast wealth, I'd go back to shooting Tri-X with a couple of Leicas and hire several darkroom assistants to develop all the film and make Carmody-style enlarged proof sheets, work prints, and final prints for me. I'd just shoot, like Cartier-Bresson did (the independently wealthy scion of a famously prosperous French family, he never did his own darkroom work).

The only snag in the daydream is that my work wouldn't be worth such resources. I don't have the appetite for shooting to keep me at it with the persistence that would be required; I know I lack the "people skills" to approach people and ingratiate myself sufficiently to gain access to the kinds of photographs I'd want to take; and I'm too old—I no longer have the energy and vitality needed to engage in the kind of travel and hard work needed to keep such a support system busy.

So all is well just as things are. George Bernard Shaw put the following words into the mouth of Mendoza, the Spanish brigand in Man and Superman: "Sir: there are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Tim Bradshaw: "I find your daydream odd: if you don't enjoy making prints, why would you want to shoot film? I know a lot of people do, but I'd assumed this was a combination of hipsterism ('my photographs are artisanal') and practicality. I certainly would not use film if I did not love the process of making prints (I could live without the film processing, which is boring). If I had a private income I would practically live in the darkroom. I suspect pretty strongly that if HCB was working today he would not use film, for just this reason."

Gordon Lewis: "Re 'I know I lack the "people skills" to approach people and ingratiate myself sufficiently to gain access to the kinds of photographs I'd want to take.' Really? During the short time I visited you at TOP World Headquarters, you seemed to know the names and backgrounds of half the people we met and some we didn't. I even watched you make friends with a part-time apple farmer / full-time Corning engineer you had never met. You're one of the most neighborly people I know. So unless the kind of photographs you'd want to take are nudes, I seriously doubt you'd have a problem with that aspect of photography."

Mike replies: That's kind of you, Gordon, but I do have lots of trouble when it comes to taking the camera out.

Tim Bradshaw: "Here's a tangential comment to a couple of the other comments (mine included). Are Henri Cartier-Bresson's prints (by which I mean prints of his work, since he did not print) actually good? Note I said prints, not the pictures. I am actually not sure: I have seen original prints of his work (which I think were 'vintage' or whatever the right term is) but not for a long time, and my memory is not reliable about them. I have a copy of the recent edition of The Decisive Moment, but it has reproductions of prints, not prints, and I have not seen the original so I don't even know how it compares. And finally I am not sure what I think of the reproduction quality in the book: well, I think it is too heavy to hold comfortably and the images are too large for 35mm prints to look at at the natural distance for a book, and I hate the gutter-crossing. So, in fact, I don't like them: but that might be just me. So the question is still there, in my mind: was his work well-printed? I realise it is heresy to suggest it might not have been."

Mike replies: It really depends on what you're looking at. Henri's prints were made for the last 30 years of his life by Voja Mitrovic, and those prints are excellent, or perhaps running a range from very good to superlative. But some "scholarly" shows of Cartier-Bresson's work have displayed—as if they were finished work, which they were not—reproduction prints, which were deliberately printed small, soft and dark to suit newspaper reproduction methods at the time, often on cheap paper because they weren't intended to last. Peter Galassi's large retrospective show "The Modern Century" in 2010 was to my mind a spectacular failure in presenting a case to the public for Cartier-Bresson as a photographic artist: it showed huge, diffuse groups of prints including large numbers of workprints (used for editing) and repro prints, many of which were very poor. Of course they were indeed "vintage," a concept which is exalted by the art dealing crowd, if sometimes brainlessly. Add to that the fact that Cartier-Bresson preferred his workprints printed excessively "soft" (low contrast) so he could see how much information the negative held, and it meant that many of the prints were not good to look at. To the public generally, that show was virtually reputation-ruining; no one seeing Henri's work for the first time could have come out of it very impressed at his ability. It was a show pitched at specialist scholars but billed as an extravaganza for the general public, which not infrequently happens in the museum world but seldom so glaringly. I thought it was dreadful.

The best case for Cartier-Bresson is made by his books. If you have only one, it should be Henri Cartier-Bresson, Photographer, published by Bulfinch (at least in the States), which was in print for some 20 years. It's now out of print but still widely available for not much money.

A Platinum Print from an iPhone?

Written by Carl Weese

Photo: Michael McWeeney. Instagram account @havana1933.
Co-Founder and Creative Director at the Reggae Math Foundation.

Recently I taught a weekend “Digital Platinum” workshop at Penumbra Foundation in Manhattan. The basic point of the workshop is to teach participants how to make platinum/palladium prints from digital negatives prepared specifically for printing in the process.

Setup
The first two hours are taken up with a lecture to explain what we have to do to trick a photo-quality inkjet printer and transparency media into producing a negative with sufficient UV-blocking density range to match the extremely long scale of the Pt/Pd print. This includes learning how to vary some of the tricks in order to calibrate for a specific paper, sensitizer coating mixture, UV light exposure unit, and general lab conditions. Then we test the calibration using a negative that combines a complex step tablet file with a real-world picture. Printing these tests lets me demonstrate the hand coating of the paper, preparation of the sheet for printing, then exposure, development, and finishing.

After that, the workshop goes free-form as I work with each participant to prepare picture files in Photoshop the way I think will work best for the process, then send them into the semi-automated “black box” of the calibrated procedure. A Photoshop Batch Action prepares the negative file, then a print driver Preset instructs the printer what to do to enhance the UV-blocking density range of the output on transparent media. While the freshly output negative cures (outgasses), the participant coats and preps a sheet of paper, then exposes it and heads into the wet darkroom area for processing, where my teaching assistant (thanks, Lizzy!) keeps everything running smoothly. By the end of Saturday each student had made negs/prints of one or two of their own pictures.

