Craft! Bang! Boom!

More adventures in photographic paper!

Today I packed up a bag with a bunch of cameras and trekked across the tundra next door to me to take some pictures. I had 3 pinhole cameras that I had made out of tins, the Pindiana camera, and some other misc. cameras. Took pics with the photo paper and using the ortho lith film, and then headed back to see what I could do with them.

For a change, and to see if it was possible, I set up a darkroom in the bathroom and poured my chems into trays. Yes, trays! Not tanks! I am rocking it, tray style. I can’t get a 100% light tight seal in my bathroom, but I figured, what the heck, why not try it? And since I shot a piece of 8×10 paper, I had to tray develop it, since I don’t have a tank big enough.

My tin photo paper negatives came out okay. Everything I developed today seemed like it was really low contrast. I made some heinous developing mistakes, namely, letting the photo paper float on top of the developer instead of being submersed in it. But it was dark, and I couldn’t see (I don’t have a good location for the safelight in the bathroom, so it was sitting on the floor next to the toilet. That’s how classy I am). Anyway, here’s some of the pinhole pictures. I adjusted the levels in Photoshop to compensate for the low contrastiness.

This is from a pasta tin, and I moved the camera after I opened up the pinhole. Whoops.

Do you like the big developer blob at the bottom? Really, that’s an embarrassingly bad picture. I’d like to just learn from it and move on with my life.

The picture from the short and stout teddy bear cookie tin turned out slightly better:

I like the distortion on this one, I just need to develop it better.

I used one of the pinhole clusters that Travis drilled out for me the other day for the 8×10 Japanese biscuit tin camera. It was 5 tiny pinholes really close together. I wanted a zone plate-ish look, but the end result just looks sloppy to me, not wonderfully soft.

So, I’ll just replace the pinhole cluster with a .5mm pinhole instead. No worries.

I also took a few pictures with the ortho lith film. One was taken with the Exposed pinhole camera, and the other with my new Ibsor camera. The Ibsor pic didn’t come out. I think it was a developing fail. And maybe too long of an exposure. I don’t know. Let’s not talk about it anymore. The shot with the Exposed camera, a 45 second exposure on an overcast, but bright snowy day, actually came out quite well.

Well, the part of the film that made it into the developer came out really well, anyway. I cropped the blank part of the film out. I developed the ortho film in the paper developer, and it seemed to go just fine.

After I developed the pinhole pics, I turned to trying to make contact prints again. Following wheehamx‘s advice, I got a 15 watt frosted bulb and stuck it in a clip light, clipped it to my shower curtain, and shone it at the ceiling. Then I was able to do a test strip in 2 second increments, and what do you know? I actually got shades of gray this time! Woot!

That’s a pretty accurate representation of what the contact print looked like, in terms of contrast. It’s just doesn’t have the punch that I want. The black isn’t black enough.

It could be a couple of different things. I’m sure my temps are too low on my developer by a few degrees, so that could be it. Or, it’s possible enough light was getting in through cracks in bathroom door to fog the paper.

Either way, my plan for the next round of paper developing is to go back to doing it in a tank. Also, I’m going to throw in a little more of the paper developer concentrate, as apparently that can alter your contrast.

I know one thing, though – I’m getting really sick of taking pictures of snow.

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Hey, I finally found something I’m worse at than developing film! Did some experimentation with the contact printer and the photographic paper today, and it went spectacularly badly. The two prints above? Those were the best images I was able to get. Yeah… I suck at this.

So, time to figure out what went wrong. I don’t have the best grasp on the whole making prints thing yet, but from what I understand, if something comes out too dark, then it’s overexposed, correct? The two prints above were done with my timer on less than a second. Seriously, I cannot expose them for any less time.

The bridge pic was the only thing that turned out actually having any light areas in it at all, so let’s look at that. Last night I took this image…

…converted it to black and white, and inverted the colors to create a negative. Then I printed it out on a piece of regular printer paper. This was what I used as a negative for the photographic paper. I exposed it for about a 1/2 second using the contact printer. Then I developed it for 2 minutes (rather than 90 seconds, since my chems were colder than 68 degrees).

