Between The Sprockets A photography blog

4Jul/100

Serious 6×6

There's something about the 6x6 format that feels more serious and professional than 35mm.  This is strange, as a lot of fun toy cameras (the Holga and Diana for eg.) use this same format.

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.

6Jun/102

New Scanner

So I finally got myself a scanner that can take medium format film.  Oh, and when I say "new scanner" I mean it's new to me.  I picked up Canon 8600F scanner at cash converters on the weekend (a well known pawnbroker / dodgy 2nd hand chain here in Australia).  This is the push I needed to start investing more in this amazing format.

I've started scanning in some of the negatives I didn't have the patience to stitch together with my Epson V300 (and it's 35mm width film scanning) and it's becoming quickly apparent that I need a better storage and archiving solution for my negatives.  I would be very interested to hear from people how they organise / store their physical and digital copies of photos.

Expect to see a lot more medium format photos over the next few months.