Read the latest posts from the changing bag.
from Marcus develops
Bought a 30 metre roll of HP5 and a second-hand bulk loader. It works out at about half the price per roll. The only scratch I have had so far came from a reused cassette with grit in the felt, so I now throw old cassettes away after three uses.
from Pinholes and puddles
Tried cyanotypes in the back garden: paper coated the night before, contact printed from negatives enlarged onto transparency film, ten minutes in direct sun. Rinsed in the kitchen sink and dipped in weak tea for a warmer tone. Very forgiving process and nobody minds if the edges are messy.
from the changing bag
For a long time my routine after developing a roll was to scan all thirty-six frames at full resolution, import them, and then spend an evening flicking through them on a laptop. I ended up with folders of thousands of files I never looked at again, and the scanning itself was the least enjoyable part of the whole hobby.
This spring I changed the order. Negatives go into sleeves, the sleeves go onto a sheet of paper under glass in the bathroom-turned-darkroom, and I make a contact print. Only frames that look interesting on the contact sheet get scanned or printed properly. On a good roll that is three or four frames. On most rolls it is one.
I thought I would miss having everything digitised. I do not. The contact sheets live in a ring binder with the date and the film written on the back, and flicking through them is quicker than any photo library. Mistakes are visible in a useful way: I can see where I hesitated, took the same thing four times, or got bored halfway through a walk.
It has also changed how I shoot. Knowing that most frames will only ever exist as a thumbnail on a contact sheet takes the pressure off individual pictures, and I take more chances. Strangely, the keeper rate has gone up.
You do not need an enlarger to make contact sheets. A desk lamp with a low-wattage bulb a metre above the paper, a sheet of glass from an old picture frame and a cheap pack of resin-coated paper is enough. My exposures are around eight seconds at f-nothing, because there is no lens involved. Test strips first, as always.
The scanner is still on the shelf. It just gets used about a tenth as often, and I have my evenings back.
← Back to the journal
from Garage darkroom
The garage darkroom is at 6 °C in January. Developer at 20 °C lasts about three minutes in a cold tank, so now I stand the tank in a bowl of warm water between agitations. Fixer and wash do not care as much.
from Marcus develops
Colour at home is less scary than I thought. A cheap sous vide stick keeps a washing-up bowl of water at 38 °C, the kit chemistry lasts for about twelve rolls, and timing is the only thing that really matters. My first roll came out with a slight green cast that I blame on old blix.
from the changing bag
The camera came from a house clearance and cost less than a roll of film plus development. The shutter fired at one second and at 1/500, and at every speed in between it made exactly the same noise, which is not a good sign. The viewing lens had a faint web of fungus and the focusing knob felt like stirring cold porridge.
On these cameras the front lens elements unscrew without special tools if you have a rubber jar opener and patience. Behind them the leaf shutter was coated in old oil that had migrated onto the blades. I cleaned the blades with lighter fluid on a cotton bud, a few drops at a time, firing the shutter between each application until it ran freely. It took an evening. I did not take the shutter apart further than that; I know my limits and the springs are tiny.
The focusing helicoid needed its old grease removed and a thin layer of new grease. The fungus on the viewing lens wiped off with a dilute mix of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, leaving a slight haze that does not matter because nothing is recorded through that lens. The taking lens, luckily, was clean.
I checked the speeds roughly by recording the shutter with a phone app that listens for the opening and closing clicks. It is not a proper tester, but it told me the slow speeds were now within about a third of a stop, which is better than my metering.
Twelve frames of HP5 on a grey Sunday around the canal. Two are double exposures because I forgot that this model does not stop you winding on wrong, and one is completely black because I left the lens cap on, which a twin-lens reflex will happily let you do since you are looking through the other lens. The remaining nine are the sharpest negatives I have ever made. There is something about a six-by-six square of film on the light box that makes even a lock gate look important.
← Back to the journal
from Priya on film
Kentmere 400 is half the price of HP5 and for most of what I shoot I cannot honestly tell the difference in prints. It curls more when drying and the base is thinner, so loading the reels is fiddlier. At 800 in DD-X it holds up surprisingly well.
from Pinholes and puddles
My nephew and I made a pinhole camera out of a biscuit tin, a drinks can and a lot of black tape. Photo paper as the negative, exposures of around ninety seconds in daylight. The results are soft and wonky and he thinks they are the best photographs ever taken. He might be right.
from the changing bag
Everyone online seems to agree that Portra wants to be overexposed by a stop or two. I wanted to find out what happens if you ignore that advice, partly out of stubbornness and partly because in December the light round here is gone by half past three and I did not have a stop to spare.