Here’s what I can think of as possible issues:

1. The red safelight has fogged the paper. The contact printer has a red safelight that turns on when it’s plugged in that allows you to situate your negative and paper before you make the print. The photographic paper says that you should keep it at least 3 feet away from the safelight to avoid fogging, but since the red light is inside the contact printer, there’s not much I can do about that unless I want to keep the contact printer unplugged until I make the print.

However, I don’t think the red safelight is the problem. You can kind of see along the one edge of the paper that it’s really white (I think I accidentally laid part of the paper and negative off the glass there). I would think if the paper was fogged, that would turn out dark as well.

2. My contact printer bulbs are too bright. The printer uses 2 25 watt frosted bulbs. I haven’t actually opened the thing up to check and see if the correct bulbs are installed. I plugged it in and it lit up, so I figured that was good enough. So, maybe I have the wrong bulbs, or maybe I can just remove one of them to make it produce less light.

3. My photo paper has gone funky. I haven’t kept it in cold storage, and it’s close to two years old now, but I’m pretty sure photo paper lasts a really long time, so that’s probably not it. I might try out some of my Efke positive paper tomorrow just to have something to compare it to.

4. My chems are too old. The bottle of undiluted paper developer was opened a long time ago, but since then it’s been closed and hanging out in its light tight bottle. I guess it could still go bad, though.

5. My chems are too damn cold and that screwed everything up. I know they should be at 68 degrees, but mine were more like 64. It’s winter and cold in my house. There’s only so much I can do about that.

My plan is to take some pinhole pictures tomorrow with the photo paper (going directly from pinhole camera to developing tank, so the contact printer isn’t involved), and see how those turn out. Of course, the pinhole prints will be negative images instead of positive, so I’ll probably just confuse myself again.

Oh, and the Ortho Lith film? Yeah, that was a complete fail, too. First of all, it has no notches in it, so I have no idea what side is the emulsion side! I think I got it wrong. According to this guy, the emulsion side is lighter under a safelight. I’m not used to using a safelight at all when dealing with film, so next time I mess with it, I’ll have to be patient and let my eyes adjust to see if I can figure out what the hell I’m doing. Also, I tried developing it in the same paper developer I was using for the photo paper. I thought I read somewhere online that you could do that with ortho film, but I guess if I didn’t expose onto the emulsion side of the film anyway, that’s kind of moot.

Despite all of the issues I’ve had, I’m still intrigued enough with the potential of making prints to continue to fumble with the photo paper. If the contact printer is just too finicky for me to use, I think I might try doing contact prints with an overhead desk lamp, a la here. That looks suitably low tech and prone to going badly, which is just about my speed.

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(This post doesn’t have anything to do with Fallout 3, or box cameras. I just ran across this pic and felt like using it.)

So! I have a lot of crap. I just accumulate things. I’m trying to be better, but still, I wind up with things, like 47,000 instamatic cameras. Do I need 47,000 instamatic cameras? No. No, I do not. But yet, I wind up buying them, because I find them being sold for a buck or two and have a cartridge of film inside. Surely, I can spend a few bucks for a chance to recover some found film. Which is fine, but the instamatics have accumulated, and I’m afraid they’re going to rise up against me.

(Incidentally, the film from this lot is a dud, at least developed in C41 chems. I’m going to shoot the rest of it and try developing it in black and white chems to see if I can recover any images that way.)

So, I need to chuck some instamatics. I also just bought some more found slides, and need to get rid of the carousels.

My plan is to dump the Instamatics and carousels at Goodwill. Maybe someone can put them to good use.

I’ve also accumulated a lot of darkroom related stuff. I have a miscellany of vintage developing tanks (I was trying to find one to use for 116 film before I settled on the Kodacraft). I have an enlarger that a friend gifted me ages ago. I have trays and tongs and beakers.

The problem, though, is that once I became empowered to develop my own film, I got kind of stuck developing my own film. Meaning, that’s as far as it goes. I take pictures, develop film, and then scan them in. Apparently, there is this whole other mysterious part of the darkroom experience that I never participate in. And that experience is making prints.

