Minolta X700 – tim dobbs photography

3 Months to finish a roll …

To say that this year has not been very productive photography wise would be an understatement.

My photography mojo has really waned and I don’t really know why.

This roll of Lomo CN400 has been in my trusty Minolta X700 for over 3 months before I managed to shoot the last frame and get it developed.

I really couldn’t remember what I had shot and was worried that I may have even shot the same things more than once.

I take a camera with me nearly everywhere that I go and I was probably shooting at least 1 roll of film every week but I have been struggling to even take the camera out of my bag sometimes.

I love photography and I want to get out of this rut so if anyone reading this has any ideas please let me know.

Anyway here is the roll, nothing special but Lomo CN400 never fails to look good along with the development/scanning by Filmdev.

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

Also still have a handful of zines over on my etsy store as well as some hand made film canister keychains … https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/timdobbsphoto

Fuji Reala 500D developed in C41 Chemistry …. Something went wrong but I think I like it

I have shot Reala 500D quite a few times and love the subdued colours when developed in C41 chemistry.

This weekend was quite drab and rainy here in Wales so I wanted to shoot colour film stock on my walk and at 1st I was going to shoot either Lomo 400 or 800 but I have been using both of those stock quite a bit recently so I remembered I still had a few rolls of Reala 500D in the fridge so I went with that for a change.

I shot it at iso 250 using my Minolta X700 with the 50mm f1.4 with the hope of getting less grain as I have seen plenty of images on the internet shot at least 1 or even 2 stops over that have looked lovely.

I have processed remjet backed film before so I mixed up a big jug of soda crystals with warm water and proceeded to fill/shake/discard the solution a few times before development to remove the remjet.

The 1st fill came out black as normal and got lighter by the 3rd fill but to my surprise the 4th and subsequent fills were coming out greeny yellow.

I used all my solution and then developed the roll as normal.

Once out of the tank the film looked pretty normal to the naked eye, maybe a little on the dark side but it wasn’t until I went to scan the images I realised there was something wrong.

There were areas of magenta and green and quite a bit of grain.

At first I was well cheesed off but after tweaking the RGB channels individually on each frame in Epson scan I did get some reasonably even colours which I then managed to edit further in Lightroom.

After the initial depression of the 1st scans I really liked how most of the photos looked … Obviously the colours were pretty wrong but overall I feel that they all seem to work for the subject matter.

I am not really sure what went wrong but my assumption was that the remjet removal bit was at fault.

The C41 chemistry is only 8 rolls old so I think that was not the problem .. also the film itself was from a batch that I have shot before that was fine.

So here is the best selection … click on an image 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 🙂

Minolta X700 & Some JCH Streetpan 400….

Over the last few months I have been adding to my Minolta SLR collection and one of the cameras I have been looking for since I began was an X700 that was in good condition as well as a reasonable price and I eventually found one.