The Online Photographer

Sunday Support Group: Let Photography Be Thy Vocation

Friday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Book of interest this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

(Heh.)

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

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

Courtesy Public Domain Review

The windmill scene from Don Quixote, 1648 Frankfurt edition

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

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

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

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

Sakai Camera Trade
Musashi Focus US Store
Sanpou Camera
Tokyophoto

"I experienced pleasant trading with these sellers."

The Very Modest Film Commitment

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

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

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

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

And I really hope I will have avoided bailure, because am I ever gonna get some kinda #$@% if I fail.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 5 of an Uncertain Number

Words and pictures by Ctein

Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV

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

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

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

Fig. 1

Words and photos by Ctein

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

Part 4 of an Uncertain Number...

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

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

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

Fig. 2.

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

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

Fig. 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ctein

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Film Processing Labs?

Photographer Ed Westcott, Department of Energy photo, 1947

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Yiorgos, Eamon and Hugh)

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

Dye Transfer and Me, Part III: Sweat and Tears

Words and photo by Ctein

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

Part 3 of an Uncertain Number...

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

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

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

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

Fig. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another $100 worth of film. Grrr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, nothing technical about it.

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

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

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

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

Ctein

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

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

Sunday Support Group for that Rare Darkroom Rat: Enlarger Dealz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not THAT Kind of Enlarger, Please

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

Illustration courtesy Darkroom enlarger.svg

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

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

Ilford Multigrade RC Deluxe Photo Paper

Written by Oren Grad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oren

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

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

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

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

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

New Film? And the Rising Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the honor of Japan!

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographing Maphiyata Echiyatan Hin Win

The words are Lakota (the tribe known in old movies as the Sioux. "Sioux" means "little snakes" in Ojibwe, the "big snakes" being the Iroquois). The name means "Woman Who Comes From the Heavens." AKA the teenaged Swedish activist Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg, who has recently been the talk of...not "the town," but the world.

If I was naming her I'd figure out how to say "Woman Who Says Emperor Is Buck Nekked" in Lakota. Or something like hey, we have to live here after you're gone, so stop not talking about this.

Photo by Chad Nodland

Anyway, moving on to the point, there's a wonderful article on Emulsive called "Greta Thunberg: capturing the voice of the 21st century using 150-year-old wet plate photography." Pretty self-explanatory, actually.

What the title doesn't explain, the first three sentences do:

"The call came in on the afternoon of Monday 7th October. Shane Balkowitsch would have [a] little under 24 hours to plan a 15-minute wet plate photo shoot with Greta Thunberg at Standing Rock. Naturally, the first thing he did after getting off the phone was to start packing his studio up into the back of his truck—including his portable darkroom.

"It was going to be an intense 24 hours."

Standing Rock is a huge Indian reservation straddling North and South Dakota.

Inspired by John Coffer, Shane Balkowitsch only shoots wet plate—nothing else. Two days ago he wrote, "This past 24 hours has completely gone off the rails. My wet plates of Greta Thunberg have gone viral online. On Facebook alone there has been thousands of shares and tens of thousands of likes."

The article is more in pictures than in words. Most of the pictures (including the one here) are by Chad Nodland.

Fascinating being able to look over everyone's shoulder on this shoot. Have a look.

Mike

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John (partial comment): "I’m a liberal and support environmentalists, but this hype around Greta Thunberg drives me nuts."

Arg: "The message is so important that the response had better not be to shoot the messenger."

EM: "Mike, thank you for linking to my little article. I must say it was a surprise to see it mentioned on these hallowed pages. Thank you so much for what you do, I'll slip away now and continue to admire from afar!"

 

Two Catalogs

For those of you who are into film and darkroom, Freestyle's new catalog is out. It's very splashy.

For those of you who are into Micro 4/3, the new Micro Four Thirds Joint Lens Catalog is out. The catalog is limited to products offered by companies that formally participate in the 4/3 consortium. There are other lenses available from companies that don't participate but just copy the mount. Leica has more expensive lenses, Canon and Nikon have useful if somewhat scattershot lines, Sony furiously produces lenses with planning that appears to constantly change, Fuji's lineup is the most sensible and well-considered (and my personal favorite), but for variety and pure photogeek fun I don't think anything out there beats Micro 4/3.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

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Want to help?

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Dark Prints and Viewing Light

JOHN GILLOOLY* wrote yesterday: "Mike, I think I posed a question to you years ago about Karsh after looking at a collection of his portraits of the Marshall Supreme Court that is housed at Boston University Law School. I found the prints to be very dark in the same way I think you are describing of Garo? Compared with the tones we see today, the images seem very dark overall, with even the highlights not coming anywhere near white. They are only highlights relative to the general darkness off the rest of the tones. I haven't seen any other prints of Karsh, so I wasn't sure if this is typical of all of his work? But I guess we can see where this came from.  —John, Boston."

