#Landscapes #People #Food #Polaroids
Every time I was out shopping for a legacy (or just plain old) lens I had to dig through piles of old magazines and bookmarks to find the info I wanted. Especially dimensions and optical scheme of an old lens are often two difficult data to track down.
So I started collecting all these specs into this handy table, that I’m now sharing with you. Continue reading “35mm legacy lenses: sizes and specs”
Ok, now is the time to get yourself that nice thing you want – or to suggest your significant other or your friends to do so.
Here is a small list of what you may want to consider, if you don’t own it already. Continue reading “10 gifts for the film photographer”
A couple weeks ago Kai of DigitalRev, with the help of Bellamy of JapanCameraHunter, did a video on the “5 top film cameras for under $1000”. Interesting, but having grown up shooting film in my opinion they got two major things wrong. Continue reading “Top 5 film cameras (+ 1) under 500$”
Scanning color negatives is the Holy Grail of the film lover.
The scanning part, per se, is no different that the one you have to carry with any other film, color or black and white. The tricky part comes when you try to obtain natural, or at the very least, pleasant colors from that piece of films covered in a bright orange mask.
A bit of help may come from some new kind of negative film, like the Rollei Digibase, that does not make use of such orange mask; but you will still have an hard time sorting out how to get an usable picture if you don’t know a few tricks.
I will assume here that you have had your negatives processed by a lab, or that you followed my previous posts on how to develop & scan them at home – that you can find here:
Best film scanner: Canon 5D Mark II vs Drum scanner vs Epson v700
How to scan films using a digital camera
How to develop color negatives in C-41, the easy way
Now you have your film neatly cut in strips and scanned. It’s time for a trip into Photoshop!
Open your freshly scanned image and invert it: CTRL + I on Windows, CMD + I on Mac. It will look something like this:
Don’t panic. Now it is time to use one of the most powerful tools of Photoshop: the curves. They look scary, but are not that difficult to understand, really. Basically at the bottom you have a couple of arrows: these set black and white point. And then you can manipulate the curve, pulling and dragging around, to your heart’s content until the image looks good.
Here is like I do it: first choose one of the colors from the drop down menu on the top part of the curve panel. We well start with red. Drag the left bottom arrow keeping pressed the ALT (Windows) / OPT (Mac) button. You will notice that the image goes away, replaced by a monochromatic version, but that at some point details starts to appear. Those details are actually areas of blocked out shadows or burnt highlights, so we will stop just a fraction before something starts to show up.
Repeat the process, always keeping ALT / OPT pressed, for the right arrow and then for the green and the blue colors.
At this point the image starts to look pretty good, but a fair bet is that the colors are still quite a bit off, with some heavy color cast.
To remove it just switch to the opposite color in the drop down menu (if the color cast is red go for blue and vice-versa) and manipulate the actual curve keeping an eye on the image. Try to not overcomplicate things. Often one control point, like you can see in the blue curve, is enough.
I find that rarely, if ever, I have to recur to more than two points. The second one is mostly just for the sake of cleaning a bit the shadows, that often tend to have some kind of blue cast for “environmental reasons”, because of the light that bathed the scene, or a green cast when you shoot under a tree in spring or summer.
Something like the image at the beginning of this post is what you will get. Quite a difference from the blue mess we started with!
P.s.: you will notice that the leaves in this image tends to go from green-ish to yellow-ish tonalities more or less from the bottom to the top part. This has nothing to do with processing: it matches the scene, or in other words it is exactly like this particular tree was.
One of the best reason to still shooting film is the ability to use negative color film. It has been perfected for decades, and now is at the vertex of its evolutive path. For this reason you can shoot on amazing films like Ektar – to name but one – that give you beautiful colors and extremely small grain.
Problem is: good labs, especially if you don’t happen to live in a very big city and / or don’t trust the postal service with your precious pictures, are getting few and expensive. It’s much more common to get back the films all scratched and full of dust, with someone even sending back the negatives uncut and just rolled up and locked with a wristband – yes, it happened to me!
