Tales on Film

Since I learned about the revival of polaroid instant film by The impossible project, I’ve wondered why you need to shield a impossible film from light. I mean I’m still quite young and what I remember from Polaroid was that you could see it develop. Now about a week ago, the impossible project had dr. Love explain it all over at their blog. I’ll try to give you a simple recap here.

So most of us will know that a developed Polaroid type image is a negative with chemicals applied so that it leaves an imprint on the positive paper. Now the film constist of a couple layers and because you can’t have an image without a reaction to light, there is a light sensitive layer. Polaroid films had an opacification layer, upon spreading the chemicals, there was a component that reacted with the layer, so that it kinda acts as a blind on your window. It immediatly blocks out most light to the film.

Apparently this layer contained Titanium Oxide, which happens to be really rare and expensive. It also wasn’t perfect, that’s why Polaroid included the frog tongs on their cameras, to protect the ejected film from light in those very first instances.

The Impossible project is working on a new solution to this problem, but it takes a lot of time and testing to get it right. Keep in mind that it took Polaroid 17 years to perfect their film and The Impossible project is only working on it for a couple of years. I think it is already great that they have some very usable film out there in that short of a time without having the recepices from Polaroid.

.

First of all let me wish you all a happy 2012. As one of my New year resolutions, I decided that I will keep on posting interesting things about film photography, but I can’t keep up the rate I did last year until september. It’s just not possible to combine this blog on that intensity with all with my work and shooting. However I will not let the blog die. So to show that I’m still committed to posting, here is the first post for 2012.

A little while ago, I was playing around with the Diana F+ and got the idea to try and see if it’s possible to fire a pocketwizard (wireless flash trigger) with the Diana. After some testing and with the little hotshoe flash accessory that came with my Diana F+, it turned out to work. I loaded some film in the camera and went on to do some light tests.

Thanks to the internet I knew that the F+ has a diafragma of about f11 and that the shutter time varies between 1/100 and 1/60 of a second. That made that I had to put my studioflashes for those conditions, I used the old school method of a light meter and made sure I used the lower end of all settings. So I measured for f8 at 1/60 of a second on iso 400 because I was using Kodak Portra 400VC. It was an experiment, and boy was I happy when I saw the photos.

It even delivers some interesting results when you start using double exposures and flashes, just remember to adjust your settings.

So it’s perfectly possible to use a Diana F+ for studio photography. There are some catches however, first of all, the Diana F+ has no real focus, so that means unless you are using a lint meter your shots are going to be a bit soft like the photos above. The second problem is that because you are not working with a through the lens viewfinder and you don’t exactly see what you are framing and that means you’ll get some pictures like the one above, where the head is cut off. So it is possible to use a Diana F+ with off camera flash and there for in a studio environment, I would not recommend it

The last days, there are a lot of articles in the news concerning the stock of Kodak. Investors have lost faith in the company that started the photography for the masses about 131 years ago, the stocks has plummet about 85 procent in the last week and if we look further back, the stock of Kodak has gone down from 80,25 points in 1997 to 1,33 today. That accounts for a loss of 99,5% in the last 15 years.

Most of you know the timeline of Kodak, George eastman Kodak invented the roll film and marketed with the now famous line: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Since then the company became the biggest camera and film producer in the world. In 1975 an engineer from Kodak invented the digital camera. But Kodak only got in the digital business around 2000, that was a capital mistake and that’s where the big decline of the stock began.

If Kodak would go bankrupt, I would guess they will not disappear, but they’ll downsize. I don’t know what they are going to downsize, but I don’t think they will drop the film line. Kodak still makes a lot of film for motion pictures and they just released several new films in the last year. That’s a clear indication that there still is hope for the color films produced by Kodak. I would guess that they are probably going to kill of the black and white film, because there hasn’t been a new film in a while and they have been dropping b/w films consistently lately.

I don’t know what the future will bring, but I rather certain that kodak won’t go down without a fight…

2 days ago Ilford photo announced a new package they will be offering starting from the end of october.

At the Focus on imaging fair earlier this year, Ilford showed a prototype of a new pinhole camera. By the end of october this camera will be available from your local ilford dealer. The package will consist of a pinhole camera with 72mm wide angle lens with plastic cone, 10 sheets of positive paper, 10 sheet of ilford delta 100 negative film and a pinhole exposure calculator based on a design by Richard Koolish. The camera features a 4×5 large format design, everything is provided except for the 4×5 film holder. The whole package will be sold for £ 150 including VAT.

I would like to test the package and write a review, so if anybody of ilford is reading this, please send me a review copy. On top of that I find it very reassuring that Ilford is releasing a new pinhole camera as a package, that means there is still some hope for us film shooters.

As you guys seem to enjoy these film guides, here is another one. I already spoke about one of the most common black and white films, the Ilford delta 3200. Today I’ll review the slower brother of this film, the ilford delta 100.

The ilford delta 100 is as all 100 iso films a rather slow film, suitable for pretty well lit situations like daylight or studio lights. It’s a black and white film, with as you can see in the photo on top of this page, a wide range of shades of gray.

Although you have a wide ranges of gray-tones, the photos can still come out pretty contrasty in a situation a bit darker. You can see in all photos that the noise is very small, almost none existent.

As you can see, the film also handles overexposure very well. This is a long exposure for about 10 seconds and the highlights in this photo has still some detail.

Overall I think this film is a widespread easy to find film. But as with most products for the mass, I’m not particularly fond of the film. For me it’s nothing special. I do more like very contrasty and deep blacks in a film. Sadly enough I only get kinda mediocre results with this film, so it’s not my favorite film, but as it is very easy to find in almost any photography store, a lot of people use this film.

I noticed in the search results of this site, that there is a huge interest in the different film types you can find. I’m only reviewing the film I have used till now and keep in mind that these are my personal opinions.