I've never seen the prints in question, and I've never seen early Karsh prints, which might have something like John Garo's style of tonality. (Early work does tend to resemble peoples' models or the previous prevailing styles—Both Ansel Adams's and Edward Weston's very early work resembled pictorialism, for instance.) If not, though, then it's quite likely that it's a matter of viewing light.

Low light levels are common even in good museums today. This is a custom or fashion based on some mix of two things: conservation of the prints, and conservation of the institution's electric bills. (I have the latter on good authority, by the way—I'm not imputing base motives on the basis of supposition only.) In any event, it's apparent that inadequate lighting is a cross we have to bear these days. Another cudgel to the side of the head of the precious baby seal of the masterpieces of the past, forgive my hyperbole.

Outdated tech stuff
A bit of technical background: the light that strikes a print actually passes through the emulsion twice—once on the way in toward the paper base, and once after it reflects off the paper and comes back out.

There are a number of cool things that this implies. For one thing, it's critical for a darkroom printer to choose the right light level under which to evaluate prints during the printing process. I can sometimes see the printmaker's mistakes in choosing viewing-light levels when I look at prints on display. I could train anyone of visual sensitivity to do this with the right demonstration setup. One obvious example is when you go to an exhibit at a brightly-lit gallery and see B&W prints where the blacks are obviously just dark gray, not a full, rich black. Non-photographer critics can even bloviate about this like it's artistic choice, on which I call BS—it's just that the viewing light the photographer was using to make his choices in the darkroom was too dim. The dim light made the blacks seem black to him. Throw the finished product under stronger light, though, and oops! Suddenly the blacks don't look so black any more.

[Usage note: I'm in the habit of using the word "printer" in the old-fashioned way, to mean a person in a darkroom who is making a print. Now that printer more commonly means one of these**, I'm trying to use the word "printmaker" when referring to the person doing the work.

Unfortunately that's not entirely unambiguous either, as "printmaker" used to refer to a human doing "printmaking," which referred to old-fashioned fine-art methods of making prints, such as etching, woodcuts, stone lithography, silkscreening, etc. But a human in the darkroom has more in common with a human inking a copper plate than she does with a hulk of black plastic that says "Epson" on the front, so I'm doing the best I can on that front, I think. —Ed.]

Optical brighteners in printing paper also threw inexperienced printmakers off, especially if they evaluated their prints under fluorescent lights. The fluorescents could excite the brighteners and make the highlights look brighter than they would look under incandescent light, causing the printmaker to print the highlights too dark and dull. I've seen this flaw in exhibited work many times too.

When I was printing, my strategy was to look at the test strip and the guide print in various different kinds of light. (This caused me to wander around various buildings staring at the tray held in front of me like one of the Peripatetics of Aristotle, but then people in art schools and studio art cooperatives have to be tolerant of eccentricity.) I developed a sense of the right compromise. It's always a compromise, unless you know for sure in advance the light levels under which your prints will be displayed.

Light in darkness
There's another really cool effect of the light passing through the print emulsion twice. It's that when you take a negative with plentiful information in the shadows and print it dark, so that all the shadows look black from the front, you can shine a light through the print from behind the print—from the back—and suddenly see a whole lot more detail in the shadows. It's like brightening the shadows by 50%, because now the light is only passing through the emulsion once.

I once found a nice example. It was a heavy tangle of bramble in the woods which had an opening in it. The opening led to a covered interior space that was heavily shaded by the foliage above it. My print of that made the opening look a pure featureless black—but if I put a flashlight to the back of the print, suddenly it was as if you were shining a light into the inner space itself—you could see all kinds of detail in the interior.

My idea was to put a person inside the space, retake the picture, and then hang the framed print with an integral lightbox behind it. The viewer would look at the plain print and see a black opening to the copse of bramble, seeing nothing there, then press a button, turning the light box on, at which point they'd see the interior space with the previously invisible person in it looking out.

Neat idea, but of course I never carried it out. Most of my ideas bloom in my head for a while but never get reified. I'm not good on follow-through. (But getting better, as I've been working on it.) The exhibit of all the cool artwork I never made would be a good show, I'll tell ya that. :-)

Another example: There is or was a landscape photographer whose name escapes me at the moment who made giant double-unsharp-masked prints from 8x10 negatives of remote wilderness areas. He is a virtuoso and his printmaking process is technically very involved. He came to my loft in Chicago one day for a private showing of his prints. Because of the limitations of transport he showed me only his "medium-sized" prints, which were up to six feet in the long dimension. Here's what he did: first, he showed a print on an easel under normal room light, in which it looked dark and flat. Then he took two very bright floodlamps with barndoors and positioned them quite close to print. Turning them on flooded the prints with blazing bright light, and bam—they were transformed! Suddenly all the tones looked "right" and extremely vivid, and the illusion of looking at snowy mountains on a brilliantly sunlit day was startlingly realistic.

