Category: Grain

1st time shooting Lomo Berlin 400 Kino film …..

I love shooting B&W and when I saw lomography had release 2 new film stocks recently I couldn’t wait to try some and compare it to my all time favourite B&W film … ilford HP5.

The 1st roll I tried was the Berlin 400 Kino which I loaded into my Nikon F4s with the 50mm f1.4 and tried to shoot a varied selection of subjects.

I processed the roll in Rodinal  at 1+50 dilution for 13.30 mins.

I was very happy with how the scans came out, quite a chunky grain structure but I like grain and it did not distract from the image.

It is pretty contrasty with nice blacks but also held the highlights well.

I always find whatever film I process with Rodinal seems to get stronger grain and contrast so when I shoot the next roll I will develop in a different dev.

Overall I will happily use this film again … I won’t replace my HP5 but I really do recommend that you give it a go … I will push the next roll just to see what I get so watch this space.

Here is a varied selection from the roll …

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

Trying ilford XP2 at different ISO ratings on one roll ….

This started off as a proper test as I had read in various places that you can shoot XP2 at different ISO ratings without changing the development times.

My plan was to load up my FE2 and over the space of a few days/weeks shoot the roll in different situations that required possible pushing/pulling and write down the setting to see what happens when I develop the roll eg.  does it work??

The experiment went pretty good initially but about 20 frames into the roll I managed to lose my little notepad with my settings on which essentially ballsed up the whole thing as I do not have the settings to correspond to the images.

What I can say is that I shot the roll between 200-3200 iso … the shots in the bright sunshine were at the end of the roll after I realised I had lost my notepad so I think they were all 200-400 while the shot of my son on his phone was definitely at 1600 iso.

All in all after a little tweaking in Lightroom every frame I shot was perfectly useable with the higher ISO shots exhibiting quite a bit of grain but I like grain so to me that was an added bonus.

Well here is a selection of images … comments most welcome …

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

 

Testing some Kodak 5325 Commercial Internegative film …..

I was kindly given a roll of Kodak 5325 a while back from a fellow Twitter photographer which I had forgotten about until I came across it the other week and after a little bit of research on the interwebs I realised that I could process it myself as it was C41 so I went out on a lovely bright day with my Pentax Program A and gave it a try.

Kodak  internegative is supposed to make color negative copies of slides for reproduction also I was led to believe that it may even be Tungsten balanced and an iso rating of 8-50 ish depending on lighting conditions.

I decided against any filters and shot half the roll at iso 25 and the rest at 50 just to see what came out.

The first thing that I noticed was a very strong “Light Leak” which  I initially believed may have been my camera but after messaging my film donor he said that a few of the rolls that he tried came out similarly to mine so I breathed a sigh of relief that my trusty Pentax was fine ( I shot another roll of Fuji 200 to test the next day)

The images with the light leak were very pleasing I actually like the look and I don’t think they spoil the images.

There was quite a varied colour cast throughout the roll and some frames were a lot cooler than others which I thought was the different iso settings but that was not the case as they were mixed through the roll and I shot the 1st 10 images at 25 followed by 50 iso for the remainder.

I could have colour balanced all the images in Lightroom but decided to just leave them as they were.

If I get any more of this film I would definitely shoot it at 25 iso or less as all the original scans were slightly underexposed which was sorted in Lightroom.

Please click a photo to view larger

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

 

March 2019 #FP4Party .. All my images together …..

I only shot one roll for the last #FP4Party last month and here are all my images together …. Shot using my Nikon F100 and the Sigma 105mm f2.8

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

 

Ricoh Singlex TLS …. with some ilford HP5@800 ….

Over the last few months I have been going through my camera collection and deciding on which cameras that I will probably use on more than one occasion and selling or gifting the ones that I have only used the once.

Enter the Ricoh Singlex TLS … I picked this up well over a year ago in a job lot of other cameras and I had not got around to using it so it was time to try it out and if I enjoyed the experience and it worked fine I may keep it.

To be honest the shooting experience was ok, not the most enjoyable but the camera was a bit cumbersome to use but after developing & scanning the images were great so I was happy to pass this camera on to someone else who may enjoy the experience more than I.

It went up on eBay and sold pretty quickly which surprised me and is now in some other #believeinfilm shooter.

Anyway here is a selection of the images shot on HP5+ at 800 iso.

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

 

 

February 2019 #FP4Party .. All my images together …..

This is the 2nd #FP4Party of the year and this time I managed to shoot 2 rolls of FP4 with 2 different cameras.

