Taming the Dragon

Is that dark speck out in the water another pinhole in the negative? Thankfully no, close inspection reveals it is just a duck.

This is a progress report of sorts on the situation I described a couple of episodes back in "Curse of the Dragon". That title refers to one subject, a driftwood log that reminded me of the dragon figurehead on a Norse longboat, of which nearly every image I took seemed to result in a negative plagued to some degree or other by pinholes in the negative, resulting in dark spots on the positive image. It wasn't the subject of course, just a bit of bad luck that somehow on three separate rolls of film that contained images of that log nearly all the spots wound up on those negatives.

Now if the only thing I was ever going to do with these negatives was scan them and put them up on the internet, or even if I printed from scanned files, this would be little more than an annoyance. These black spots are no more difficult to remove in Photoshop than are dust spots, the near inevitability of which I've reconciled with long ago. For me however a finished image is nothing short of a traditional silver print. With Photoshop taken out of the equation retouching dust spots is done on the prints directly using special retouch dyes and a #000 brush. This of course can only make a light spot darker and there is some risk of ruining the print, especially if you're out of practice. Retouching the dark spots that result from pinholes in the negative requires much more drastic measures and a much greater risk of botching the job. After spending hours getting all the printing details down, toning, archival washing and so on (retouching has to come after all of this) the risk of that kind of heartbreak is something I consider unacceptable. Finding solution to this out of the blue problem is therefore a necessity.

A quick review or those of you who haven't read the first part, pinholes in photographic negatives can be caused either by air-bells, which are simply tiny bubbles of air that cling to the surface of the film preventing developer from reaching the emulsion at that spot, or chemical reactions suddenly releasing little gas bubbles that blow tiny holes in the emulsion. Think of the fizz you get when you mix baking soda and vinegar. Developers contain an alkali very similar to baking soda (I start with baking soda to make the alkali for my home mixed developers) and the acetic acid in most stop baths essentially is vinegar. It seems pretty safe to eliminate cause number two though - I use plain water in between developer and fix.

So air-bells are almost certainly the culprit, but what is behind their sudden appearance in such numbers? To be sure the occasional stray pinhole has found its way onto my negatives from time to time, but never before has an image looked like it had been sprayed with a tommy-gun. My standard practice when developing roll film includes two preventative measures - pre-soaking the film in plain water before starting with the developer and giving the tank several firm raps on the counter after every agitation cycle to shake off any bubbles that form. Many darkroom workers suggest a single rap only after the developer is added and say they find a pre-soak to be a waste of time so I always thought that if anything I was being overly cautious. To be suffering from them anyway just seems unjust.

Something In The Water?

I had two suspects in mind. The first was a possible change in the water. Part of the reason I always seem able to find new images along the same few kilometres of beach is the fact the lake is an ever changing mistress. Well that same changing lake that figures in so many of my images also happens to be the source of the water those images are developed in. It never seemed to be a problem. The water quality where I live is pretty good, we don't have hard water and our town water was rated the second best tasting water in Ontario. But the treatment and testing of tap water is done with a mind to human consumption, not consistent results in the darkroom. Distilled water is considered the gold standard when mixing photo chemistry. In areas where the tap water is less suitable for photo chemistry it is virtually mandatory. Even though I've never considered tap water to be a problem the one virtue distilled water has is that it's not subject to sudden changes and is the same anywhere you go. It isn't expense that's kept me from using but rather the dual inconveniences of having to store it and the fact it doesn't run hot and cold which can make getting it to a specific temperature an extra challenge at times.

Factor number two was the change I had made a month or so before from using the stainless steel tanks and reels that had been my standard for years to plastic Paterson tanks and reels. It seemed like a safe choice - Paterson has to be the most widely used daylight processing tank system by quite a stretch. The comparative advantages of plastic vs. stainless could (and very well might) be the subject of an episode on their own, but my reasons for doing so have less to do with versatility and ease of use than my accidental discovery that a problem with negatives showing more development along the edges of the film compared to the middle simply went away when I used them. For this reason I was hoping the water was the problem. I did not want the solution to the pinhole problem to require a return to uneven development I thought I had banished for good. It wasn't a severe problem, it just required some extra effort during printing to even things out, but it was a pain and sometimes even meant using an extra sheet of paper or two to get things right and I was glad to be rid of it.

My stainless steel tank and 120 reel on the left, and Paterson
tank on the right along with a reel adjusted for 120/220 film.