Image sources
The two most obvious advantages of working with digital internegatives are that you can enlarge a small original (platinum prints must be made in direct contact with the negative under intense UV light), and that you can make a Pt/Pd print from a picture that didn’t start out as a film negative.

There’s much more versatility than that, however. By the end of Sunday our five participants had made 30+ negs/prints from a wide range of original sources. Most were from captures with good digital cameras, but we also had: scans from medium format film; scans of negatives from a 4x5 view camera; scans from 35mm transparency film; scans of negatives from a handmade 4x5 pinhole camera; non-photographic images from Adobe Illustrator renderings; and copy captures of historical wet plate photographs more than a hundred years old. This is almost typical of these workshops and a very real part of the fun.

Sunday surprise
One participant, Michael McWeeney, had brought his MacBook Pro to the workshop, and after working up one or two pictures with me on mine, began to do the workups on his own. Late Sunday, he had a surprise for me. “Just to see if he could,” he chose a picture on his iPhone 6, and worked it up entirely on the phone. Then sent it to his computer to run the “black box” operations for a digital negative. The resulting print was entirely presentable, and had all of us at the workshop amazed/amused that he’d pulled it off.

I asked Mike to detail the apps and steps he used to do this, so here’s his lightly edited explanation:

iPhone Pt/Pd workflow

1. Shoot a raw file with the Moment camera app.
2. Send the Raw file to Google Snapseed.
3. Adjust basic highlight, shadow, and color temperature as Structure in the Snapseed RAW processor.
4. Convert to B+W in Snapseed’s filter tools, BLACK & WHITE tool, using color filters, grain, contrast and brightness adjustments.
5. In the Tools section, use DETAILS to add sharpness and structure if needed [Note: Only add structure one time, either in the Details tool or RAW editor].
6. Use SELECTIVE to create masks to edit specific areas.
7. The lens blur tool added a selective focus look and some lens fall off/vignetting to the image. [This concentrated emphasis on the flowers and helped the hosta leaves recede visually.]
8. Save image.
9. Send image to computer via Airdrop or email.
10. Run the Batch and print driver Preset to make the negative.

As you can see, it worked!

An equivalent workup could be done in the Lightroom Mobile App, and I’m sure there are others, while of course specific steps will vary.

I’m happy to see this blending of the 19th and 21st centuries!

Carl
(Thanks to Mike McWeeney)

Text © 2017 by Carl Weese, image © 2017 by Michael McWeeney, all rights reserved

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Ektachrome Returns

On account of a perceived reversal in demand (geddit? Reversal? I'm on a roll [geddit? Roll?]), Kodak Alaris, the 2013 spinoff of the old Kodak that makes film, will re-introduce Ektachrome slide film.

Generally speaking, assuming it served them reliably and didn't cause problems, older photographers have more or less affection for old films depending on how much of it they shot and how well they knew it. Since Ektachrome was Kodak's bread-and-butter, middle-o'-the-road slide film and lots of people shot lots of it, you can read cries of approval all over the Internet. Well and good!

Me, I never shot much slide film; didn't have to for clients, and slide film didn't have any DR (exposure range), and all us arty guys shot VPS and made prints anyway.

As the rest of the Internet suddenly extols the virtues of Ektachrome (I live in the future and the future is strange), I probably shouldn't remind people that it was the the slightly cold neutrality and subdued, "accurate" colors of Ektachrome, a film that Kodak was complacent about and saw fit to improve only sluggishly, that allowed Fujifilm to eat Kodak's lunch in the '90s with its zippier, more saturated Fujichrome films.

But never mind; Ektachrome's back, and that's good news for many. Power to 'em, all of 'em. Choice is good. Ektachrome is a 100-speed, E-6 process film that was previously discontinued in 2012. Kodak no longer makes slide projectors.

Mike
(Thanks to more tipsters than I can shake a stick at)

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Shiny chrome
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marcin wuu: "Introducing, or reintroducing actually, any film is good news these days, 'cause it's so rare. You keep hearing about new films popping up here and there, but it always turns out it's a rebadged existing product. So, while I don't shoot reversal, this bit of news made me happy, which is a rare thing lately. We're at the end of digital transition, and film's still not dead it seems. Like Punk, kinda."

Doug Thacker: "Good luck getting it processed. There was a new lab that opened in Hawaii circa 2003 that spent seven figures for its E-6 processing gear (I heard the amount was $2 million). Fujifilm's Hawaii division farmed its local E-6 processing out to them, so I know they made a lot of money, but when the lab shut down six or seven years later due to lack of business, they couldn't find anyone to purchase their E-6 processor, and my understanding is they ended up leaving it in a dumpster. Hopefully they'd made their money back on it. Since Ilfochrome/Cibachrome chemistry is no longer available—not to mention slide projectors—it's going to be pretty difficult to justify shooting slide film. But I suppose it will be a nice novelty for young people."

Peter: "You didn't mention the huge market (relatively speaking) for cross-processed, i.e., C-41 processed, Ektachrome. That's what I used for my Cuba montage series, with the idea that cross-processed Ektachrome, with a few simple tweaks of color balance and color-specific saturation in Photoshop, is evocative of old magazine photos that have been gathering dust for the past 50 years. Unlike other cross-processed slide film, Ektachrome E100VS (I wonder whether the new stuff is more like the standard G or the more vivid VS) was not irretrievably color-cast in greens or yellows or purples. It was a bit more subtle. Hoping the same for the new stuff."