I tried out my recent purchase the “Lomography Fisheye 35mm” as well as my trusty Mamiya 645.

I was very happy to find out that 3 of my images were shortlisted this month ….

These are the 3 along with all of the others …

The best of the rest …

 

One’s that didn’t make the cut ….

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

Snow Day on some Kodak DoubleX 5222 ……

At the beginning of this month we managed to get a bit of snow here in the South Wales valleys, just enough to get me a day off work so as not to waste the day off I went for quite a long walk with my Nikon F100 loaded with some Kodak DoubleX which I had shot a roll of a while back and was pretty happy with how the film looked, nice grain/contrast while also giving a good tonal range.

When I shot it previously I developed it in Rodinal so this time I went with ilfotecHC at 1+49 dilution for 7 minutes as I rated the film at iso 200.

I was far happier with the result this time as the grain was far smoother while still giving great contrast and tones, only on a few frames did I slightly blow out some highlights as I was over exposing by at least one stop for most of the images due to the snow coverage.

Anyway I have to say that even though this is only the 2nd roll of this I have tried I really, really like it and will be definitely buying some more.

So here is a selection of the images ….

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

#FP4Party 2019 .. all the posted images together

As ther new year begins so do the twitter Film Parties …. beginning with #FP4Party where as the title suggests you shoot some ilford FP4  during shoot week then develop in the 2nd week followed by … you guessed it post your images during the 3rd week.

For this challenge I used my Minolta SRT 101 with the Rokkor 55mm f1.7 which is a combination that I really enjoy using and one roll of FP4+ rated at 200 iso.

I was pleased to say that I had a really good hit rate with the roll with plenty of keepers which are here all together.

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

Diana F Pinhole shooting on Lomo Color Negative 400…

This year it is my intention to shoot more so called LoFi images.

I enjoyed my time shooting with the Littlest Holga and since modifying my own Holga so now I can actually get some usable images (see blog post from a few weeks back) I love the look and feel the plastic cameras can achieve.

So over Christmas I loaded up my Diana F with some Lomography Color Negative 400 and shot the roll in Pinhole mode.

The light was pretty consistent as I was checking with my light meter which gave me an approximate shutter time of 10 seconds after looking up cloudy days and Diana pinhole on the trusty internet.

After development and scanning I was pleased that the exposures were pretty spot on.

The only problem was that I shot the roll at the 16 frame setting without the frame mask so all the images pretty much touched or overlapped a bit which gave an interesting look but I scanned each one individually and cropped slightly.

Anyway here are the images any comments most welcomed.

Here is what the actual frames originally looked like.

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All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

 

 

 

 

My Crappy Holga re-visited with some Foam/Card and Tape on ilford HP5 …..

Since my lovely experience shooting the Littlest Holga for over a month a while back and producing a zine which was well received by my film photography peers I wanted to start shooting more Lomo style images alongside my other photography.

I already have a Diana F+ (which may feature in my 1st blog of 2019) … a Lomo Actionsampler and a Holga 120GN.

Since owning my Holga I have shot numerous rolls of B&W/C41 and Slide with very little to show in the way of usable images.

I always thought it was possibly my incompetence with the camera but after using another holga and getting loads of images that I was extremely pleased with I came to the conclusion that it was something not right with my copy.

The main problems were horizontal film scratches, huge light leaks that obliterated large areas of the image and ultra soft focus or even totally blurry images.

I realised that my Holga didn’t come with any film masks as I bought it 2nd hand from eBay so my 1st mod was to make my own mask which I guessed the size of by measuring the mask in my Diana  and attached it to the inside using black tape.

I then replaced the foam on the take up side as it was perished and I did notice that I was previously getting fat rolls.

And lastly I attached similar foam pieces on the back door in the hope of keeping the film flatter and hopefully getting a bit better focus on the frames.

I loaded up a roll of my Favourite film ilford HP5+ which as the weather was really dull, overcast and drizzle I took a meter reading with my Sekonic meter and decided to rated the film at 800 iso and developed it in Rodinal at 1+25 dilution for 8 minutes with the intention of getting the best sharpness from the film.

Once scanning the film I was so pleased to find the images were such a vast improvement over any previous images that I have ever got from this camera and I was justified for playing around with the insides.

Ok … these are not a patch on what I get with a camera like my Fuji GW690iii but that is not what it is all about … these images are exactly what I want from my Holga and I am looking forward to shooting it on a more regular basis in the new year along with my other Lomo style cameras (I have already purchased a Lomo Fisheye).

Anyway here are some of the images ….

Please click a photo to view larger

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at  usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

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