Why should the tank make any difference at all? The main reason, I believe, is that the reels for the plastic tanks are much more tightly wound. For those of you not familiar with spiral reels for processing film they are simply consist of two circular grooved surfaces separated by the exact width of the film allowing roll to be developed can be wound around the grooves, ensuring no part of the roll is in contact with any other when placed in a cylindrical developing tank. As regular readers are probably aware I primarily shoot 120 film. The stainless steel reels I use are wound just tightly enough to accommodate standard length of 120 film which can be up to 840mm long. One of the great advantages of Paterson reels is that the same reel you load your 120 film into can be adjusted to accommodate a roll of 35mm film up to 36 exposures as well. But a roll of 35mm film is almost twice as long as 120 roll. This means that a 120 roll is wound much more tightly than it would need to be if the reel was designed exclusively for 120 film as is the case with stainless reels. As a consequence there is less space between successive windings of the film surface to allow bubbles to escape. Looking at film in the tank with the lid off while its being washed I have also noticed the flatter tops of the plastic reels seem more apt to keep the bubbles that have risen from below from escaping to the surface.

Well, that was my theory anyway, the one I hoped wasn't the case. Though it seemed reasonable I had a couple of reasons to think it wasn't so, The first was this wasn't the first time I had used these tanks, so why didn't I notice this before. The second was I have seen all kinds of stainless vs. plastic comparisons and had never heard anyone suggest propensity for problems with air-bells was a factor. The proof of the pudding though, would be in the eating.

The Investigations Begin

Chosing to let hope lead I decided to stay with the Paterson tanks for now and see what happens with distilled water. I'm currently working with the Beutler formula as my standard developer, mixing the stock solution from scratch using distilled water. Now I would be diluting it for use with distilled water as well, rather than tap water which had always been my practice before. Just to be safe I also used distilled water for the pre-soak. For the remainder of the process tap water would be used as usual since I had no suspicions the problem might occur after development. Even as I was hanging the strip out to dry the result was obvious however as an unmissable clear spot appeared smack in the middle of a dense are of sky on one of the images. On the bright side it wasn't an image I would have wanted to print anyway and there weren't many pinholes besides this. In the grander scheme of things however this wouldn't do.

Before reverting to the stainless tank however I decided to give one other idea a go - adding a few drops of the wetting agent (Photo Flo, LFN or what have you) to the pre-soak and the developer. Having run into one or two sources that recommend against this I was reluctant to try it, but the more I researched the more I found this was done a matter of course by more people than I had suspected. No matter, it still wasn't difficult to find pinholes.

I actually had to dig the stainless steel tank out, having stored it away thinking I might never have use for it again. It's back in it's old spot now though because from it emerged the first roll of film since the curse of the dragon began that did not contain pinholes. Some extra density along the edges, yes, but those can be dealt with.

Putting It All Together

Did I really have to deal with them though. I had a pretty good idea why negatives were coming out of the plastic tanks more evenly developed. Even when filled with chemistry they weren't really full. There was always a generous amount of air at the top so that when the tank was inverted there was room for things to slosh around, replacing exhausted developer with fresh more completely. With stainless tanks I have always been in the habit of mixing enough chemistry to allow me to see it above the top of the light trap in the lid - 475ml. It was more that the 450ml suggested, but it was somehow reassuring to see it, knowing there was no possibility anything inside wasn't completely immersed in chemistry.

Straight from the scanner this is typical of the results I often
got with negatives developed in stainless steel tanks. Note how
much brighter the sides are compared to the centre.

With a bit of new perspective this now seemed like precisely the wrong thing to do. Before my next roll went in I decided to find out exactly how much chemistry was actually required to cover the reel in the tank. It seemed 400ml would do it and 420ml gave plenty of cushion if, for example, the tank wasn't set down exactly level. It also divides out nicely with the 1+1+12 dilution I've come to favour with my standard developer. Compared to what I had been doing that's 55ml of extra space to allow chemistry to slosh around, mix together and even out during agitation (also 55ml less chemistry used.) Would it make a difference?

It's only been one roll since I tried this but so far the answer is yes. The image at the top is from this roll. It came out as even as anything that's come out of the Paterson tank and pinhole free. It seems like it's the plastic tanks that will be headed to storage now, which is a shame really since it was the more complete system. The stainless system I have limits me to developing one roll at a time which can be quite a pain. I'll be travelling most of this week and anticipate returning with several rolls to process. On the bright side I like working with the stainless tanks. I find the process of loading the reels more foolproof than with the plastic and the tanks I have don't leak at all. For some reason every Paterson tank I have ever used dribbles a little chemistry every time they are inverted.

None of this is to suggest the Paterson or any other plastic reel and tank system are bound to give you the same results. If everyone had the results I got these products would have fallen off the market long ago. It's, what can I say, one of those things. Somewhere in the idiosyncrasies of the materials I use and the way I do things is the reason I had problems while countless others did not. Maybe someday I'll figure out what it is. The real bottom line is that if none of this happened I'd probably still be doing things the way I have for years thinking density variations were something I just had to live with.

Post Script

As I said I'll be travelling much of the upcoming week. The bad news is that leaves me without any significant time for any little extras like writing another blog entry so there will be no Golden Age of Silver next week. The good news is that I anticipate having at least a photo or two taken during my travels to talk about, and if for some reason I don't, well the reasons for that should be worth talking about for their own sake. At any rate, lets all agree to meet back here sometime in early June.