Tom: "This pleases me. For 11 years of my career I shot 10 rolls of Ektachrome a day, sometimes at base, often at 'plus one.' You found a way to do it and pictures from that period seem somehow to have more character for so often straining at the limits of suitable shutter speeds and apertures and if the light was inadequate or unsuitable you lit the scene rather than bumping the ISO.

"The need for post production is one of the things that pains me most about digital. To this day I can't accept that it's just no longer possible to get it right in camera every time."

Trecento: "Ah! I might have to get my older rangefinders serviced. I'd been wanting to visit the late 'fifties and early 'sixties again. Maybe do some re-photography. I do recall that my grandfather and dad were kinda down on Ektachrome, because fading was much more noticeable to them than it was on Kodachrome. (R.I.P. K64.)"

Speed: "My camera has a slot for a CF card and one for an SD card. I don't see an Ektachrome slot. Will they be selling an adapter?"

Mike replies: I don't think there is one. You might have to develop it yourself. [*Rimshot*]

Gallitypes: A New Way to Shoot 8x10

If you're looking for something to do with that old 8x10 you've had in the camera closet for year now, here's an idea for you. I heard of this idea from Jim Galli's website, although my memory is a little hay-zee as to the specifics. I think I wrote about it some years ago.

It's a simplified way of shooting with an 8x10 camera that bypasses film.

What you need is an 8x10 camera, some 8x10 B&W photo paper, and a flat-bed scanner. You put the paper into the film holder, expose it (I assume some trial-and-error will be required regarding exposures times, and I assume exposure times will be very slow, like they were in photo-antiquity), develop it, then scan the negative image that results and reverse the tones in software.

If anybody tries this, send results!

I think we should name the process for Jim, who from what I hear is a great connoisseur of large format, a ceaseless experimenter, a polymath of old lenses, and a guy who appears to have more fun with photography in any given year than most of us will have in our lifetimes.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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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Wes Medlin: "Mike, I think this is the post you were looking at. I agree, Jim's site is a lot of fun."

Film and LF News

It's been reported that the high-end, full-line Japanese view camera maker Ebony, founded in 1981 by Hiromi Sakanashi, will be going out of business at the end of June. Our friend Oren Grad sent an inquiry in Japanese to Sakanashi-san and, sadly, received confirmation that this is true. Jeff Taugner at Badger Graphic Sales is still taking orders, but recommends that you order very soon if you wish to buy an Ebony camera new.

No word yet on the reasons for the closing.

Bad film
Meanwhile, photographer John Sexton's latest newsletter has information about some bad Kodak film stock. Apparently photographers have been seeing pictures with uniform areas of tone disfigured by faint letters and numbers. John shows an example and reports his investigations into the matter. Here are the possibly affected emulsion numbers according to Kodak:

Emulsion numbers that may exhibit the above problem only in Kodak 120 format roll film:
(Emulsion numbers can be found on the film box, the foil wrapper, and printed on the clear edge of processed film near frame number 11.)

Kodak T-Max 400
Emulsion 0148 004 through 0152

Kodak T-Max 100
Emulsion 0961 through 0981

Kodak Tri-X
Emulsion 0871 though 0931

Check your stock if you're shooting rollfilm. Here's a link to John's newsletter archive if you'd like to read more (he has a nice special-edition print for sale in this newsletter, too).

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad and John Sexton)

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Sal Santamaura: "Re 'No word yet on the reasons for the closing.' There may be no word yet, but I'm willing to speculate.

1. Digital has almost completely replaced film as a capture medium. In 'the old days,' professional photographers used expensive view cameras from Linhof, Sinar, etc. to do their work. In Japan, Ebony cameras were among those choices.
2. Compounding declining sales volume is competition from China. The 'Wal-martification' of buying attitudes means that, even among those amateurs still using large format film, there's very little willingness to pay for the highest quality cameras when less expensive knockoffs are available.

"Personally, I'm thrilled to have purchased and still regularly use my Ebony SV Wholeplate. The image of that specific sample (first one produced) from Ebony's website is what you've illustrated this post with. It will soon join my Phillips cameras' status, namely, great products no longer available new."

Mike replies: I was about to rise to the defense of Chinese cameras such as my beautiful former Chamonix, but then I remembered, oh yeah, they really are knock-offs. They used Dick Phillips's design without permission and didn't compensate him. Q.E.D. your point.

I did recall that it's your camera in that illustration.  :-)  Oren has its twin, I believe.

David L.: "Wow, I had two recent rolls of 120 T-Max 400 film ruined with the faint letters and numbers. They are obvious on first inspection. I tried and tried to find out how that happened; a broken camera, bad processing or handling, etc. So where is the notification from Kodak? What are they going to do about it? Why did it take an individual to spill the news?"

tex andrews: "This is sad news, I think. Irrespective of what the Chinese are doing/have done/will do. The loss of a venerable hand crafted camera manufacturer is a 'bell tolls for thee' moment."

I'm Just Sayin'...

...If you really want the simplified, traditional Leica experience, what you need is something like this...

...and this...

No light meter in the camera, roll your own film. Done and done.