So from November to the end of December I loaded the Olympus with Portra 400, set the meter to 400 and left it there. Five rolls in total, all metered with the camera's centre-weighted meter and no compensation except for the obvious backlit scenes.
Honestly, they are fine. The lab scans have a bit more grain in the shadows than the overexposed rolls I shot last summer, and the skin tones lean slightly green under streetlights, but nothing I would call a failure. Overcast daylight frames are almost indistinguishable from the summer ones once I had corrected the white balance.
Where box speed really showed was in mixed light: shop windows at dusk, the inside of the bus, a pub with one lamp. Those frames are muddy in the darker half. Another stop of light would have helped, but another stop would also have meant a shutter speed I cannot hand-hold.
I would still rate it at 400 in winter, but I would meter for the shadows instead of letting the camera average everything. And I would stop expecting a 400-speed colour film to behave like HP5 pushed to 1600. It is a different tool. In the dark months the black and white film comes out again.
The best frame of the lot is a boring one: frost on the allotment shed roof at about ten in the morning, low sun, completely flat greys and one rusty corner. It is in the contact sheets, sort of.
← Back to the journal
from Garage darkroom
I have gone back to Rodinal 1+100 stand development for everything black and white. One hour, agitate for the first minute and once at thirty minutes, then leave it alone. It is forgiving of mixed exposures, which is useful when half the roll was shot indoors and half in sunshine. The grain is not subtle, but I like it.
from Priya on film
Bought the K1000 from a charity shop for £45 with a 50mm f/2. The light seals had turned to tar, so the first job was scraping them out with a cocktail stick and replacing them with foam from a craft shop. First roll was Ilford FP4 in the park on a grey Sunday. Twenty-nine usable frames out of thirty-six, and the seven bad ones were my fault, not the camera's.
from the changing bag
A few people asked how I get consistent colour and tone out of my negative inversions. The short answer is that I scan a strip of unexposed but developed film at the start of every session and let the inversion software use it as the reference for the film base.
Here are the two reference scans I use, straight off the scanner with all corrections switched off, 16-bit TIFF at 3200 dpi:
They are mostly useful as an example of what a “flat” scan looks like. Your own film, developer and scanner will differ, so make your own if you can.
from the changing bag
For the first two years of shooting film I posted every roll off in a padded envelope and waited. It worked, but the wait took the fun out of it, and by the time the scans arrived I had forgotten what half the frames were supposed to be. Last autumn I bought a second-hand Paterson tank with two reels from a car boot sale for eight pounds and decided that was my excuse.
The kit list is short and mostly borrowed from the kitchen: the tank, a changing bag, a measuring jug, a thermometer that lives in a drawer with the cake tins, three old squash bottles for chemistry, and a timer on my phone. For developer I settled on Ilfosol 3 at 1+9 because it is forgiving and the bottle lasts. Stop bath is plain water. Fixer is whatever rapid fixer the shop has in stock.
Loading the reel in the bag was the part I dreaded. The first roll took me twenty minutes and I creased the leader so badly that the first three frames have a half-moon on them. What helped was practising with a sacrificial roll in daylight, eyes shut, maybe ten times in a row. After that it became a thing my hands do while I listen to the radio.
HP5 at box speed in Ilfosol 3 is around six and a half minutes at 20°C. My kitchen in March is nowhere near 20°C, so I stand the jug of developer in a bowl of warm water until it comes up. I agitate for the first ten seconds and then four inversions every minute. When I push it to 800 I add about two minutes and accept that the shadows will be a bit thin.
The biggest improvement did not come from chemistry at all. It came from a wetting agent in the final rinse and hanging the film in the bathroom after a hot shower, when there is less dust in the air. Drying marks were my most common fault for months.
Financially, yes, after about the sixth roll. More importantly, I see the negatives the same evening, and that short loop between taking a picture and looking at it has done more for my photography than any book. I still send colour film away; C-41 at home is a project for another year.
← Back to the journal