The obvious choice at this point would be developing the films at home. But, unlike black and white developers that are pretty much easygoing in terms of temperatures involved, C-41 – the name of the chemical process used to develop color negative films – is quite tricky. In theory, it requires you to maintain a temperature of 38 °C / 100.4 °F ± 0.3 °C during the entire process. A 0.3 °C margin is restrictive enough, but the real problems here springs from the 38 °C temperature. It is a really difficult threshold to maintain. During most of the year the water you use for the processing and the stock chemicals will be both at a much lower temperature.
To have the bottles of chemicals and the tank reaching 38 °C you will have to immerse them in hot water in some kind of basin or tray – and they will tend to float. But how will you be able to stop the heating process exactly at 38 °C? And what will happen when the water in the basin will starting to cool down? Yeah, you can add more hot water, but let’s be honest: there is no way you can control the temperature in a ± 0.3 °C range without an expensive and bulky color processor. And no, an aquarium heater is not a viable alternative. In many forum I read about this suggestion, but guess what: even setting aside the fact that it would lack the necessary precision, the goal of an aquarium heater is to let the fishes survive – duh! – so it will not run hotter than 32° C / 89.6° F; as you can see not hot enough by a long shot.
So what, we give up? No way! There is an alternative, and if you have read some previous post of mine you may start guessing what I’m referring to: stand development at room temperature.
Yes, exactly like a black and white film. And that is possible mostly because the first developer of a C-41 process is, in fact, just a plain black and white developer. It is the next phase, the bleach or bleach-fix in some kits (blix for friends and family) that will remove the metallic silver and, so to speak, make the colors appear.
I first read about this technique on Lomography and I’m using it with just a couple changes. The results I’m getting are just plain great, without the awful and unpredictable color shifts caused by the imperfect control of time-temperature when trying to develop the films by the book at 38 °C.
So let’s cut to the chase; these are the steps you need to follow to develop color negatives at home:
VARIATION 2 baths (for example: Tetenal C-41 kit)
Pre-soak = 3m (no agitation)
Developer = 45m (1m continuous agitation at first)
1st wash = 3m (changing the water every 30s)
Blix = 60m (1m continuous agitation at first)
Final wash = Ilford-style
Stabilizer = 1m (no agitation)
VARIATION 3 baths (for example: Rollei C-41 kit)
Pre-soak = 3m (no agitation)
Developer = 45m (1m continuous agitation at first)
1st wash = 3m (changing the water every 30s)
Bleach = 60m (1m continuous agitation at first)
2nd wash = 3m (changing the water every 30s)
Fixer = 1m continuous agitation and then 10s every minute for the amount of time given in the instructions
Final wash = Ilford-style
Stabilizer = 1m (no agitation)
Keep in mind that if your tap water is way colder than room temperature, say 5 or more °C degrees, like it happens in winter at my place, you should bring it to more or less room temperature or, better still, around 20 °C / 68 °F. No need for precision, just use the mixer faucet!
Pre-soak
Just plain water. It swells the emulsion leaving it prepared to receive the developer and removes the anti-halo layer – this is why the water will come out of the tank with an heavy coloration.
1st wash
You could actually avoid this step, but it makes the blix last longer – and probably gives you better colors too, even though this is controversial.
Blix
This is simply a combination of bleach and fixer that some kit uses to combine two steps into one.
Blix & bleach
The times for blix and bleach can be extended up to 50% – with respect to the ones reported in the instruction booklets that come with every kit – without harm.
Ilford-style wash
It is an archival washing method devised by Ilford. Basically you fill the tank with water and turn it upside down 5 times, than you empty it. You repeat the process, but this time you turn it upside down 10 times, then you empty it. And for the last time you repeat the process, but turn the tank upside down 20 times before emptying it. That’s it; at this point you will have saved a ton of water – compared with the traditional 15′ wash – and your films will be still archival-quality clean. And yes, you can and should use it also when you process b/w films.
Stabilizer
This step has three functions: it hardens the emulsion, disinfects it agains fungus and bacterial contamination, and lets the water flow away out the film surface without forming drops.
After all this just hang the films to dry in a clean room – the best possible place is in the shower, after you run hot water for a minute to clean the air from flying dust particles – and come back in an hour and a half or so. Your pictures will be ready to be cut in stripes and scanned!
How to get good colors from the scans will be the argument of the next post.