This was taken in July, I think; I held the cam still on the seafront while the two year old son of a friend peered into the massive viewfinder on top (it was an Ensign Fulvue shot) and the friend held onto him. It was windy. It smelt of salt water and mud, and brisk air, and a fresh scene.

My friend regards the countryside from behind some strange patchiness

The development process itself is fine by the looks of it: margins of film all clear, good contrast and so on. So I’m happy :)…but while the development and the actual image is okay, there is pretty heavy vignetting on all shots, and also the ghostly line up the side of each negative has returned (see photo, from my very first development run where this occurred). I used the same tank. I used the same tank in the second development run also, and *didn’t* get the line, so the tank isn’t the culprit after all

So it occurred to me that the very first film I developed was also through this Selfix; checked the negatives and the line and the vignetting are there also. Gah! On the origional shots from the previous owner, you can make out the line also – somehow I missed this earlier, must’ve been the excitement of finding anything at all! – but I can’t see any vignetting on them. Mind you, there could be a swarm of locusts passing and you wouldn’t be able to see those either.

So it looks like the Selfix needs it’s seals looked at or something similar – I’m not an expert in this at all, but someone will be :)

Zeiss icon first shot

Originally uploaded by cedar_9

I like it a lot, especially the Icon-ness of it – really very clear and detailed shot. But I am not that happy after all with the light leaks on the sides and will need either the central tube or a new tank. Or of course, to do one by one after all.

It’s been suggested that I could maybe do with:
proper stop bath to preserve fix better,
washing agent,
longer washing time for any reused developer bottles.
Thanks :) it all helps.

First I mixed all the chemicals up. Bigger tank so more chemicals: I made sure I had all the right bottles, and mixed up new everything to prevent mixing new with old (except the vinegar stop bath, which hadn’t been around for long anyway), having measured the volume I’d need by filling the tank with water while empty and then measuring that. All well and good.

This tank is one of those massive ones you can do five rolls of 35mm in, and I was told to use all five reels every time to keep it light tight, as the absence of the tube (spindle?) would mean the light came in at the top. Obviously I forgot entirely about that until I had my three rolls of 120 wound up in the changing bag, and even that was slightly more fiddly than normal because the inside of the tank still had a few drops of water on, but it went fine, and three reels expanded to 120 width seemed to fit okay – couldnt feel a gap in the centre at all.

But I wasn’t sure, and if I really had to I could have taped myself into the bathroom/darkroom properly and done everything there (really extra fiddly though, as it’s not exactly palatial in there). In the end I left the stuff in the bag, extra carefully and with the tank lid on, and measured up again – five reels at 35mm width is only 4mm less than three reels at 120 width, so I put some 4mm wide film cartridge case tops in there, which may or may not have made any difference. In the end, you just have to try it out eh?

Meanwhile I noticed that my fingers, on my right hand, were looking a bit purply….not sure if the pen leaked or something happened with the film getting wet in the bag. Either way, the spectre of doom from a number of sources is threatening my films now but who knows, I really don’t know enough about the limits of these factors to predict it. Good job I like purple anyway, because before I did the development I did the fixer test recommended by rwyoung (‘strange but true’ post) and the purple remained there for quite a bit longer than normal fixing time, longer than the film became clear (though still purply). Hmm!

Anyway, did the deed. Turns out the developer didn’t quite come to the top of the tank, where the top of the spindle would have been, so I did slow rotation all the way through the development time to try and keep the dev level up on the top film. No idea if that worked. Did the usual inversion, tapping and the like anyway.

Everything else was fine: stop, fix (left it in a few minutes longer as a result of that fixer test, as the purple itself did go in the end, but not too much longer), wash etc. Did the same half an hour running water at 68 wash, as I don’t have any other wash chemicals yet.

Learning this time:

1. Sort the reels and capacity of a new tank out *before* starting to develop in it.

2. Don’t load in a wet tank, dry it properly first.

3. Don’t make notes with a leaky pen. Or, use a permanent marker (not purple)!

4. Make more than you need of all chemicals, in case you either understimate the amount you need, as I did today, or the tank leaks or you drop some! Seems easy now, but that’s the main thing that could have scuppered things today, it seems to me.

