Craft! Bang! Boom!

A few days ago we dragged out the RA-4 chems to see if they were still good. I’m working my way up to making an epic Freestyle order, and wasn’t sure if I needed to order more color print chems. Turns out, the unmixed RA-4 chems stay good for forever, but I also mixed up the last bit of what I had, so I need to order some more anyway.

I’ve been using this Fuji paper to make color prints since, unlike almost everything else I have, it’s fresh and in-date. It’s supposed to be kept under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but I’ve just kept the box at room temp since I’ve gotten it. I don’t have room in my fridge for more photo stuff. It’s bad enough already. Anyway, the paper doesn’t seem to have gone weird, and we were able to get some pretty good prints from it.

This, however, isn’t one of the better ones. It’s a print from some cross processed 35mm Kodak Color Infrared film, respooled onto 120 backing paper, and shot in the Yashica-Mat. It’s not that great of a picture anyway (it’s interesting… but that’s about it), but I was curious to see how the color infrared worked as a negative. This particular picture was shot with a red filter, but I shot others with yellow, orange, and green filters, so I may have to try making a print of some of those to compare.

A better print is this one, which came from a C41 Kodak Ektar 4×5 negative.

I was very happy with this print. The colors actually look like reality, which is what I was going for! Yay! Also, 4×5 just kicks ass. I’ve completely gone off 35mm. The more I work with actually printing photos, the less use 35mm holds. The difference in the grain is stunning. For a comparison, here’s a section of the boat picture at 100%:

And here’s a similar section of the cactus print at 100%:

That may not be a completely fair comparison, since the cactus picture is cross processed, which tends to make things more contrasty, but still, it doesn’t make me want to shoot a ton of 35mm.

Not that there’s not still uses for 35mm, though. I made this print from cross-processed Kodak E100G 35mm, respooled onto a 620 spool and shot through the Savoy. It’s not exactly sharp, or has realistic colors, but it’s still fun.

Travis also shot a ton of 35mm film on vacation using a little Olympus Pen-EE camera. It’s a half-frame 35mm camera, which means instead of getting 36 pictures of a long roll of 35mm film, you get 72 half-sized pictures. So, yeah, the image quality is not great, but it’s a fun little camera to use.

We made a few prints using some of the Pen-EE negatives yesterday. One of them came out especially neat (cross processed Kodak Electronic Output film), but Travis doesn’t have them up in his Flickr yet. So, the Pen-EE is a cute little camera, and it’s fun to make pairs or trios of smaller prints on one sheet of color paper.

It was my intent to do more color printing today – I might as well keep going until the chems are all used up – but I found myself making stupid mistakes and it got to the point where it wasn’t fun. And if it’s not fun, then I probably need to take a break from it. I’ve got some weird stuff I want to try with the remaining chems, though, so I’ll probably be back at it tomorrow.

Oh, one thing that is potentially interesting is that Freestyle is now carrying their own brand of color paper. I’m excited! It looks like they’re getting it in stock in a few days, and I’m definitely going to get some and try it out. It’s slightly cheaper than the Fuji paper (which I like, and have had good results from), but the main benefit I immediately see is that you can buy the paper in boxes of 50 for the smaller sizes, as opposed to Fuji, where you have to commit to a box of 100 sheets for anything smaller than 16×20. That being said, I’m kicking around possibly ordering a box of gigantor paper (16×20 or larger) to try making UBER PRINTS. It’s not like I have any wall space to hang prints that size up on. I just want to make a gigantic print. It seems fun. (I think I used the word “fun” about 80 times in this post. Yay?)

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I’ve experimented with redscale photography before, with varying results. (Just a refresher: redscale photography refers to the technique of shooting color film with the emulsion side facing away from the lens. This involves running the film through the camera backwards). I’ve liked the results that other people have gotten from redscale film, but have just been more or less meh on the shots I’ve taken.

However, during the great Respooling Odyssey of 2011, when I was getting all of my film ready to take on vacation, I went a little crazy and wound up buying some of Rollei Nightbird film (pre-flipped redscale film) and respooling several rolls of 35mm redscale film onto 127 or 120 backing paper.

This picture and the one at the beginning of this post were both shot on a roll of expired Fuji X-Tra 400 speed 35mm film, flipped for redscale, and respooled onto 127 backing paper (shot through the Ward’s 26 camera). This is pretty typical of how redscale generally looks – the majority of colors are tones of yellow, orange, and red.

What I had wanted to try in addition to just shooting the redscale normally was seeing how it came out when it was shot in conjunction with a filter. So, for this roll of expired 800 speed Kodak Gold Max, I taped a small section of a teal gel over the inside of the lens (again, I used the Ward’s 26). I made sure to use a faster film for this, since redscale film in general is like shooting through a red filter (the base color of the film), and I was adding an additional dark filter on top of that.

I didn’t really know what to expect, although I guessed I’d get results that were dark brown. I shot the roll on a very gray, misty morning that didn’t have much going on in the way of color.

As you can see, the redscale film plus the teal filter resulted in green tinted images.

So, that’s kind of neat. I packed more redscale film than I actually wind up shooting, though, so I still have some more filter experiments I want to try with it (if I shoot with a straight blue filter, will I get purplescale images?). We only managed to develop a little under half of the C41 rolls of film we shot before I started to get paranoid that our chems were going wonky. So, I need to restock.

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So, we’re back. Actually, we got back home to Ohio last week, but there’s been a confluence of drama since then (some family stuff, some health-related stuff, and a good heap of drama with our camper – here’s a tip for you: don’t buy a Rockwood. Worst. Camper. Ever.). Anyway, it turns out I did pack a boatload of film that we didn’t wind up shooting, but not by much. I think we shot all but one or two rolls of the 20+ 620 film I had respooled, and quite a bit of the 127 film.

What I barely shot was any 35mm film. Even though I had a boatload of fun, weird 35mm films to use, even though I love my 35mm Nikon FM2N outfitted with the Lensbaby, I had to force myself to use it. I don’t know. The more photography stuff I do, the less I see the point of 35mm. I just like working with the larger format negatives so much more.

So, the cameras I did wind up using! The Polaroid 230:

The Yashicamat:

The Speed Graphic (Zarl!), of course.

The Savoy, although I haven’t uploaded any vacation photos from it yet, and, to a lesser extent, the Ward’s 26 127 camera, the Bollywood pinhole 4×5 camera, and Watson, the 5×7 camera.

All we’ve managed to develop so far is the black and white film. I accidentally fogged a chunk of our 4×5 black and white negatives (sad trombone), which kind of sucks, but things like that inevitably happen when you’re loading and unloading film on the fly. The majority of the film we’ve shot is process C-41, which we haven’t even started to develop yet.

After looking over the black and white negatives, though, I know one thing – if I had this vacation to do over again, I’d take less pictures of waterfalls.

I can’t help it. I don’t exactly live in waterfall country, so whenever I see one I instinctively take photos of it, which is fine, but seriously? I could have stepped back a bit from the waterfalls. Less waterfalls. More other things. I guess I took so many waterfall pictures that any pictures of other subjects, like this one:

…automatically stand out to me.

We were gone for a month, and it was easy to get in the habit of drive, drive, drive, get to a “Destination,” and stop and take pictures, automatically. The interesting pictures, the ones I’m drawn to now, are the ones we took not of a big major scenic Event, but of smaller things, like the awesomeness we ran across in Forks, Washington:

Or being so bored while doing about 18,000 loads of laundry that I brought the pinhole camera inside the laundromat and amused myself for a while:

We still have a boatload of film to develop from the trip, so we’ll keep slogging through the developing and the scanning. I’m looking forward to making prints already!

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