He had printed the prints to display properly under unusually bright light.

Charles Phillips. Not to be confused with the Western photographer from Mariposa of the same name. The JPEGs at the link are nothing like the real things.

Anyway, long story short (unless it's too late for that), my suspicion is that the prints you saw were printed for bold, bright midcentury viewing lighting, and you were looking at them under tepid, fey, postmodern viewing lighting. This is only a guess, but I'd need to know more to be convinced I'm wrong.

Mike
(Thanks to John)

*I reproduce all commenters' names just as they wrote them, unless requested to do otherwise.

**I actually had a dream about making prints with a big Epson last night. I'm not kidding. And in my dream, I had figured out a way to make someone else pay for the ink.  :-)

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Here’s the situation

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John Camp (partial comment): "I went to a photo show of historic prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I could barely make out the images because of low lighting and protective glass. I wanted to pull out my iPhone and turn on the flashlight app to check out the pix, but I chickened out.

"There seems to be a basic contradiction here—they want to preserve rare prints, but for what? So they can sit in drawers, unseen, until they're dead? Or they're pulled out for some kind of ritual artifact display, in which you can't actually see the photos, but have to take it on faith that they're there?

"With delicate, sensitive photos, why doesn't the museum make precise copies, which I think really good digital printers could do, and display those, so we could see the images under brighter lights? You wouldn't get to see the actual artifact, but why is that different than seeing an actual artifact (say, 'Moonrise') that was 'printed later?' And often, much later? I've also noticed that with many really old, delicate photos, some of the details are hard to make out, even under crystal clear museum glass. I think it would be very interesting to make a precise copy of the photo, right down to the the precise colors or shades, and to the exact millimeter in correct size, as the main point of a display, but then surround it with blow-ups of details, and also tonal adjustments that the curators believe would accurately represent the original, un-aged print."

Mike replies: We should get Ken Tanaka to pass this idea along to the PTB at the AIC. (Powers-that-be at the Art Institute of Chicago.) Maybe it would make its way into the art world from there. Maybe the originals could hang under a thick weighted piece of black velvet that viewers could lift briefly under the watchful eye of a guard, like this precious artifact was when I saw it in D.C.

The best way to preserve prints would be to entomb them in archival enclosures and store them in a salt mine, and never let anybody look at them. That way when humanity goes extinct from climate change, they'll be there for aliens to discover. ...After the aliens get over their surprise about the dinosaurs being all gone. "Dude, wasn't this planet just full of giant lizards for, like, eons? What the hell happened here?"

I'm still waiting for the first museum exhibit of prints made by the curators from images that existed only in digitized form prior to the exhibit. That would take a curator (male or female!) with cojones.

James Bullard: "There is one other factor that applies in printing and that is drydown. Ansel used to dry his tests in his microwave oven to be sure of the final tones. I find that drydown is even a factor in digital printing, at least with the mat surfaced paper I mostly use. Wet inks, even slightly wet inks, reflect more light."

Mike replies: Some silver gelatin papers suffered from quite a lot of drydown and some very little. For me it was just a matter of really getting to know the paper. I know I tried the microwave thing once. Decided it was a tad iffy from a food safety standpoint, since of course I didn't have access to a microwave dedicated exclusively to drying prints.

Tony McLean responds to James and Mike: "I used to avoid drydown with my silver gelatin prints by using a technique borrowed from the water colourists—I taped the washed print to a piece of 1/4 inch glass and let it dry overnight. The print was drum tight in the morning and no shrinkage equals no density increase."

Geoff Wittig: "Digital inkjet printing is very much prone to errors in value control, and prints notoriously tend to come off the printer looking way too dark. Low ambient light in viewing conditions is part of the problem, so I finally got a decently bright daylight balanced viewing light to check my prints to make sure the shadow details I intended are actually there in the print.

"A much bigger problem is the innate difference between transmitted light on the computer monitor and reflected light in the print. It's very easy to see endless shadow detail on a bright computer monitor that disappears in the print.

"The solution has two parts: the first is to turn down the monitor brightness (some authorities state 90 cd/m^2 [candela per square meter], but 'less bright' is a good first approximation). The second comes from Charlie Cramer's fabulous printing course, and is an invaluable technique. You set your Photoshop 'infopallete' so one of the readouts is in L a b colorspace. Then place your cursor over a shadow area where you want some detail to show, and check the values. The 'L' in L a b is luminosity, and gives a simple numeric value. Anything less than about 6 will print as dead black (depending on your printer), no matter how much detail you can see on that monitor. Somewhere between 8 and 12 you'll see subtle shadow detail. From 15 or so higher you'll see lots of detail. Simply using this tool saves you lots of wasted paper for prints that lost their shadow separation."