5. Label the bottle lids as well, and remember to wash the tank lid between chemicals too.

6. Find out if using developer in a washed ex-fix bottle is adviseable. I washed it carefully and ran water through it, but wondering if that was enough.

Results:

The film at the top was definitely affected by lack of developer coverage (or light) as there’s a darker fading band across half of it. The images themselves worked okay (bar the line). It was the black Daci Royal, I knew that one worked okay. Not a film to see the light of day that often!The emulsion has splodges on it in the area that was closest to the centre of the reel, and this is true of the other two films as well. This could be a drying issue oddly enough – usually I run a film squeegee thing down the films right away, took me a few minutes to do it this time, maybe that was it.

The other two films are a lot better. There is a narrow line of dark on both sides where light has got in, but it doesn’t encroach on the images much (not enough to write them of, to my eye). I used two cameras for this; a Franka Soliday Record and a Zeiss Icon. The Franka film was okay, the Icon film came out really well. Posting imminent.

unfamiliarity.

Originally uploaded by cedar_9

Portrait of a man, probably by the river. I took it with a Daci Royal, which was on long exposure and got waved about slightly to produce this mistiness.

In general, I find the whole thing with portraits a bit like the issue of ‘pictures depicting time’ – sometimes portraits show you the surface of a person, and the way they react to a camera, but it seems to me that the way the portraitee looks fits a pattern, a familiar path through the field of portraiture. Certainly you can get some truly unique and remarkable ones – and I’ve seen some around flickr, and can’t hope to better them – but also you can get ones that seem very focused on the outer message of a person, and I want what’s in them.

Here’s another one. You’ll be surprised to learn that this one isn’t from Flickr, and that isn’t me. Elizabeth I sits with her back to the Armada, seemingly waiting unhurriedly as they meet their doom, contemplating her status and power and looking a great deal better than she did in real life, apparently. According to this link, she ended up getting younger looking as the years went on, neat if you can do it! http://www.shafe.co.uk/art/early_stuart_02_-_jacobean_painting.asp

The clues are all right there – crowns, globes, death and turmoil amongst the fleet, and the opulence of her surroundings, and I love it of course, these are fantastic artefacts alone, let alone considering the marketing and artistry that went into them. But clearly, it’s political, and subtlety doesnt’ really figure here. It’s like having a man standing there with a placard saying ‘The Queen is alive and well, incredibly well off and ready to defeat your nation if you dare to differ,’. Not much subjectivity to be had.

I’m sure, though I can’t remember it clearly, there used to be a group on Flickr for portraits or self-portraits where the person being regarded wasn’t even in the frame. That’s the kind of thing I’m after I suppose. It doesn’t have to be that extreme, but I want something that shows me the inside of people, a bit more insight in to what they’re experiencing internally, or what they believe. Not all ‘external’ portraits are as extreme as this one of course, but even so, I want to be able to read what it says about the heart of the person, or what they think about while the portrait is being done.

And like the time pictures, there are techniques that spring to mind. Pinholes, lack of focus, contrasting focus, doubles…and particular cameras. Here are a couple I tried much earlier :)

Helpfully in this one I resemble the Grim Reaper, and you can’t tell anything else much about what I’m like from my appearance. You would have to use the clues – unfortunately this was not ‘set up’ to be a conscious self-portrait, being too opportunistic to provide real inference, so you might get a bit misled! But if something like that could be done less randomly, it could work.

And in this one, I have taken something of a squashing from the pinhole camera (an oatmeal tin with layers of black tape). I enjoyed the distortion, and there’s promise there. I would like to look less hungover though, especially as I hadn’t even drunk anything! I like the way my eyebrows are sprouting like forests. But really I like the way pinhole takes you away from direct, surface ‘reality’ of what’s being seen, and leads your eye to what else there is to be found.

Originally uploaded by eh-a

A fascinating photograph about time (in my view) which shows the measuring equipment but encapsulates the timescale of distant memory as well as ‘real time’.

dreams of mountains and distant industry [5]

Originally uploaded by monkeyinfez

Monkeyinfez pinholes, and thinking about landscapes and personal meaning. Well worth taking your time over.