I have pretty much all of the materials one needs to make prints. I’ve got the enlarger (with a working bulb!), red safety light, timer, trays, etc. And one day, I took some pictures with the Hannakube using Efke Positive black and white paper, and did my first shot at developing paper. I cleaned up an area in the garage, waited until night (since I was in the garage, which isn’t really light-tight), set out my trays, and went to work.

Aaaaaand… I didn’t like it. Some of the angst came from, I’m sure, the confusing nature of the Efke paper. I couldn’t wrap my head around whether I had under or overexposed the images. I was stressed out that the garage wasn’t light-tight, even though I don’t think it ultimately mattered. I seemed to remember being clumsy with the tongs. I hated having to clean up all of my dyeing crap in order to make room for the developing materials. Ultimately, I think what turned me off the whole experience was that I wasn’t crazy about how the pictures came out, and the fact that I had to do the whole thing at night (due to the light issue). I work better earlier in the day.

So, that was the first and last time I developed paper. Which really made the 3 packs of black and white paper (the aforementioned Efke 4×5 positive paper, a 25 pack of 8×10, and a -god help me- 100 sheet pack of 5×7) pretty ridiculous to own.

However! It suddenly dawned on me while I was doing my last round of developing, as I had a single sheet of 4×5 sheet film in my Patterson system 2 tank, that I was completely dim. This whole time I’ve written off my black and white paper in favor for film developing, I could have been developing paper in my film tank! Yes! I mean, why not? In theory, that works, right? And that way, I don’t have to clean any bigger area than I already do for film developing, and I can process paper during the day when I actually feel like being productive.

With that thought, and for a couple of other different reasons, I wound up buying a Patterson system 3 developing tank the last time I ordered from Freestyle. It’s designed to fit 3 rolls of 35mm film, and is slightly taller than the system 2. Specifically, it’s tall enough to develop a sheet of 5×7 paper or film. Yay! Now, maybe I can start putting the box of 5×7 paper to work.

A long time ago, I had Travis drill out holes in 4 tins with the intention of making them into pinhole cameras. So, today, I finally got pinholes taped to them and made them ready to go. I also picked up 3 5×7 film sheet holders (darkslides? Is that the technical term?). I’ll wind up using them eventually for a bigger version of either a pinhole or diy large format camera.

(Incidentally, the guy at Columbus Camera Group said he could get me into a real large format camera for about $125. Whaaaa? I might take him up on that next time I go down there.)

But, back to my habit of being weird, random stuff. I picked up this package of 35mm x 100 ft Kodalith film yesterday.

I have no immediate plans for it. I’m pretty sure it’s been discontinued, which is why I grabbed it. I have some of the Arista Ortho film, which I guess is a suitable replacement for the Kodalith. I bought some a while ago to play with, and haven’t gotten into it yet. I think I have a box of 50 4×5 sheets.

If I’m not mistaken, the ortho film is supposed to be safe to use under red lights. Developed in an A+B developer, it gives really high contrast black and white (no gray) images. But, I guess you can also develop it in regular film developer and get the gray tones, too.

This is interesting to me because, this evening, as I was planning my world domination plan via 5×7 photographic paper, I suddenly realized that hey! I have yet another tool at my disposal!

You see, after Christmas 2008, Travis and I were wandering around Jack’s Camera Shop in Muncie, and I found a thing. It was a big, heavy metal box, and it was only $10, so of course I was all, “I *need* this.”

It turns out it was a contact printer in perfect working condition. You put your negative on top of a piece of photographic paper and expose it to light for a mysterious length of time, and then develop the paper and surprise! You have a print the same size as the negative! Sounds good, right?

I have never used it. I bought it, looked at it, opened up the heavy panel on top of it, plugged it in, and then packed it away under my bathroom sink. Poor neglected contact printer.

But I had the thought, today, that not only could I use this to make contact prints on photo paper, I could also use this to make contact prints on Ortho sheet film, develop it in regular film developer, and then get, maybe, magically, large format black and white positive images, or, basically, a giant black and white slide. This thought appeals to me.