Curse of the Dragon

Last week I wrote about my misadventures in pinhole photography. In this episode I detail my run-ins with pinholes of a different sort, one that photographers are never happy to see, and the disconcerting circumstances under which they appeared.

I call this image "Driftwood Dragon", not because it reminds me of the actual creature so much as the dragon figurehead on some ancient ship of war. It's the remains of a tree that, who knows, may have been uprooted and set adrift in Lake Superior, ultimately coming to rest along my favourite little stretch of beach, just shy of the Niagara. It's one of many driftwood logs I have encountered along the shore now that the ice that had carried them is finally gone, a few of which, like this one, I found interesting enough to spend a frame or two on. This one, however, got more than its fair share. It's not that I found it all that particularly worthy of photographic attention so much as the sense I wound up getting that my every attempt to photograph it was accompanied by a particular darkroom mini-disaster. It was almost like a curse.

This isn't just a tale of my efforts to take a picture of a log however, so let me back up a little to put the story in its wider context. While most of the home darkroom practicing world chooses to develop roll film in plastic daylight tanks, most notably those made by Paterson, my preference has always been for stainless steel tanks. The relative merits of each are a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that that's what I was comfortable with. When I got my enlarger last summer however part of the lot that it came with included no less than three of the plastic Paterson tanks along with a host of reels. For the most part these had been sitting on a shelf ever since, though I did find uses for them now and then.

One such occasion came up a few weeks ago. I returned from an outing to put the Bronica I had just picked up through its initial paces with two rolls of HP5+ to develop. This has never been a standard film for me but I wanted bring something a bit faster into my arsenal to make it a bit easier to go tripod free when the situation calls for it. This also seemed like an opportune time to finally try Kodak Xtol, a developer I had been considering for some time and it seemed like a good match for the HP5+. I actually wound up getting eco-pro, an Xtol "clone" that is rumoured to come off the same production line.

I could have used the larger Paterson tank to develop both rolls at once, but as these were test rolls and I was using a new developer I wanted to at least have a peek at few frames on one roll to be sure everything was okay before going ahead with the second. I processed one of the rolls in the stainless tank as usual and a quick look coming out of the fix showed everything looked fine, but not wanting to wait for that roll to be hung to dry before starting on the second I decided to process the next one in the small plastic tank. Once everything was finished and I had a chance to look at the scans however I got a bit of a surprise. While the negatives from the stainless tank showed a pronounced decrease in density towards the centre of the image compared to the edges, those processed in the Paterson tank seemed perfectly even. The problem itself may be fodder for a future episode, but suffice it to say that since then I have switched to using plastic reels and tanks.

Now jump forward a few of weeks to find me spotting our lump of driftwood on the shore early one evening. There's some fairly interesting clouds in the background though the light is a bit flat. Finding I can't get low enough with the tripod I set the camera down on a convenient flat rock, propping it up with a few twigs to get the horizon level, and make a couple exposures, the second and third frames on a roll of Fuji Acros. Finishing the roll before heading home I developed it that evening only to find that both frames were riddled with pinholes, little spots on the negative where the film is clear. This is much more of a concern than dust spots since not only are they permanent, but they come out on prints as black spots that, unlike white dust spots, are nearly impossible to retouch.

Above is a scan showing the worst of the two negatives with the majority of the pinholes circled in red. There are actually more than I have indicated here that are either small enough not to noticed or are relatively hidden in the darker areas of the image. The scan would be a five minute retouch job in Photoshop, but I wouldn't waste the time paper and chemistry to print this in the darkroom. I've had the occasional pinhole in my images before, but nothing like this. I'd done something different this time though. After reading through some forum discussion on the practice of pre-soaking film before starting with the developer, my standard practice for years, I decided to skip this to see if it made a difference. Well, obviously it had I thought, lesson learned.

Two days later I was up at dawn with a few hours to kill before I had to head for work so I tossed the camera bag and tripod in the trunk and headed out for some morning photography, including a re-shoot of my dragon boat log. The light was much better now, so maybe it was a blessing I had problems with the first shots. Even the little twigs I had used to level the camera were still there as I had left them the other day. I set up just as I had the day before and did a couple of exposures, then just for insurance switched film magazines and playing around a bit with exposure and filtration did three exposures on HP5+ before finally switching back to the Acros to make two more exposures from a slightly different angle.

I finished the roll of HP5+ a couple days later on some shots of my daughter and processed it right away. This time there would be no skipping the pre-soak. The result was nine negatives completely free of pinholes or any other nasty defect, but though they weren't as bad three images were still marred by them. Guess which three.