Michael Perini: "Re light traveling through the emulsion twice, When my second daughter was preparing her thesis show at University of Pennsylvania, she had an idea to accentuate the effect. She had shot portraits of women's shoes. Her idea was to print them on glass and then frame them three inches in front of a mirror. Ten by ten sheets of glass, 10x10 mirrors, and we made 3 1/2" deep shadow-box frames to hold the sandwich. We had to polyurethane the glass, paint on the 'Liquid Light' emulsion in a bottle, then process. The effect was stunning.

"She got the thesis prize that year. A nice memory. I pulled them out a few years ago, and they had faded quite a bit. I must have gotten the fixing or washing wrong. It was the only time I ever worked with liquid emulsion."

hugh crawford: "When I was in college I made the mistake of judging my exposure in the darkroom by looking at my prints standing next to a window with a sopping wet print in the tray. Between the print drying down about a stop and the bright viewing light they were pretty much viewable only in direct sunlight, or about 500 watts of Lowell Totalight (RIP Russ Lowell by the way). They were on the 'old' Portriga and it turns out that overexposed prints scan really well so it's good that I saved them. Still at the time I had a portfolio that was optimized for viewing either outdoors ('funny running into you here in the parking lot, want to see some prints?') or under really bright light. Fun fact; stores and galleries like to turn the lights up really bright because it makes people want to buy things, and painters tend to have studios that are lit to daylight levels."

Kenneth Tanaka: "We have over 200 prints by Karsh in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, gathered from the 1950s to 2014 (I think). I can't claim to have seen them all (probably most) but I can say that there is (understandable) variation in papers and general print warmth. I do not know what you would consider 'dark' but I can say that Karsh did keep the highlights of his prints below (paper) white. However, the overall impression of 'brightness' is largely conveyed via the contrast of the image. The 1946 portrait of Henry Ford II, for example, presents a brighter impression than, say, the duller 1971 portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor even though it's certainly 'darker.' But your (visual) mileage may vary.

"Regarding museum light levels, I've been on a bit of a personal campaign to visit as many of the major museums, at least in America, as possible for the past several years. (My aching feet!) I have no doubt that museums do attempt to reduce their electric bills. But I can say that any lowered lighting levels in shows at larger museums are primarily due to conservation considerations, not 'fashion' or electric costs. (Museums have become sensitive to the gripe about gloomy galleries.) Advancements in research of the effects of various lighting on print integrity have made exhibition standards for chemical prints more conservative during recent years. It has become common for loan agreements, for example, to mandate maximum footcandle-hour exposures for high-value prints loaned for shows. Advancements in LED lighting, light filtration, and glazing are gradually helping to mitigate this, but these newer technologies for world-class museums are very expensive. So it will take a while.

"(By the way, If you're interested in print conservation and you're visiting the AIC by April 28 be sure to visit Sylvie Pénichon's outstanding exhibition on Conserving Photographs now on view in Gallery 10!)

"Anyone can make an appointment to view prints in the AIC collection for just the price of general admission during the museum's normal weekday hours. Just call the museum and ask to talk with the Department of Photography's collection manager.

"Closer to John Gillooly's location, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has over 900 Karsh prints in their collection. Why not make an appointment to visit some of them this spring?"

Bruce Alan Greene: "A while back I went to see the Huntington Library's collection of original Weston prints. I guess to preserve these old prints, they display them only on occasion and...in dim light. And they looked so dull displayed this way that one was left wondering why anyone thought they were such good photographs. Even the bookshop at the museum was a better viewing experience. Sad."

Mike replies: Sometimes I think books really do give a better representation of prints than the real thing. Another example is one of my all-time favorite books, Roy De Carava: A Retrospective. The reproductions are faithful in feel, but just slightly better balanced than the real prints. They look better, read better, and seem more beautiful to me, compared to some originals I was able to compare to the reproductions in the book.

Glenn Brown: "I was once sent to Ottawa by my boss to pick up copies of his then-new book Karsh Canadians as corporate giveaways. He was very charming and appreciative of the book purchase and I had the opportunity to talk about his prints. His technique was that you had to be able to 'read through' the negative and print accordingly. They were what I would call 'thin.' After that I did print darker than before."

Sal Santamaura (partial comment): " I've gotten to the point where it's not worthwhile traveling any distance to view exhibits. They're almost always so dark one cannot see the prints anyway."

Tom R. Halfhill: "Printing dark was apparently an intentional style early in the 20th century, or so says a museum curator. While viewing a photo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art several years ago, I saw several dark prints by famous photographers. I was wondering if they had faded when I noticed a museum placard next to these prints. It said they weren't faded and were well-preserved original prints from that time."

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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