Costs less than $6k, too. At least at first.  :-)

Mike

UPDATE: It turns out the Leica and 1957 7-element 50mm collapsible Summicron lens (Henri Cartier-Bresson's favorite and most-used lens, by the way) in the top photo is for sale. It is museum-quality—its only flaw is a tiny pinhole (almost too small to see) in the chrome plating on the back left of the top plate, which is however very probably how it came from the factory. The lens comes with box and papers and has a completely clear front element. Probably shouldn't be a user...it's too good to spoil now that it's nearly sixty years old yet still in ideal condition. Contact me if you're interested and I'll put you in touch with the owner. —Mike the Ed.

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George Feucht: "I did the math and bulk loading doesn't save money, for some reason. A roll of Tri-X is $5. The 100' bulk roll is over $100. For the 18–19 36-exposure rolls you get, it actually costs more to load yourself. Weird, right?"

Mike replies: But rolling your own is more of a pain in the you-know-where, so it would be more in the spirit of an M-D, right?

Gordon Cahill: "Does it do video? Kinda pointless if it doesn't shoot 4K, isn't it?"

Open Mike: A Beautiful Enlarger

One of the reasons I got into photography—here I usually add "this is true," because it's so intensely ironic today—is because I had a talent for mechanical things and a marked lack of aptitude for computers and computing. Funny, huh?

I've never been very comfortable with the abstract. I don't like the way theory so quickly becomes insular and self-referential and loses its connections to reality. One of the things I dislike about digital imaging is the free, almost glib readiness with which it detaches from reality. Remove a bird? No problem. Add a moon? Easy. It's become popular now to say that digital is no different from photography in any other era because photographs departed from reality in every era. That's technically true, but it's vastly different in degree. Optical/chemical photography had to be wrestled effortfully away from its subversive and tenacious attachment to the direct report of the lens image; it could be done, but only within limits, and it was difficult, and often the final result left behind telltale signs of the manipulation that had been done. With digital imaging, of course, those formerly thick boundaries melt away like rock-hard ice turning to water. If you don't think this is true, please take a film negative of a woman with a telephone pole in the distance, and go into the darkroom to make a print for me. And in the print, please remove the telephone pole and make the woman thinner. Go ahead, make my day. You'll be at work for three days making enlarged copy negatives you can work on with a pencil, masks, all sorts of nonsense. And in the end, odds are the picture you end up with won't look quite natural. With digital imaging, of course, a facile operator can do that sort of thing with a few clicks of the mouse, and the final result can be utterly convincing. Photographers might have wanted to manipulate images from 1839 to ~2000, and they might have tried, but photography's ties to reality, though transliterated through the medium's specifics and its particular techniques and peculiar visual conventions, was robust, even obstinate.

With photography, it was the reality in front of the camera that had the upper hand, even though it got translated into photographic terms. With digital imaging, you have the upper hand.

I've often said that I lived at the absolutely perfect time to be a photographer. Periods of transition are rich. Model railroaders love to model the so-called "transition era" of the late '40s and early '50s, because they can include diesel and steam locomotives side-by-side on their layouts. When I was born, Edward Weston was still alive; Ansel Adams sent me a postcard. I got to learn photography as it had been practiced more or less since Talbot. I got to mix my own developers, and my first serious lens was one of the very earliest "zoom" lenses (it was actually a varifocal, meaning it had to be refocused after every change of focal length). And then, like many of you, I got to live through and hence witness the rise of digital imaging, which Ansel Adams foresaw but didn't live to see. I watched as a saturated and almost moribund industry turned volatile and dynamic, and the age of black and white transform to the age of color. Really, given my interests, the timing of my lifespan could not have been better.

One way my timing was not good, however, had to do with what Nick Hartmann called "the room-sized accessory"—the darkroom. That, I had back-asswards. Because when I was young and shooting Plus-X and Tri-X and of course doing my own printing, and needed a darkroom, I was poor and living in apartments and could barely afford the equipment and materials needed to be a photographer. Now that I'm a personage, i.e., a middle-aged fart, and able to convince the bank to buy a house for me to live in, I no longer need a darkroom. I was a darkroom nomad for years, using school darkrooms, other peoples' darkrooms, and cadging together borrowed equipment and cast-off equipment and gradually building up my stock of the stuff I needed. I finally built the darkroom I'd always wanted in a corner of the basement in my house in Wisconsin...and used it a dozen times. As a single parent and the writer of a blog, the computer won. I just didn't have time for darkroom work. In fact, since I'm on the subject, I will note in passing that I do have some regret for all the time I spent developing film over the years. It was necessary in those days; but those are hours of my life—thousands of them—that I'll never get back now to spend any other way. Maybe my timing wasn't quite perfect there, either.

Beautiful machine
But although I never got my own darkroom until it was too late, I did get my own enlarger. After a few false starts—one of them well documented in the pages of Darkroom Photography magazine—I bought a Saunders/LPL 4500 II with a VCCE variable contrast module. (LPL was the manufacturer, Saunders the U.S. importer at the time I bought mine. Omega now has them.) It was made in Tokyo. Trust the Japanese to finally engineer an enlarger right. It was a beautiful machine. The quality of its light was perfect—midway between the hard, collimated light of a condenser head and the soft, low-contrast light of a cold-light head; the VCCE sliders incorporated a neutral-density pane that compensated for exposure when changing grades, at least within a pretty close approximation; and the mechanics of the head and the massive column were so well engineered that the darn thing assembled in perfect alignment and stayed that way. I bought several alignment gizmos of various types over the years, but all they did was confirm that the LPL was still bang on. I'd been the darkroom tech at my art school for a summer (and, unofficially, thereafter), and believe me, I spent some time (and considerable inventiveness) aligning enlargers. My lens was a German Rodenstock Apo-Rodagon-N 80mm ƒ/4, hand-picked. A beautiful lens that I used for everything from 35mm to 6x7.