So, to sum up, I have a lot of experimentation to do. I have no idea what kind of exposure times to use for the paper and the ortho film, both in a camera or using the contact printer. At least I have a lot of film and paper to experiment with.

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So, an interesting thing happened recently. I made some curtains. Maybe you’ve seen them?

They’re made out of old Kodachrome slides I bought last fall from an antique store in Kansas City. I got a lot of maybe 400-500 slides, plus a few other things, like a crate and a slide projector, for about $25. When Travis and I got home, we sat down on the floor of our living room and went through them, seeing what we had. It was a lot of fun. I scanned in most of them, uploaded some to Flickr, and then put them back in the box. A few months later, I finally got around to trying something I had been wanting to make for a while – a pair of curtains for my front door made out of the old slides. I needed curtains for door. I had slides that I appreciated and liked to look at. It seemed like a perfect match.

The project went together quickly enough, and 3 days later, I was able to hang them up on the door. Hooray! I took some photos, added them to a few groups on Flickr, and did a Craftster post about it, because Craftster is awesome and I’ve been inspired by a lot of projects on there in the past. I figured that because I posted on Craftster, I’d get some more hits than usual on my photos on Flickr, but I didn’t think much about it.

I went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning Travis told me the views on my photo were in the thousands, which is crazily huge compared to the regular traffic. And that’s when things started to get a little weird. This is going to be a long post, people, so head on over the jump with me… Continue Reading »

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Hey, look!

I made a camera! Like, with a real lens and shutter and everything! And it works!

I took the body from this pinhole camera I made last year:

…and took out the pinhole-y front of it, since I wasn’t using this camera at all (instead, I preferred my more simple Exposed Pinhole Camera instead). Then I cleaned this Ibsor lens I had picked up for $5 the best I could and attached it to a piece of black foamcore.

The lens is still kind of funky, but not as dusty. Oh well. Anyway, I taped it to the existing box and took a few test shots.

I was using Kodak TMax 100 film. I have no idea how accurate the shutter speeds are on the lens, so I just winged it and shot this picture at 1/50 sec with an aperture of f32. It came out kind of overexposed, so I think I could have gone up to 1/100 and have been okay. I figure with all of the snow on the ground, this is probably the brightest scenario I could see myself using this camera for.

The shutter speeds get even wonkier at the slower speeds. Regardless, I tried taking a few pictures inside to see how close I could focus. It turns out 3 feet is too close, but 6 feet and beyond is okay. This pic was taken with a shutter speed of 1/25 and an aperture of f4.2-ish.

Could have probably used a longer shutter exposure there, but oh well.

I’m really happy with the sharpness of focus I got with this camera. I had no idea what type of focal length to use with the lens, but the depth of the pinhole box seems to be about perfect. My scanner, unfortunately, will only scan a strip that is 70mm or less, so I can’t get the entire length of a 4×5 sheet of film scanned in, but you can start to see in the snow picture that one of the corners has some really weird, stretched out distortion going on. Which I think is neat, so yay.

In other news, I finally placed my order from Freestyle and got some new goodies. A new tank that doesn’t leak (yet – I know I said I didn’t feel like getting a new one, but I caved), a great big E-6 kit, some smallish sheet film that will hopefully fit in my smaller than 4×5 film holders, A+B developer for my ortho film, and a kit to develop black and white film as reversal (slide) film. That stuff should be fun to play with.

Also, I made these curtains out of found Kodachrome slides. While Travis had the Dremel tool out to drill holes in the slides, he also drilled some tiny exact holes in metal for me to use in future pinhole projects. Now I have perfectly exact pinholes that measure .3429 mm, .4064 mm, .508 mm, and .6096 mm.

