photography – Page 7 – tim dobbs photography

Salvaged images from badly stored/expired ilford Delta 400 …

I have quite a large stock of expired film acquired from friends/fellow photographers and eBay and I usually know the storage details of nearly all of it but sometimes I get hold of some rolls that have no information on how it spent it’s life.

Last week the cloud formations up here in the South Wales valleys was pretty nice so I went out with my Mamiya 645 and 45mm f2.8 lens with a roll of ilford Delta 400 with the intention of getting some pretty detailed images of the landscape up here.

The film expired in 2004 so I rated it at 200 iso and proceeded to shoot the roll.

To be honest I have only had trouble with expired ilford film when it has been much older that this and even then it was still usable so when I opened up the development tank and was greeted with some pretty murky negatives I was pretty disappointed.

Once I began scanning it became evident that the whole roll was under exposed quite a bit and the grain was very pronounced unlike how Delta usually looks.

I also suspected that my fix was on its last legs which didn’t help matters (new batched already mixed for next time).

The Epson scan software struggled to find the edges of some frames which meant I had to scan each frame individually.

Once in Adobe Lightroom I have spent the last week back and fore between Lightroom & Photoshop trying to get the best out of the scans and I managed to salvage 9 frames which I am happy to post.

Anyway …. lesson for today … Know how your film has been stored before taking any important shots.

Also buy more fresh Delta 400 because if I managed to get these images with a crappy old roll imagine what they would look like on fresh film and maybe with my Fuji Gw690ii 6×9.

Here are the images … comments most welcome

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 🙂

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 …

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 🙂

100mm focal length as a walkabout lens ……..

I have had my Canon FD 100mm f2.8 for ages but I have never really given it a proper runout, I have shot less than 20 frames with it in total so just to try and give my photography a different slant I decided to shoot a whole roll just at 100mm.

I mounted it on my Canon T90 and loaded up a roll of the lovely Lomo CN400 and went out for a walk.

Viewing the world at 100mm was a bit strange at 1st with a lot of backing up with the compositions but after a bit I started to get used to it.

I decided to get the roll developed and scanned by Filmdev and when the scans arrived I was very happy with the results, Lomo CN400 colours especially in good light are gorgeous.

To be fair the lens isn’t the sharpest wide open at f2.8 but still looked great and focussed spot on most of the time.

It was fun just shooting at this focal length it definitely puts a different perspective on my usual look, I need to take this lens out a bit more whenever I use any of my Canon FD cameras.

I have an FD adapter for my Fuji X cameras so I may give it a go on one of them next.

Anyway here are 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 🙂

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.

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 🙂

Disaster or Happy accident? … 1st time shooting Rollei CR200

Last week I partook in a film swap with a twitter friend who had never shot my favorite colour negative film” Fuji Reala ” so I sent him some in return for some of his film one of which was a roll of Rollei CR200 colour reversal film in 120 format.

I have never shot this film before so I was intrigued to find out how it looked so I loaded up my Fuji GW690iii and visited my favourite tree and shot away.

View this post on Instagram

Didn't manage to get any FP4 today so out shooting some Rollei CR200 for the 1st time in the Fuji GW690iii @emulsivefilm #beniceshootfilm #believeinfilm #Wales #saynotoxpro #landscapephotography

A post shared by Tim Dobbs (@timdobbsphoto) on Mar 10, 2019 at 9:39am PDT

I returned home and processed the film as normal in the Tetenal E6 kit and when they emerged out of the tank they seemed ok at 1st glance when I hung them to dry.

The only difference in my procedure was that I left it to dry overnight so when I went to scan it I was really confused as the colours were totally wrong, I immediately thought that I had my scanner settings wrong but after a few attempts with different settings nothing changed much or got even worse.

I dug out my lightbox and had a look at the film which instead of having the usual black rebate/frame it was purple.

I double checked the box that it was actually a reversal film incase I had got it wrong and obviously it was.

So to cut a long story short I have absolutely no idea what went wrong here … it does appear a bit like Solarization but no light got to the film while I was developing so I can only assume that the roll of film has had a very varied storage life.

So here are the images …. any comments welcomed …

After my initial shock and disappointment I actually really like the look and would love to be able to replicate it 🙂

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 🙂

Fuji Sensia 200 expired and scanning twice …..

I am really slacking with my photography this year … so far I have only managed to shoot 8 rolls and 3 of them were for the #fp4party.

I know that equates to 1 per week but this ratio is pretty poor for me and my blogging is also behind.

So this week I am hoping to get at least 2 posts done just to catch up …. here is the 1st … A roll of Fuji Sensia 200 that expired back in 2004 that I shot on a pretty dull afternoon using the Olympus OM2s, Zuiko 50mm f1.4 and developed using the Tetenal E6.

After development and subsequent scanning using the Epson v500 all the images had a slight magenta cast and due to a nasty curl quite a few frames didn’t appear very sharp.

So after deciding on which frames that I liked I rescanned them using the Plustek Opticfilm 8100 and Silverfast 8 software which gave far better results especially the sharpness due to the better film holder which keeps the film so much flatter.

I am not really sure if the magenta cast was due to my dev going off or just the film itself but it was very easy to remove in Lightroom.

Anyway here is a selection from the roll … there are a few shots containing Daffodil’s (National flower of Wales) which are blooming nice and early this year also my Obligatory end of roll Peg shot 🙂

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 🙂

#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.

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 🙂

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.