I used that enlarger in Paul Kennedy's commercial darkroom in Takoma Park, Maryland for a number of years, and then it came to the Midwest with me after my son was born. But when you're poor, or at least not continuously prosperous, it's very difficult to acquire and keep nice possessions. The reason is that even if you're flush when you buy them, lean times can mean losing them again. Alas—alas—the time came when I looked at my beautiful, trusty LPL enlarger that had made tens of thousands of prints for myself and others, and had been with me through thick and thin, and saw...the rent money. Off it went.

Another thing I got to witness in my lifetime was the huge increase in the reliability of cars. The first Honda Accord in my family was a revelation—the darn thing just worked and kept working. If you wanted it to start it started. Maintenance became a routine instead of a soap opera. Perhaps because it was also Japanese, I always thought of the Saunders/LPL enlarger as being the Honda Accord of enlargers—not fancy, not flashy, not classical or retro, purely practical—but it worked. It worked just like it was supposed to, and kept on working, dependably and reliably.

A beautiful machine.

I'll add a picture later, but now I have to skedaddle—off to watch a tintype demonstration by John Coffer! Should be fun.

Mike

[UPDATE: The enlarger is still available new but it's much more expensive than it used to be, thanks probably to the vestigial size of the market for enlargers. I was shocked as the price rose from under $1,000 (I think) to $1,800, years ago. It's now supposedly available from an outfit called Electron Microscopy Sciences for $3,622.

Oh, and about that picture—can't find an adequate one that I'm allowed to use. Sorry. —Mike the Ed.]

"Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP, which is sometimes off-topic. It appears only, but not always, on Sundays.

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Pi Manson: "I feel real sympathy for you, and for the sense of disconnection from the mechanical, physical manifestations of photography. My work is similarly sliding to the intangible. I am a bicycle mechanic by trade. I have always savoured the absolute mechanical operations of the bike: how moving this does that, essentially. But cycling is in an era of transition also: electronics, Wi-Fi, and motors are coming. I feel nothing but sadness about that, young as I am. It makes me feel old to be resisting the new, wishing back the ethereal digital tide from my adored solid mechanical bicycle."

Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "...Do not regret your sale Mike; rather pity those of us who have held on—white knuckled—to our technology past the point of depreciation, past the point of parts availability, past whatever final signpost of rationality there may have been on a straight-line, no-rumble-strip, pedal-to-the-metal Thelma-and-Louise...wait...where was I? Oh. The kicker? Several years ago, a local camera store had a Leica Focomat Ic for sale, and I said to myself, 'You know, I always wanted one of those....' So now the Zone VI has a little friend. You have to laugh."

Mike replies: I did.  :-)

John Camp: "Photographers don't talk or think about the 'reality' thing often enough. A depiction of the reality in front of the lens is the fundamental strength of photography, just as measurement (say) is the fundamental strength of architectural drawing, and farm work is the fundamental strength of tractors, as opposed (say) to tractor-pulls. Sure, you can do other things with photography or architectural drawing or tractors, but the further you stray from the fundamental, the less valuable your work becomes. Software, of course, can be used to strengthen the realistic, as when it corrects for lens distortions, or corrects color, or adjusts exposure. And even some major manipulations can be justified, in lieu of (say) skill. In this regard, if you're making a portrait of somebody, and you get back home and realize a phone pole is growing out of her head, removing the pole takes out an extraneous element that in no way contributes to either the aesthetic or reality of a portrait; it simply shouldn't have been there in the first place. You're not changing reality by making the portrait-sitter's face thinner, you're simply compensating for your lack of skill.

"Essentially I think software is good for fixing things that you can't otherwise fix, and by 'fix,' I mean pushing a photograph closer to a perceived reality, or, in very limited cases, correcting mistakes.

"I also applaud your comment about differences in degree. There is no real absolute purity in photography—you're taking a picture, not recreating the world. Given that, differences in degree make up an essential pivot in photography."

Ed Buziak: "You may remember the review I did in Darkroom User magazine of the LPL7452, which I think is the same model as your Saunders 4500 Mark II...it's still up on my old Wordpress page. But for me the best enlarger of all was the totally automatic Durst L1200 Multigraph...it was so good it took much of the joy (or perhaps frustration) out of darkroom work and although very expensive, using one regularly saved a fortune on previously wasted paper. However, for absolute die-hards, I'm certain the Leitz Focomat IIC was the very best for everything monochrome from 35mm to 6x9. I did an overall review of the various Focomat models about 10 years ago which is also still up.... 

[Ed was the founder and editor of the British Darkroom User magazine. —Ed.]

Gary Nylander (partial comment): "I ran into a bit of a conundrum...as I was able to make a darkroom print or a print scanned from my negative printed via inkjet, which was better? Each had its own unique character. Eventually I ended up turning the darkroom into an office, made myself a nice desk for the scanner and a printer stand for the Epson 4000. Nowadays, and for the past 12 years, I have been scanning my large format negatives, which I then print out via an inkjet printer (Epson 4800). I love using my view camera."

