Today, it is much easier to do your own hand painted negatives.  With the help of film scanners and image editing software you can create your own old time portraits from pretty much any photo.  I won't go into too much detail here, but it involves using layers in your image editing software, setting the blend type to overlay and careful selection of colours.  See the before and after shots below:

Hand painted black and whites have a very distinct look.  With modern image editing software it is really not that hard to do, but can take some time to get right.  I spent a long time trying to get a realistic looking skin colour and settled on this one (that I think still looks a little washed out).  I'm working on a better explanation and how to page for this technique, so stay tuned!

Now I'm looking at them again and thinking "If I saw that on someone's photo stream on Flickr, I would think they look great".  I often get so hung up on process and equipment that I fail to see a success when it occurs.  So, why aren't they on my photo stream? I don't have an answer for that.  I do have a tendency not to include too many lomo style or toy camera shots on my Flickr account, mostly because it will start to look like most other photo streams.

With the huge advantage of the film to digital workflow process, I was able to make these shots more interesting than they first appeared.  I am a big proponent of changing as little as possible in the digital side of the workflow, so my images are generally only cropped, levels applied and colour balance fixed.  I will occasionally use the clone tool to remove dust or spots from photos, but not usually with these toy camera shots.  Imperfections are what make these toy camera shots stand out.

With these changes made, and some sensible level adjustments, Some of the shots really started to shine.

So do yourself a favour, go back through you photos and take a second look, you never now what you might see now that you couldn't before!

A big thank you to the Film Photography Podcast guys for linking to me on their Facebook page!  Keep up the good work guys, always looking forward the new episode!

I had been to this same recycling centre before and passed up on a few minor bargains, but when I saw this pile of stuff I couldn't say no.  All together, I piad $15.80 for this stuff.  "Bargain" doesn't even come close to describing that.

Of all of it, I'm only keeping one item though.  The Minolta 24-35 3.5 MD Zoom.  I can actually use this, and was very excited to get my hands on a lens wider than 28mm.

Sadly, the rest of this stuff has a date with eBay.  Included in the items to sell are a hand strap for a 9xi, a vertical control grip for a dynax 7, a wireless flash controller for a 9xi and the best item of all - a Minolta M-Rokkor 40mm f2 Leica M-mount lens. (the lens is starting to grow 1 or 2 dots of fungus unfortunately).

It seems most of this stuff was still brand new when it wound up in the recycling centre.  Almost all of the items were still in plastic bags in their boxes, and even contained warranty cards and manuals!

(Pictured above is $15.80 worth of camera gear sitting on the boot of my car)

These shots were taken along the Maroochydore river.  There's a few of these little boat houses lining the riverbank.  The polariser I had on the lens made most of these shots possible in the early morning light.

Taken with my Konica Minolta 5D (digital) 28-80mm 3.5-5.6 D lens.

]]> http://www.betweenthesprockets.com/?feed=rss2&p=399 0 http://www.betweenthesprockets.com/?p=393 http://www.betweenthesprockets.com/?p=393#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:36:31 +0000 jason http://www.betweenthesprockets.com/?p=393 Finally got around to developing another roll of shots from my Kodak Brownie Six-20 D.  These shots where taken on Shanghai GP3 100 and developed in Kodak D-76 1:1.

Getting exposure right with a Brownie is not easy.  First of all, there's no settings.  You can't adjust anything on the camera, the only way you have any control over the exposure is by selecting the right film type.  A couple of shots taken on overcast days seemed to not come out so great, so this is very much a sunny day type camera.

Still, it's great fun to use, and those amazing 6x9 negatives freak people out when they see the size.

The Shanghai GP3 Flickr Group

Here you can find info on, or ask questions about Shanghai GP3 branded films.

Film Development Times

Select your film and developer type on the left.  This will display known good development times for almost any type of film and developer.  Specifically, here is the two that usually generate the most interest:

• Lucky Films Developing Times
• Shanghai Films Developing Times

Those are the most sought after according to my stats.  As more information becomes available, I will update this post.

(A couple of request through google are closely related to pages I'm working on in the techniques section, most notably "Sprocket Hole Photography" and :120 Film in Kodak Brownie Six-20".  They will be up shortly!)

For those that don't know, film swaps are when you shoot a roll of film then rewind it, but not all the way.  You have to leave the leader out (some cameras do this, others don't have the option.  With manual cameras you can feel when the film leader is released from the opposite spool while rewinding it) so the film is use-able again.  You package the film up and send it to the other person, and they shoot it as per normal.  When the film is developed you get a roll of double exposures (2 photos taken on top of each other on the film), and you don't know what they will look like until they are developed.

I decided to skip the unpredictable results and sending to someone else parts, and do my own film swap.  I set about creating some simple black and white patterns on my computer, then used the whole roll up by taking 6 photos of each pattern.  I made them full screen on my laptop, then took a full frame shot on my Konica Autoreflex-T with a 57mm 1.4 lens.  here's the patterns I used:

(1280x800, because that's the resolution of my laptop.  Feel free to download and use them yourself.)