In addition to the pinholes, I’ve been looking at zone plate stuff. I love the super-soft effect you can get from zone plate, and I even have a zone plate/pinhole lens for my lensbaby. (As an aside, I’m working on building a 4×5 camera that I can just pop the Lensbaby lens modules into. Travis drilled a really tiny, almost pinhole sized aperture disc for it last night, too). However, I hardly use that since last time I put it in my Nikon, it got my mirror absolutely filthy, and I FAIL at cleaning.

I don’t really understand how one makes a zone plate camera at home without having access to some kind of microscopic drill bit, so instead, I just had Travis drill patterns into metal with the tiniest drill bit, and I’m going to see what happens when I try using those. It could turn out to look like a big overexposed blurfest, but that’ll be okay.

Here’s a few more pics I uploaded from the C-41 developing fest. The tree one is my favorite.

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Have I mentioned that I am the World’s Worst Film Developer? Because I totally am. I blame it on the fact that I have no formal training in photography at all. Also, I’m using a developing tank that leaks and a thermometer that has only the vaguest grasp on the actual temperature.

I’ve never let any of that stop me, though! No, I just charge blindly ahead, haphazardly mixing up chems and dunking film and watching in amazement when a suggestion of an image appears on a fresh negative.

I spent the past few days doing a batch of C-41 developing. I had something like 30 rolls of color film backed up, so I mixed up a liter of color chems. I used Arista’s C-41 liquid kit. At this point, I’ve tried the liquid kit and the Unicolor powder C-41 kit, and I think from now on I’m just going to order the Unicolor kit. It’s cheaper, and seems to work just as well.

The kit is supposed to develop something like 8 rolls of 35mm film, but like I said, I had 30 I needed to develop, so I just kept going and going and going. I did about 14 rolls (mainly 120, 35mm, and 126) the first day, and 16 the next. The second day, I added some chems from a Kodak Flexicolor developer replenisher kit into the developer. I didn’t know whether it would help or hurt, and I didn’t really have any directions for it, but I kind of just thought, ‘What the hell!” and threw it in. I don’t think it hurt anything, but I think I probably should have started adding it after I developed my first 6 or 8 rolls of film.

I finished almost all of the film I wanted to develop, and was going to do my last two C41 rolls and then try developing some older color film (Kodacolor X and Triple Print) with room temp chems, when I realized that the chems I were using had gotten seriously funky. Like, this funky:

It actually was not the dark creepy night of the apocalypse when I took this picture. That’s courtesy of my near-exhausted C41 chems, just barely able to gasp for breath. So, I decided to be done with the color processing for right now. Still, 28 or so rolls of film out of a kit that was only supposed to do 8 is pretty good (if you overlook the fact that a lot of the pictures have serious weirdness going on with them).

Have I mentioned that my developing tank leaks? It does, like a sieve, when I do inversions. The lid is cracked. It’s a bummer, and messy. I wear gloves when I develop, and hold a towel around the tank to try to minimize flinging Blix everywhere. It’s a pain in the butt. Also, I wind up getting pictures like this:

Check out that sky. Bubbly! I thought that the sky bubbles were due to some weirdness in the temperature of the chems, but yesterday I tried stirring the chems using the swizzle stick thingy instead of doing inversions, and that seemed to solve the problem. Instead of bubbles, I got smeary things instead.

Not that I’m complaining about any of this (well, the leaky tank sucks, but I don’t feel like buying a brand new one). Maybe because I have absolutely no formal training in photography whatsoever, that allows me to not be really anal about what I’m doing. The only real bummer during this stretch of developing was that none of my 126 Instamatic film turned out. I guess that was to be expected, since it had expired in 1976 and 1981, but that was still disappointing. Plus, I always wind up destroying the Kodak Instamatic cartridges in order to remove the film, so I can’t even reuse the cartridges for respooling. Sadness.

I’ve got a ton of pictures to upload to Flickr, and some other photo-related posts I want to do here, so hopefully I’ll get some more posts up here soon. But until then, here’s a few pics:

Oh, in case I’m not the only person in the whole world still messing with 116 and 616 cameras, I started a Flickr group for them. So far I’m the only member, which is hilarious and sad. So if anyone out there wants to share the 116 love, feel free to join. I’m so terribly, terribly lonely…

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