Dale: "I printed on the exact same enlarger last night (LPL 4500II with VCCE head). Made some 11x14 prints from a 6x4.5 Delta 100 negative, a tight shot of Burney Falls in Northern California. I'm staring at the prints now, and marveling at the luscious tonality and details, as rendered on Ilford's Warmtone paper (selenium toned). Also reflecting on how enjoyable it was to be in the darkroom, handcrafting prints. I upgraded to the LPL 4500 a couple of years ago, and it's pure joy to use. The fine focusing action on that machine is silky smooth...luxurious! My Schneider and Nikon enlarger lenses are probably '80s vintage, but they give me all the sharpness and quality I could ever need.

"My career requires me to stare at a monitor intently for a large part of the day; the last thing I want to do when I get home is stare at a monitor for two or three more hours. Yes, darkroom printing is labor-intensive and takes a chunk of time, but it's so much more fulfilling, at least for some of us 'retro' types."

Crabby Umbo: "The absolutely perfect time to be a photographer"? I wish I could have been 10–15 years older (I'm 61 now)...there's virtually nothing I like about digital photography. There was certainly a lot of 'chaff' kept out of the industry with people who couldn't actually expose transparency film and get a decent result. I liked the film, I liked the processing and printing, I liked the equipment, I liked the art directors I worked with (who really don't exist today), and I liked the income from being good at what I did. Everything about computers wrecked the way I wanted to work. It would have been great to start my career in 1960 and pull the plug in 2000, which was about the last time I worked the way I wanted to anyway...." 

Voigtlander Throws in the Towel

...On film cameras. During its brief, bright heyday it was an enthusiast's dream—a small company run by a true photo enthusiast with deep pockets, making a proliferating lineup of cool, interesting, unique and affordable products.

Alas, Cosina/Voigtlander (properly written either "Voigtländer" or "Voigtlaender," although we bow to convention) is hanging it up. Cosina has quietly announced that it is discontinuing all the remaining Voigtlander film cameras, plus a variety of accessories. 

The move leaves Leica as the sole surviving manufacturer of 35mm film rangefinder cameras.

Here's a more detailed announcement from Stephen Gandy of CameraQuest.com on the Rangefinder Forum. CameraQuest is one of the leading Voigtlander dealers in the U.S.

Stephen reports that current C/V lenses and remaining accessories are selling well.

High points of Voigtlander's second coming as a camera company (there were never any direct links to the original German firm—the name was an homage) were many, including a premium rangefinder with the Zeiss Ikon nameplate, rangefinders with 21mm framelines and others with 1:1 finders.

Who knows, though, maybe now Cosina will make another digital rangefinder camera, a great-grand-nephew to the one it made for Epson long ago.

In any event, let the collecting begin!

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

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David W. Scott: "I too wish for a Cosina digital rangefinder. But I despair that won't happen. Years ago, a rumor made the rounds that Cosina made a gentleman's agreement with Leica to not produce another M-mount digital. Something about fearing that would kill Leica completely. Whether this story is true or not, it resonates because of Cosina's leadership being fans and devotees of cameras. Who wants to be known as the guy who killed Leica?"

Henning Wulff: "Mr. Kobayashi [President of Cosina —Ed.] does indeed not care for digital cameras, and was not overly thrilled by his experiences with Epson on the RD-1.

"Cosina is one of the larger optical manufacturers, and is a supplier to many other companies that use lenses and optical components, such as video surveillance and digital projectors, as well as camera companies of various sizes. The Voigtlander line was introduced almost as a hobby line in that Mr. Kobayashi wanted some new lenses for his Leicas and the collectors were snatching up the good used (but often quite old) items that were available. The 15mm and the 25mm were lenses in focal lengths that were never available in screw mount, and the lenses that were available in focal lengths like 50mm weren't available in modern designs like the ƒ/1.5 Nokton.

"He and a mutual friend here from Vancouver developed a strong friendship and Mr. K gradually expanded the camera and lens line to suit both their interests. A couple of lens/mount combinations exist in just two or three copies.

"The Voigtlander line of cameras and lenses had to make money, but they were very much driven by Mr. K's personal interests. Cosina the company is quite healthy. Expect some new and exciting Voigtlander lenses in the not too distant future."

In Memoriam: Joe Saltzer

I was reached by the news yesterday that Joseph Saltzer of SaltHill Photographic Products died back in 2008, of complications resulting from triple bypass surgery.

I wish I could write a proper obituary of Joe, whose death appears to have gone unmarked in the online world. I can't, I'm afraid. I reviewed a number of his innovative and deluxe high-end darkroom products for Camera & Darkroom magazine over a number of years, talked to him on the phone many times, and finally met him in person when I visited his beautiful contemporary/modern style house at the end of Wildcat Road in Chappaqua, New York, an hour outside New York City. In the words of Andy Grundberg, "SaltHill [was] what you might call a small manufacturing and marketing firm," which Joe ran from the lower floor of his home, where he also had a laboratory-quality, state-of-the-art research darkroom.

His chief designer was a genius from Eastern Europe who spoke little English. Together they conceived, designed, built and marketed products which were certainly overbuilt for their purposes, and which had the same relationship to more commonplace darkroom products that Leica has in the world of cameras today.

Joe was the one who recommended me to S. Tinsley Preston III for the job of chief editor of Darkroom Techniques magazine in 1994, a challenging, sometimes maddening job that was, overall, an experience that I would not have missed. For six years it was a wonderful lookout post from which to watch the changes then happening in photography, affording great views back at the past and toward what lay ahead.