I should take a moment here to discuss some of the causes of pinholes that appear like this on negatives. By far the most common is air bells, little bubbles that cling to the surface of the film, preventing chemistry from reaching the film. The best remedy for this is to rap the tank sharply a few times after the developer is poured in and preferably after each agitation cycle. I'm a bit of a fanatic about this, having once broken a tank in my efforts to ensure any air bells had been thoroughly shaken off, so I don't imagine this sudden issue is the result of any lack of bubble-jarring diligence on my part. A pre-soak also tends to diminish the tendency for air bells to form which may be why the problem was so much worse when I didn't do this. Pinholes can also form as the result of chemical action when the film is taken out of the alkali developer and suddenly introduced to an acid stop bath, but I don't use an acid stop bath for film, preferring a water rinse instead. Finally they can appear as a result of dust or debris lying on the film surface at the time of exposure. There may be other known causes, but I'm not aware of them.

Pinholes in a portion of one of the HP5+ negatives. You probably don't need me to circle them.

So now I needed to start questioning everything. There are some flaws that can be accommodated for or worked around but pinholes aren't one of them if you're hoping to make some top notch prints in the darkroom. The problem was there were so many things to question - a developer I had only just begun to use, processing tanks that were different from the kind I had used for years, even a camera I haven't had all that long. Time to start narrowing down the possibilities.

First up was the developer. When I finished up the roll of Acros with the remaining log photos, rather than using the eco-pro I mixed up a batch of Beutler's, a tried and true formula for me and a favourite for me with fine grained films like Acros. It also occurred to me that all of the problem images were among the first few images on the roll. These would have been on the innermost part of the processing reel, so as a precaution I wound the film onto the reel starting from the other end. The result? Pinholes in three of the four images of the dragon log. The image at the top of this post is the only one out of nine taken of this subject on which no pinholes were evident.

For my next roll it will be back to the stainless steel tank. I do get the impression that the more tightly wound plastic reels of the Paterson tanks tend to trap more tiny air bubbles than the stainless reels. Paterson tanks are by far the most popular type of developing tank out there however, it's hard to imagine they have an inherent flaw like this that nobody's talking about.

There is just one other possibility that comes to mind when I consider this - these problems have appeared on the last three rolls of film, each roll having twelve images for a total of thirty-six frames. Of those thirty six, nine were of this driftwood dragon, eight of which were marred by pinholes. I have had a decent look at the remaining twenty-seven and twenty-six of them don't seem to have any problem at all. Maybe I just need to stay away from this log.

A Spot Meter's Epitaph

Ah Spot, we hardly knew ye. I had hopes that by the time I sat down to write this it wouldn't be a eulogy for another beloved gadget gone to camera equipment heaven, but alas let's all bow our heads. While I haven't mentioned it previously, about a month ago, on the outing I wrote about in Embracing the Elements, my Pentax Spotmeter V suddenly stopped giving readings, each press of the trigger button resulting in only a small deflection of the needle in the opposite direction of the reading scale. Fresh batteries didn't help and in any case the battery check showed there was power with either the old or new set. When I got home I pulled it appart but after several sessions of poking around looking for loose connections, shaking and blasting canned air to flush out debris that might be shorting connections and spraying with contact cleaner, no dice.

I managed to finish that days shooting by guesstimating exposures based on experience and the readings I had been getting up until the meter gave up the ghost, the resulting negatives appearing no worse for it. Since then I have been operating with my second meter, a Gossen Luna-Lux. While its simple over/under LED indicator is less refined than its more sophisticated Lunasix and Luna-Pro cousins, it's accurate and I can't recall a time when I wasn't able to get good exposures using it. I used it exclusively on the day I wrote about in my previous post and had no exposure issues. In fact on the outing I wrote about in A Follow Up Visit I used no meter at all, relying solely on my experience with the old Sunny 16 Rule, again without any bad exposures. 

But despite all this success without the Pentax, at least in terms of exposure determination, the current situation is something I can only regard as a temporary work-around. Accurate though the Gossen may be, and as handy as its option to switch between incident and reflected metering is, it's not a spot meter. 

Here is where I should pause as I don't want to take my reader's knowledge of metering too much for granted, especially when it comes to something as old-school as using hand-held meters. Briefly then, straight-up reflected metering will be familiar to many as the method used with the built-in metering in cameras, at least before the days of computerized evaluative scene analysis. It simply looks at all the light coming from the scene and gives you the exposure settings that will render it all as an average brightness scene. Adjustments may need to be made for scenes that should appear more or less than average brightness such as a snowy landscape or coal pile. Doing reflective readings with a hand-held meter can be even more challenging since all you can do is point it in the general direction of the scene where readings may be skewed by things that don't appear in the scene as seen through the viewfinder. 

Incident metering allows you to base your exposure on the amount of light it reads falling on to your subject, a simple and brilliant method as there is no need to account for how light or dark the subject itself is. For a guy who does primarily landscape type work however it's usually not possible to go to where my subject is to measure the light, so unless I'm confident the light is exactly the same where I'm standing it may not be possible to get a meaningful reading this way. 

The view through the Pentax Spotmeter V. The circle above the 11
on the exposure scale indicates the area that the meter reads from.

