Category: film processing
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Holi in Bangladesh Part 2: the Ruined Roll
A bit of clicking around this site will reveal I’m a film photographer. And when I went to photograph the Holi celebration for my previous post, I took with me three rolls of film. Only two turned out as intended. I had two small developer tanks that hold two spools each – two in one,…
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Making a Camera Work: The No. 2 Folding Pocket Kodak Model C or Maybe D…
Among the growing group of people who collect and operate vintage film cameras, there are two types of people: those who quickly figure out a way to make an old camera work again, and those who obsess way too long over making an old camera work, to the point that it’s no longer really about…
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Twelve Months, Twelve Cameras, Twelve Decades…and One Film. #ATG365
In August 2017, the hosts of podcast Against the Grain discussed photographers’ tendency to immediately look at photos they’ve shot (chimping) and how film photography slows the process down, resulting in an increased emphasis on capturing the photo, without constantly worrying about the end result. They suggested taking this idea of removing “chimping” to an extreme by…
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Testing Silberra’s New Film
Tell most people there’s a new kind of photo film and they’ll think you’re crazy. But there have been a number of new film types over the last year or two – some reboots by companies like Kodak, new film types by existing film companies – even companies entering the film market altogether! Silberra is…
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Favorite Film, Favorite Camera
I finally got around to trying something a photographer friend suggested a couple of years ago. At the time, I was new to film photography and not trying anything too fancy, beyond simply getting the 50, 60, 70-year-old cameras I was finding on eBay to take reasonable pictures (also no small feat). I had discovered…
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Kodak T-Max P3200: My First Roll
A notification from 35mmc today with Hamish Gill’s review of Kodak’s re-released P3200 reminded me that I, too, recently shot my first roll of P3200 – I just hadn’t gotten around to sharing my results. I’m a little bit late to the game, given that the film was re-released in mid-March – but it takes…
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Guest Post: Darkroom Blues: A Blast from the Past (Part II)
This is part 2 of an article shared by a photographer friend here in Chennai which was originally written for the Photographic Society of Madras, a local photographic society founded in 1857. Â The first part of the article is published here. The author, Rags Raghavan, has since moved on to digital photography. Â You can find…
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Guest Post: Darkroom Blues – a Blast from the Past (part 1)
A friend of mine here in Chennai shared an article with me the other day, which he had written for the Photographic Society of Madras, a local photographic society founded in 1857.  It reminded me not only how far we have come – in this day and age where everyone is taking perfectly lit/focused photographs at…
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Processing Your Own Film
I recently had a query from someone on whether I would teach him how to process his own film. Â Unfortunately I’ve only been at it for about 9 months, far too short to be in any position to teach on the subject. Â But I can share what I know so far – and thought I’d…
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Gypsies in India
We regularly join “photowalks” here in Chennai, and were surprised to hear we were going to visit a “gypsy colony.” A bit of googling informed me that the “Roma” people speak a language closely related to Hindi, and are thought to originate somewhere in or near India. Here they are not known as Roma people;…
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Cross Processing 127 Film
When I first started playing around with vintage cameras, I wasn’t sure what kind of film to order, and just for fun, ordered a roll of Rollei Crossbird, without really knowing what it was. Â It turns out this is slide film – i.e. “positive” or “color reversal” film you would use for old-fashioned slides, rather…
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Found Film: 110 “Pocket Instamatic”
One of those small 110 cartridges people used to put in “pocket instamatic” and other miniature cameras in the 1970s and 1980s came into my possession the other day. Â All twelve pictures had been taken. Â No idea whose it was originally – it was probably found in an old camera picked up at a garage…
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Vintage Photos with the Agfa Billy Record I
Here’s another post about vintage cameras from this blog that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Agfa’s Billy Record I was produced from 1950 to 1952 in the U.S. Zone of post-World War II Germany. The export model (to the U.S.) was known as the Ventura 69. It shoots at 3 speeds (1/25, 1/50,…
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Color Film Processing at Home
There are quite a few opinions out there on the ‘net that processing color film yourself is just too darn hard. Â I’m happy to report that I managed to do it for the first time – and if I can do it, it’s definitely not that hard. Â You do have to be able to keep…
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Success! Processing B & W Film for the First Time
This weekend, I set out to try and cut the expenses for my hobby a bit by learning to process the film myself. I ordered the chemicals for both black/white and color film processing a few weeks ago, along with a developing tank from the 1950s I picked up on eBay for 3 bucks. The…
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Preparing to Process my Own Film for the First Time
It has been about seven months since I started fooling around with film photography again, after a break of decades.  My daughter suggested we try and load up an old folder we had picked up years ago at a flea market in Belgium – I blogged about it back in February. Today, laughing, she said…