Alas, fate had it in for Joe. His business faltered around various disasters and betrayals connected to his quixotic fiber-optic enlarger. I could tell the whole story, but the story is not mine to tell. The enlarger, which did eventually briefly come to market, had a superlight head made possible by its radical light source—a "cloth" consisting of a weave of fiberoptic strands, some emitting green light and some blue, the two colors of light to which variable contrast papers are sensitive. Joe's misfortunes multiplied upon themselves, and he lost his designer, his business, his fortune, his house...and his wife, who left him as his business crumbled. Joe and Tinsley Preston had a falling out over unpaid advertising bills, and Joe ended up working in the darkroom department at B&H Photo for a time, a relationship which unfortunately also did not end very well as far as I know. He moved house more than once, having come down considerably in the world, and I lost track of him during that time.

I knew Joe, and will remember him, as a bright light. He had vision, and talent, and taste. If he didn't leave a large mark on photography it's because he was in the wrong business at the wrong time, and paid too dearly for the boldness of his vision. His is one of the more tragic tales of the Transition Era. 1979 was the peak of the darkroom hobby in the U.S., and if Joe had started his business 15 or 20 years earlier, he would probably have been much better known and far more widely admired.

At the very least, his passing would have been more noticed by the world at large. I hope some photography museum somewhere (Eastman House, perhaps) will collect an example of each of his products so they don't disappear from history altogether. A belated goodbye, Joe.

Mike
(Thanks to Adrian F.)

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Two Cool Film Cameras [and Mike Update]

This post has no point. I just wanted to share.

First of all, a very kind supporter who might or might not remain anonymous (s/he hasn't told me yet) donated the funds for the purchase of this lovely artifact, which shall decorate the front hall of the TOP office / photo museum at the Eastlake House:

It's a Rochester Optical Pony Premo No. 6 "self-casing" camera, very popular at the turn of the 20th century, manufactured a few hills and dales away from me in Rochester, New York, probably between 1903 and 1906. The camera was developed when one W.F. Carlton ran the company, whether he designed it himself or not. I am delighted to have it to welcome visitors inside the front door of the office entrance of the house. My remaining decision is whether to put it on a contemporaneous vintage tripod or just let it sit on a table. It's going to look fetching either way.

The new house is a very complicated little house. I've been working out the placement of furniture and functionality...on paper, as I'm still not moved in to the place yet. But if things go like I think they will, on a large table opposite the Rochester Optical camera will sit either an Epson P600 or P800—right there in the living room! The living room (where the photography books will also go) will function as part of the office. (I mean, assuming TOP survives this year+ of moves, and I still need an office. (I do know we haven't been covering the world of photography very well of late. (That will change this Fall. (I know I said that last Fall. (But this time it's more likely to be true.)))))

Another fun thing: there will be a permanent sign out front that will say "The Online Photographer / Eastlake House." For this year the sign will be made of vinyl stick-ons, but in a year or two (or three?) when I can afford the $6–800 it costs, I'll get one of those hand-carved gold-leaf wooden signs. Or maybe I won't, but I will sure enjoy thinking about it.

Summer is gorgeous on Keuka Lake (I'm told Fall is too) and the Finger Lakes are a target-rich environment for photographers. It sure seems like a no-brainer to host workshops. Could you see it? A primary instructor in a field of expertise, with me doing hosting duties, portfolio reviews, and helping to lead discussions. There are plentitudinous B&B's and hotels in the area and lots of nice restaurants, and we could meet at the Eastlake House for group and individual discussions and one or two shared meals. Sure seems like something to think about for 2016.

Horseman
Here's the other cool film camera mentioned in the header. When I was (very sadly) de-accessioning my beloved but long-unused darkroom equipment, retired high school photography teacher and TOP reader Jeff Dionesotes, who turned out to be a very nice and interesting person—and, of course, like all TOP readers, well above average—came by the house to pick up my superb SaltHill print washer. So check out the man's box:

Naturally it shoots film; digital photographers are not known to have a great deal of use for print washers.

It's a Horseman Multiformat 985, and Jeff says he does everything with his, from snapshot memories to careful artwork. Which, if you ask me, is several shades of awesome (English translation: brilliant). Of course, he did take a return snap of me, and mentioned that it would be at least several weeks before either of us would see it...if either of us ever does. Jeff, you listening? Any progress to report?

By the way, I didn't charge Jeff for the washer. Ancient journalistic scruples, still in play: I didn't pay for it in the first place, so I couldn't profit from it now.

And as an aside, anyone know where Joe Saltzer of SaltHill is these days? I'd love to say hello.

Mike
(Thanks to anonymous and Jeff)

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Featured Comments from:

James Sinks: "Ah, the living room. A strangely named space in my experience—why would the room filled with an Epson 7900, 54" print timmer, rolls of paper, heavy duty copy stand, backdrops, props, light stands, C-stands, boom stand, lights, tripod, camera, and lenses, be called the 'living room'? Surely, 'photo room' would be a much better name for it."

Rob L: "That Horseman's a wonderful machine; I have its German cousin of sorts, the Linhof Tech 70, and use it for about the same purposes(the looks you get shooting on the playground, or soccer, with that critter...). The Rochester's a pretty Pony too:) Good luck with getting the house set up, and I have to say, workshops sound like a grand idea!"

scott kirkpatrick: "Your new camera looks very close in style, function, and content to the Wright Brothers' camera, the one which took the picture of their first flight. Theirs was made by Gundlach (a few blocks from the company that made this one, and they had a rapid rectilinear, the kit zoom of the day, which could be assembled in wide, normal, and telephone configurations."