Spot meters are really just very discriminating reflected meters, having their own viewfinders with a smallish circle in the middle that indicates the actual area the meter is measuring. In the case of the Pentax Spotmeter V the area measured roughly equates to what you'd see through the viewfinder of a 35mm camera equipped with a 2400mm lens (something that would probably be more accurately described as a telescope.) Most other hand-held meters I'm aware of are roughly the same. In addition to the hand-held variety however, many more modern cameras include a spot metering option with their built-in meters, which I imagine would include many 35mm SLRs new enough to have autofocus as well as, of course, all but the most basic DSLRs and those rangefinder-like lensless digital jobbies. Whatever the case the ability to measure just a small portion of the scene being photographed allows a photographer to, for example, pick out one small area of the scene with average brightness and base their exposure on this knowing that nothing else in the viewfinder is skewing the readings. Taking it one step further they could also take a few readings from different parts of the scene, say the lightest and the darkest parts, then chose an exposure that ensures both ends of the scale will stay within the films exposure range. Add a few more conceptual details and you have Ansel Adams's famous Zone System. 

I cut my teeth on the Zone System, at least once I started to fall in love with black and white work. Specifically it was the version I learned from The Zone VI Workshop by the late Fred Picker. (The Zone System, for those of you not acquainted, makes use of Roman numerals, so that reads "The Zone Six Workshop.) I don't know if the way I go about things these days still qualifies me as a user of the Zone System. Dedicated practitioners may turn their noses up at the subjective loosey-goosey way I go about determining personal film speed (box speed is usually perfect with the acutance developers I favour) and developing times (start with the Massive Dev Chart recommendation and adjust to taste), I still use it conceptually to determine exposures when shooting however, and so long as I have the other variables controlled it doesn't let me down. And using the Zone System, in practical terms, really demands the use of a spot meter. 

But while a spot meter gets me reliable results, would they be any less reliable if I used other methods? Others may dispute this, but it's always been my experience that, saving for demanding high-contrast situations, with black and white film there is a range of exposures which could be considered equally correct in terms of the final results that can be obtained without heroic measures in the darkroom. It's not hard to hit that range most of the time without any meter at all, virtually always with a simple reflected meter as a sanity check. If you add the fact that its also possible for me to use incident metering in most situations I find myself in, it would be really quite rare for me to get an exposure using a spot meter that wouldn't have been just as good if I'd used something less specialized or even no meter at all. Compared to the number of exposures I lose for other reasons (most commonly cock ups resulting from the odd little quirks three of the four RB67 backs I own have) I might do well to worry more about those things and less about metering. 

Still, as I write these words there's another Pentax Spotmeter V that I found at a decent price on eBay on its way to me. Why bother if I could do just as well without it? I think it comes down to a sense of control. Having absorbed the Zone System zeitgeist I can't help thinking in those terms no matter what I'm shooting with or using to measure light levels. I know, for example, that that rock over there has a certain value relative to those clouds up there regardless of whether I have a spot meter to measure it. Just trusting that it'll all work out in the final image bugs me even if, in the end, I would have set the camera to f/11 at 1/30th of a second in any case. I still enjoy shooting this way, just not as much. I hope that package comes soon.

How I Learned to Hate Scanning Less

One of the unsung heroes in my photographic arsenal is my Epson Perfection V500 scanner. While not as hyped in the flatbed film scanning world as it's large format capable siblings in the V700/800 series, for medium format on down it's nearly as capable at a fraction of the cost. The slightly over $100 (Cdn) clearance price I picked it up for is quite possibly the best money I have ever spend on photographic equipment of any kind.

My praise of just about everything about this scanner ends however at the included negative carriers. They're flimsy yes, though considering they're meant to hold precious one of a kind original images one would hope they wouldn't need to endure anything approaching man-handling. (Speaking as a man I'm not sure if I resent that term.) More to the point however it is notoriously difficult to get negatives into them, a difficulty that seems to grow exponentially with the degree of film curl present in those negatives. Two strips of 35mm film can be placed in the 35mm holder so they are held relatively securely at one end, leaving the remainder of the strips entirely loose so they must be manipulated to stay aligned in their frames as the top part of the frame holder, an entirely separate piece, is clipped into place over them. The 120 holder has next to nothing to keep the negative strip in place until the the hinged top of the frame is closed, an operation which itself tends to push them out of place and efforts to hold it in place may result in the film buckling. Further, once closed I would often find the negative had shifted enough to require a small reposition leaving me to decide whether it was better to start the whole operation over again or trying to adjust it with the carrier clamped closed which always had me worried about scratching or otherwise damaging the negative (though I don't know that any actual harm ever resulted from this).

The stock 120 carrier for the Epson Perfection V500 (above)
along with the Lomography 120 DigtaLIZA (below.)