Once all these were shot (6 shots each on a roll of 36 exposures) I rewound the film until I felt the leader release from the take-up spool, then reloaded it.  It was then time to head out and get some shots.

This part took weeks, mostly because of a run of bad weather, then me forgetting about it for a couple of weeks.  I looked at the camera last night and only 27 shots were taken.  I decided that was enough, as I really wanted to see how it turned out.  In the end, it turned out...

Great!  Some of the patterns didn't work very well, and most of the shots didn't line up with the pattern frames, but this made the shots all the better.  Some of the shots have two different patterns overlapping them, making some strange effects.

Overall, I highly recommend giving this a shot.  Experiment with creating patterns (I used various filters and render command in The GIMP) and find out what works.

My only advice would be this: I used 100 iso film, and for most of the shots I exposed bot h frames at 100 iso.  Depending on your pattern, this can cause overexposure.  I would suggest (if your camera allows it) you underexpose your shots slightly.  Only by as much as half a stop, 1 stop would probably be too much.

You can check out the ones that worked on my Double Exposure Experiment flickr set.

Chromatic aberration is a type of distortion where the lens fails to focus all colours to the same point on the film / sensor.  What you end up with is parts of your picture having halos of colour.  See if you can spot it in the first image here (cropped from a larger picture, taken with a Konica Minolta 5D and Minolta 70-300mm 4.5-5.6 D lens):

It's not easy to spot, especially at this size, so here's a zoomed in shot:

See the blue / violet on the bird's shoulder?  That's chromatic aberration.  The lens has failed to focus the violet light to the same point as all the other colours to make the white (shade of grey in this case) colouring of the bird.

Most lens manufacturers have ways of dealing with this, but it's not cheap.  This is where the more expensive lenses come from.  In the Minolta (now Sony) range, these normally have the "APO" badge which stands for Apochromatic.  This is the name of a method of using multiple lens elements to reduce chromatic aberrations.

If you would like more information, I can suggest the following Wikipedia links.  They are very complicated, but all the info you ever wanted is there.

Chromatic Aberration
Apochromat

As you may have read a while back, I picked up some Shanghai GP3 film on the cheap recently.  I've shot a few rolls, but my developer was dying fast, so I hadn't had the chance to develop them.  This past weekend I was invited to Brisbane for drinks.  Taking the opportunity I grabbed some developer while I was there.

This is the first time I've used Kodak's D-76 developer.  Once it's mixed and ready to go though, it's just as easy as the liquid concentrate Ilford chemicals I had been using (LC29 and Ilfosol 3).  Using D-76 in a 1:1 solution (1 part D-76, one part water) and developing for 14min (@ 20 degrees) with intermittent agitation, and there's the result.

I'm very happy with the results, and will surely be using this combination more.  These two images were scanned in with my new scanner, and with minimal post processing (levels, no sharpening).  There was a couple more shots that turned out OK, but these are the two I'm most happy with.  Overall, my experience developing this roll was much better than it had been previously with medium format.

I'm no stranger to digital.  My intrest in photography started with digital a while ago and peaked when I bought a Canon 350D digital SLR.  That is when I really started to learn about cameras and photography in general.  With it's instant feedback, digital photography is a great way to learn without becoming too discouraged.  If I had to wait a couple of days to get film back and spend time scanning it in just to discover I didn't do it right, I probably would have given up a very quickly.

When finances got tight for me, I needed to sell a few things to catch up.  First up was the camera, lenses, filters and accessories which I had grown to love.  I didn't want to sell them, but surviving does take priority over photography.  For a couple of years I wanted to get back into it, but could never justify the expense.

I don't know why it took me so long to realise it, but one day it dawned on me that the skills I had learned on my digital SLR should easily transfer over to a film SLR.  I dugg out my father's Canon EOS3000 film SLR, bought myself a roll of Ilford XP2 black and white C41 film and headed to brisbane to se how I went.  I was a little rusty, but overall it felt great to be out taking photos again.

This is where my love for film started.  With the realisation that film SLR's had now become crazy cheap, I could build up a kit of very good gear for far less than the price of a digital SLR body.  I began buying almost any film camera I could get my hands on, the more bizarre, the better.

Recently, older digital SLR cameras have started to come down to reasonable prices, and I have been looking at them again.  I still hadn't been tempted to buy one as the price of lenses are still too high.  Canon and Nikon bodies still take the same lenses they used to, so the demand is still there and the prices remain high.  So I was looking at the cameras in a pawnbroker expecting the usual Canons and Nikons when something caught my eye.

The Konica Minolta 5D is not a common camera, but from what I read and from what I have experience so far, it is a brilliant little digital SLR.  Both Konica and Minolta have cemented themselves in my mind as quality manufacturers after using some of their film gear, and knowing that the 5D has the Minolta AF mount, I could use my existing Minolta lenses on it.  That's all I needed to know, and a few minutes later, I  was the owner of a digital SLR once again.

I'm not giving up film though, far from it.  I'm still experimenting, but hopefully I can use both to improve my skills in general.  This blog will still concentrate mostly on film photography though.