Mike replies: Mine has a Gundlach Rapid Rectigraph lens, which may or may not be what you meant. Many of the Rochester camera companies were either close to each other or "in bed together," and I suspect at least a few were started in the hopes that George Eastman would eventually buy them, which he did in the case of Rochester Optical.

[Mike Update 3: House Names]

How do you pronounce 'Patience'?
I'm completely in limbo. We leave the vacation house my girlfriend rented today, and I don't yet have a closing date for the new house. All my worldly possessions are in storage, the dogs are at the boarding kennel (I miss them), and I'm living out of a suitcase.

Byword for the week: Patience!

Reminds me of one of my favorite stories. My high school students used to have to roll their own film on to the developing reels, of course in total darkness. And obviously I couldn't go in there to help when someone got into trouble. So, to encourage them, I wrote a sign on the wall of the film-loading room in glow-in-the-dark tape (no, it doesn't hurt the undeveloped film as long as it's far enough away).

One day I could hear a girl in there just getting more and more stressed out, swearing and moaning. Finally she stormed out, saying, "WHAT is that word?!? Why did you put that there? 'PAT-eye-ents.' 'PAT-EYE-ense.' I could NOT figure out what that meant. What in the hell does 'PAT-EYE-ENTS' mean?!?"

The word on wall, of course, was "Patience."

She did feel appropriately chagrined at herself when I told her.  :-)

Hope springs
Its been delightful to be here in the Finger Lakes, my new home. Although my "new new house" is smaller and much older than my "old new house" (1400 sq. ft. rather than 2,000, built in 1880 vs. 1961), it's been very artfully renovated and restored by its previous owners and I'm just in love with the place. I love the spaces, the feel of the neighborhood, the grounds. It's about an hour's drive from S. and we hope to get together every week.

The Finger Lakes are utterly beautiful.

I want to name the new house, and nothing I've tried has quite stuck yet. "Eastlake" is the name of the road it's on, conflating the two; "Redwall" (there's one deep red wall in the kitchen) sounds too much like the title of a Stephen King novel.

[UPDATE: We decided to call it The Eastlake House, after the road it's on, and after Lady Eastlake, the first photography critic. I currently plan to put the office on the front porch, so there'll be a small portrait of Lady Eastlake out there that visitors can spot.

I also really, really want this to put inside the front door—it was made right up the road in Rochester, and it is gorgeous—but I absolutely can't afford it. Rats. —MJ]

With any luck this coming week will be eventful; I could be all in before week's end. There are still a few things up in the air, and I'm not in control of all the variables. But you know what they say—hope springs eternal!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Stephen McCullough: "Feels like you are struggling a bit with the limbo thing. Well, you know this period will end, so be in the moment as much as you can. As for naming the place...Finger Lakes—your lake isn't by any chance the middle one? Just a thought.

"By the way, this entire story of you getting your son started in his next phase, moving on with your life, making a major shift, entering into a relationship and so on is all pretty inspirational."

Chuck Albertson: "Admit it. You're homeless."

Mike replies: I am.

Hugh Crawford: "Every time I was on the verge of buying a house I always asked myself if it would be appropriately named Toad Hall, as I looked upon Mr. Toad in The Wind In The Willows as something of a role model.

"Another thought: I used to know someone who called her house 'the small house' and called her car 'the green car' because she thought that way people will assume that she in addition had a larger house and a car that was not green."

Darkroom Equipment for Sale

UPDATE #2, 5:00 p.m. Tuesday: Good news—a reader friend has offered to take all these things away and post them separately on Ebay in August. I'll be sure to alert TOP readers when that happens.

-

[UPDATE #1: I had to remove the sale notice. I was hoping to get some offers for all this stuff together, admittedly for my own convenience. It's just that I have no time to part it out and ship things separately to multiple people. 

I accepted an offer on my current house that was contingent on a quick closing. It left me without enough time to get a mortgage for my new house and unable to hire a moving company. So I'm having to make an interstate move all on my own and I won't have a house to move in to when I get there. It's something of a logistical nightmare. Lots of work trying to organize everything and get ready. I need to get rid of things, but I have no time to sell things individually.

Very sorry about the inconvenience! It's not that I wouldn't like to accommodate everyone who just wants one or two items, it's just that I'm not able to do it that way at the present time. Sorry again.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Don Davis: "Boy, oh boy! Last year, I was tasked with liquidating long unused darkroom gear at the newspaper. Stacks of Nikor tanks and reels, Gralabs, film dryers, Leitz easels, Leitz and Nikkor enlarging lenses. Twelve-foot stainless sink. The equipment was unused for nearly fifteen years, but in excellent shape. No buyers or takers! We literally could not give the stuff away to schools. I retired shortly thereafter, and the paper moved to a new building, taking nothing with them from the darkroom. Into the dumpster it went. Talk about moving on!"

Ann: "The house is sold. It could be much worse. I had to do the same thing, by the way, on my last move. I got three weeks to pack, move 1,200 miles and start the new job, and the new house wasn't going to be available for six weeks after we got there. We ended up taking two people, a Great Dane, a cat, and six weeks' worth of possessions across the country in a Honda CR-V, and putting everything else in storage until the new house was ready. We spent a week in a terrible furnished apartment, a week couch surfing, three weeks in a Residence Inn, and convinced our sellers to move a week early. It was hard, but we got it done. You will too."