Enter the Lomography DigitaLIZA, an alternative negative/transparency carrier with a unique positioning and loading system that among other things is supposed to avoid most of the problems common to other carriers such as the ones I have experienced. It is also, apparently, exact enough to allow 35mm negatives to be held by the very edge of the film, allowing the sprocket hole area of the film to be part of the scan. The trick involves a metal plate that sits in the bottom of the frame bringing everything flush to the ledge the film sits on. After positioning the film an upper magnetic plate is positioned on top, clamping to the metal plate underneath, sandwiching the film flat and exactly in place. The hinged frame can now be closed without fear the film will shift in the process, at which time the upper plate can be pulled free, releasing the lower plate while the film remains perfectly in place.

If it's a bit convoluted to describe in words Lomography hosts a video showing the process which you can see here.

This much you could have learned from the Lomography site, so how does all of this translate into practice? After fighting with the Epson carriers one too many times I decided it was worth a go. Much of the fanfare surrounding the DigitaLIZA focuses on the 35mm version's ability to make include nearly the full width of the film during scanning including the sprocket holes.  Photographers who use adapters to shoot 35mm film in medium format cameras or other tricks to get an image across the whole width of the film have few other practical choices for getting this additional image width scanned. While I experiment with techniques like this myself, 120 film is by far the majority of what I shoot these days, and its the format I struggle with the most using the stock carriers, so it was the medium format version that I ordered. At the time of this writing the 120 DigitaLIZA goes for $45 (US) in the Lomography store, but with a bit of shopping around may be found for less through some resellers.

It arrived in attractively designed custom box that makes it tempting to carefully repackage the unit after every use rather than toss it in a drawer. If the box board thin Epson carrier struck me as a little flimsy before it seems even more so compared the the DigitaLIZA, especially when the metal bottom plate is attached. Despite the more rugged build the film is still sits in the holder at about the same distance from the scanner glass as is the case with the stock Epson carrier.

The DigitaLIZA's frame window is wide enough to accommodate three 6x6 negatives at once. If you shoot square format and cut film into strips of four you'll have to reposition the film once to scan the whole strip. Since I primarily shoot 6x7 negatives the window will allow only two negatives to be scanned, so a repositioning will again be required to scan a strip of three. By itself this is an improvement over the Epson carrier, which permits only two 6x6 negatives to be scanned at a time, only one at a time for larger 120 formats, and if you shoot panoramic formats larger than 6x12 you could be in trouble.

The bigger point however isn't how often negatives have to be repositioned, it's how easy they are to position in the first place. If all my negatives layed dead flat I probably wouldn't have too much to complain about with the Epson carrier but even a bit of curl is enough to make positioning the frame properly without risking damage or getting fingerprints all over the image into a struggle. To look at Lomography's video demo it would seem like loading the DigiaLIZA couldn't be simpler, but does the seemingly foolproof mechanism go this smoothly in actual use?

Well, for the most part yes, yes it does. When the negative strip is first placed in the carrier it sits in a recess deep enough to keep the edges of the film from going anywhere. This is in contrast the stock carrier's ledge which is much too shallow to keep the film from sliding around or buckling, something that tends to happen as the hinged frame is closed, The DigitaLIZA further largely avoids problems keeping the film held in place while the top part of the holder is closed down with the magnetic top plate that is put in place once the negative strip is aligned, holding it there until the hinged lid is closed at which plate it can be removed without risk of the film slipping out of place. I say largely avoids because with more severely curled film I find getting the top plate in place without the film moving can be a small challenge, though nothing compared to the struggle that would be needed to get the same images ready to scan with the stock carrier. This small difficulty aside the DigitaLIZA's loading mechanism aside it has worked for me as advertised.

Once loaded however the DigitaLIZA does have a downside compared to Epson's carriers for the V500 however - there is no provision to get it positioned correctly on the scanning bed. This might not be a concern at all with large format units that can scan the entire area of the scanning bed, but the V500 and similar flatbeds designed for smaller formats require the film to be lined up under the transparency scanning strip in the lid. The stock carriers are designed to align with this automatically. As a universal carrier, the DigitaLIZA has no such provision. Lining things up by eye would probably be good enough to get the entire negative into the scanning zone, but it almost certainly wouldn't be square to the edge. In cases like this it\s necessary to come up with some sort of alignment device. A simple cardboard strip of appropriate width would do the trick, though I found I could use the lower plate from the DigitaLIZA's magnetic positioning system does the job admirably and I suspect this would be the case for most scanners.

A comparison of scans from the Epson Perfection V500 using the stock 120
 negative carrier and the 120 version of the Lomography DigitaLIZA.

The only question that remained is whether there was any impact on the scan quality. Might the magnetic sandwich positioning system hold the film flatter leading to sharper scans? Might the film to scan bed distance differ from what is spec for my scanner making scans a little less sharp. I put this one to the test scanning by scanning the same image using both carriers and to my eye the results are functionally identical. If you'd rather judge for yourself I include the comparison images above for your own consideration. The insets show crops at full resolution from identical areas of each scan made at 3200 dpi. (Click to bring the image up at full resolution.)

The bottom line is that, at the cost of auto alignment provisions you may get with a flatbed film scanner's stock carriers, the DigitaLIZA addresses the shortcomings these carriers are often plagued with in regards to positioning and loading of negatives and transparencies. Not only is this task made easier While the 35mm's big selling feature, the ability scan the width of the film out to and including the sprocket holes, does not apply to the 120 version, this benefit alone may make the DigitaLIZA well worth the price in terms of saved time and diminished risk of damaging irreplaceable images as a result of buckling, scratching or throwing the whole mess at a wall in frustration.

Adventures in Home C-41

In previous episodes I had written that for Fall colour this year I was going to use colour negative film and develop it myself with a home C-41 kit, so this is a bit of a progress about how that went, or at least how it is going thus far. 

The C-41 process itself is really nothing new to me. Back in the old camera store days a significant part of my job involved operating the onsite Kodak/Noritsu mini-lab including replacing exhausted chemistry and other process maintenance tasks. Doing it at home then should involve no more than combining that knowledge with the black and white processing skills that are routine for me and - spoiler alert - for the most part they were.

In contrast to the C-41 chemistry I knew from the past which always came in liquid form, the Tetinal/Jobo C-41 press kit I ordered was composed entirely of packets of powdered chemicals. Aside from that however the sequence chemical baths was the old familiar one, though what we had always called "bleach fix" goes by the cooler sounding name "blix" in these kits. The it's the same thing though, and once mixed it even had that same odour, the one that always gave the old lab its characteristic aroma. It's not particularly strong or unpleasant mind you, certainly less so than the vinegar smell of stop bath used in black and white processes. For me in fact the scent was pure nostalgia.

Unlike the cool room temperature 20^oC (68^oF) that is the most common standard temperature for processing black and white film, the instructions that came with my C-41 kit were all geared for a temperature of   39^oC (102^oF). This means the chemistry must be warmed up significantly before starting, and kept there throughout the process. I found getting a temperature change of just a few degrees for black and white had sometimes been a real pain, so I thought bringing it up by nearly 20 degrees would take ages. In the Flickr forums I received several assurances from others who had done this before that a simple water bath would get the job done in just a few minutes and indeed it seems I had underestimated the efficiency of this method. On my first go at developing a film I put the C-41 developer and "blix" into the sink and filled it with the water running purely from the hot tap to just below the mouth of the storage bottles then headed into the darkroom to load the tank. Figuring it would take quite a while for the chemistry to come up to temperature I really lollygagged through this process and as a result when I finally checked the temperature of the chemistry it turned out I had to wait for it to cool a bit. Lesson learned.

Having brought the chemicals up to temperature (the final stabilizer bath can be left at room temp) I emptied the sink, got the tap running at exactly 39^oC then refilled the sink to act as a temperature stabilizing bath and filled the daylight tank now loaded with film.  One difference between the old automated C-41 machine process and the home kit is that in addition to the usual chemical baths a pre-soak is recommended and a water rinse is used in between the blix and stabilizer.

Unlike black and white film processing and the often wildly varying processing times you can get depending on the particular combination of film and developer you chose, colour processes like C-41 are standardized affairs. As a result I felt compelled to abandon the gentle and rather idiosyncratic agitation method I usually use for the comparatively brutal inversion cycles assumed in the processing instructions.

Shot on Kodak Portra 160, developed in the kitchen sink.

The first film processed was a roll of Portra 160 I ran through the RB67 and it looks pretty good. As is my usual practice I squeegeed the film prior to hanging. I've never been happy about having to do this as it sometimes leaves fine scratches that can be visible when scanned or printed, but this is better than dealing with the water spots that seem to be the inevitable result of failing to do this, even if the final rinse is done in distilled water. Other photographers have sworn this is not necessary and no doubt it isn't given their particular combination of water supply, humidity levels, working habits and whatnot. The C-41 process ends with the film being hung straight out of the stabilizer solution with no other rinse in between. I wondered if this might be different enough to allow me to forego the squeegee, so with the second roll I processed I decided to just give the film a shake before hanging to dry.

Apparently little more care is needed with the drying process.

Well, it was a noble experiment. The above result says it all. This is from the second test roll I put through the Minolta Hi-Matic 9. It was taken in the pouring rain and the scan is straight from the Epson V500 on default settings. There were two or three frames on the roll that weren't ruined, but this one is typical. Admittedly I used tap water to mix the stabilizer, but this may be the worst case of water spots as I've ever had and if distilled water didn't cure my problems there I can't see it being much use here. It looks like squeegee it will be.

If years gone by are any indication it won't be long before the urge to shoot colour once again drops off the radar screen. The oft spoken of peak of colour has already gone by for another year, though it's not always about getting those super punchy reds oranges and yellows. That in between period as the colours are on their way to a faded brown can have a mood all its own as well and if I'm lucky I may be able to capture some of that before it's gone.

Nearly There

This blog has only been going a few months so I'd be kidding myself to think anyone out there is waiting with bated breath for my next post, but if anyone's noticed it's been a while since the last one hopefully you've guessed the 8x10 pinhole project I've been writing about has been eating most of my free time. I'm happy to report though that things are nearly finished. There's just a few finishing details to worry about but as things stand now it's ready to begin testing. Here's how things have panned out since last time...

Here is how I solved the problem of attaching the cone portion to the rest of the camera. Those are elastic bands, the short thick ones grocery stores use to bunch vegetables. Standard office supply elastics, and other things I tried such as hair bands, just didn't have enough pull. Inside the cone they are wrapped around mirror hangers which are hard to see here since I painted them black. Inside the camera portion they attach to upholstery tacks I didn't drive in all the way. 

After considering a number of fancier options including leaf springs and rare-earth magnets I settled on these simple latches to keep the film holder in place. I wasn't able to find anything by way of ready-made hardware that was suitable for this, but by luck I had a just-right-sized strip of maple in the off-cuts from making the body which in the end is probably better.

I used the plug from a hole cutter as the disk for the tripod socket and after enlarging the central hole pressed in a threaded insert with a bench vice. It was painted black with the spray on Plasti-Dip I used to make the fiberglass cone on my 4x5 project light proof. It's sort of rubbery and you can see a layer sort of peeling off here from the friction of tightening then removing the the tripod quick release plate.  

Here's what it looks like from the business end. There is no shutter at all at this point and I should actually be able to get away without one. Since the film stays in a light tight (I hope) film holder there's no need to keep light from getting in until the dark slide is ready to be pulled. A hat or a dark card over the pinhole should make a serviceable shutter in the short span between pulling and replacing the dark slide. My concern is that the 8x10 dark slides sometime need a bit of coaxing to slide through their groove in the film holders and I may want two hands available for this. It occurred to me too late that a refrigerator magnet would cover the pinhole opening hands free if only I hadn't made that black retaining ring you see from non-magnetic aluminium. Oh well, should be an easy fix. 

I received a box of 8x10 x-ray film about a week ago, so whenever I get the time I should be able to take it for a few test shots. That's not to say I'm done, but barring light leaks or other unexpected issues it' now a functional camera. Finishing touches I'm planning include:

• Some aesthetic finishing touches, especially around the front "standard"
• Swapping out the retaining ring in the front for one made from a ferric metal to allow for my fridge magnet shutter idea
  (Am I the only one who wonders why there's a 'd' in fridge, but not in refrigerator?)
• Adding a second tripod socket to the short side to allow for verticals
• A detachable viewfinder
• Built in spirit levels

Hopefully I'll have results to show soon. As always I'll keep you posted.

Seconds and Sleepers

With the 8x10 project eating up much of my free time I haven't been doing a lot of shooting this week. Actually aside from documenting the project I really haven't done any. Tonight as I wait for the next coat of urethane to dry it occurs to me that there are a lot of photos taken over this summer passed (or almost passed at any rate) that haven't received the attention they deserve. Usually I'm all over it the moment the negatives are dry enough to get on the scanner, but for one reason or another a few deserving shots get no more than a preliminary low-res scan (soon to be replaced by an actual contact sheet, but more about that another day) then languish in a negative sleeve tucked away in a binder on my shelf.

Most often this happens when I get infatuated with another shot on the same roll. Such was the case with the photo above of my son Brennan looking... well I'm not sure how he looks to you but he was really just bored. (Teenagers, what  do you expect?) It's a nice composition and I just love the sky here. It happened to be taken on the same roll of film on which one of my favourite exposures from this past summer was on. And so it was that it sat virtually unnoticed for nearly two months, and might have sat even longer if I'd been careful to buy a faster drying wood finish.

This one sat even longer before I really took much notice of it. It was taken one wonderfully foggy morning last spring. I went through several rolls that morning alone and spent the rest of the day developing film. Unsurprisingly there were many keepers from that lot. If I was granted the power to control the weather for one hour while I was out with a camera you can bet I'd make it foggy.

I liked this shot back then, enough to have made a good scan of it, but it didn't find a spot among the half dozen or so from that day I became keen to share. It was a bit of a sleeper. Maybe I needed to live with it a while. Or maybe I just needed enough time to pass that I could regard it as a singular image rather than in the context of one of the shots I took that morning. Whatever it was, it was just last week that I stopped on this image while looking for something else and asked myself why this one has never made its way into the wider world. Granted, at this point this means no more for me than an inclusion in my Flickr gallery, a post on Tumblr, and now a mention here. Due in part to a few spots of bad luck I'm still not in a position to make any kind of print, at least any kind that would be worth showing. Things are again moving on that front however. I hope to again have the capacity for making prints, real silver gelatin darkroom prints, over the next few months. I wonder how that will change things. Making a good print is a bigger commitment than posting a scanned negative somewhere. It will probably be even harder for these seconds and sleepers to make it on to the printing easel. On the other hand the internet is still there and it will remain just as easy to get them out into the world in their electronic incarnation. There are worse fates a good image can suffer I suppose.