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Maxim Muir
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I came up with a way to eliminate (or greatly minimize) the staining of amidol when used as a paper developer. Do I release the secret, or do I take it to my grave (about 22 years from now according to the life expectancy tables)
A Traditional and Uncompromising Technique
Michael A. Smith with his 8x20 view camera. Lots of photographers these days have never seen one of these, much less used one. I've gotten a number of questions about the techniques that Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee use, and I've been a bit negligent about filling in those blanks. Better...
Now is the time for a clique of billionaire hobbyists to resurrect outdated emulsion technologies. How about for starters the complete patent and plans for ASA 10 Kodachrome? Never liked the look of Kodachrome II Process K-12, or Kodachrome 25 process K-14. The bronzy colored skintones, and the muted red brick colors of ASA 10 Kodachrome were the bomb (not to mention fill flash portraits of women with bright red Max Factor lipstick). Ernst Haas like it so much, he still had bricks of the stuff Kodak could not process after 1966. This exclusive Kodachrome ASA 10 revival team could find a nice tax advantage by setting up shop in Lichtenstein. I am sure the world's greatest research chemists would be available for a price for QA the chemical and process line manufacturing. Welcome to my personal reality distortion field:)
Kodak to Sell Film and Paper Business
Building 23 at Kodak Park—the Engineering building—is demolished on July 1, 2007. In a rather opaquely worded press release issued today, Kodak has announced that its photo paper and still film businesses are going up on the sales block. For us, the lede is partly buried: From paragraph 1: "t...
What I enjoy most with this famous photo, is that it has an optical illusion that causes the shadows cast by the clouds to appear to be moving. I used to think it was animated in someway, until I realized it was just good ol' contrast effects. The illusion works best by looking at the right hand portion of the photo, the shadow will appear to be moving in your peripheral vision.
Three Very Important Photographs
Ever heard of Les Horribles Cernettes? You might not have, but they truly deserve a footnote in history. Or rather, this photograph of them does. But before I tell you why, take a look at this picture: What is it? The navel of the eponymous orange, taken with a '90s-era Xapshot? From mere ap...
THat song sure reminds me of this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh23YADF11U&feature=related
Who could have sued who in this instance? :)
Blog Note
Ctein is off today. A brief update on the recent Micro 4/3 sale: About 640 prints were sold through direct U.S. orders, and our international "angels" will be ordering between 115 and 155 more. Ctein has his printer running full time. The mailing tubes have arrived at the Little Box Made of Tick...
Hey Mike,
Know of any workshops for Luddites looking for a darkroom anachronism such as me? I could show the Leica M film users how we used to brew our own high acutance film developers to get the most from a tripod mounted Leica M and a 50mm Summicron stopped down to optimum aperture:)
Tsk, Tsk—Bad, Very Bad!
SA* A Guest Post by L. T. Gray I'm afraid our friend Lloyd Chambers has stepped in it. Stepped square in fresh poop with a great big squishing sound. He's written a commentary about the Leica M9 that's not totally over the moon about that august device (which Mike actually quite likes, we hasten...
(Sung to the tune of Alouette)
Tiny sensor, teeny tiny sensor,
Tiny sensor, this is how you play.
Compare it to a nice full frame,
now your feeling lots of pain,
lots of pain,
cry in vain,
OH!!!!!!!!!
Tiny sensor, teeny tiny sensor,
tiny sensor this is how you play......
Canon 7D, $1699
To considerable fanfare among Canonophiles, the world's leading cameramaker today announced its bid to regain the APS-C throne it ceded when it didn't try hard enough with the 50D. It has tried hard enough this time and then some. The new 7D is Canon's top-of-the-line reduced-sensor-size body...
This coming October, I will be facing yet another rite of passage. I will be packing up thirty some odd years of darkroom equipment and chemistry into our Jeep, and making a cross country trip to North Carolina, where it will be lovingly reborn into new life. My other friend named Mike who lives there, wants to get back into the darkroom after ten successful years as a digital photographer. The materials I had so lovingly coaxed into performing as I desired are no longer available, and so the many things I used to tweak old forgotten formulas from many a deteriorating old book go away for the last time:)
I am just simply happy that these things will end up in the hands of someone who wishes to soldier on against the digital tide, rather than end up in some metal scrap pile.
Darkroom as Recreation
H.H. Bennett's Darkroom Darkroom is on the way out, on the way down, Banco Unpopular. Easy to kick, backward-looking, subject to ridicule (gentle and otherwise). But there's nothing inherently wrong with darkrooms. They have at least one good thing going for them: they're not computers. Anybod...
Ctein,
Back in the film days, I "discovered" that prints needed grain to have additional edges for your eyes to focus upon at the contrast boundaries, and create the impression of sharpness. This is why I never liked the look of Panatomic-X or Ilford Pan F 35mm negatives compared to say Tr-X or Ilford HP5 negatives-the prints from the grainier, faster films always looked crisper. Of course, they would not print the same due to the differences in the characteristic curves, but a good printer knew how to fix that.
And don't get me started on how terrible prints from Tech Pan negatives looked. I got several Gamma .55 associates off that stuff and onto larger format film:)
Noise Is Your Friend
By Ctein No, really. You think I'd lie about something like that? Noise is the bête noire of both the idealist and the fetishistic pixel peeper, but in the real world appropriate levels of noise improve signals. Ears use noise to improve their sensitivity. There's a signal threshold below which...
To Marcelo (and all others who own this lens and are "in the same boat"),
Do not let the digital age turn this lens into a very expensive paper weight. Get a set of bellows for your digicam, and make sure the mount on the open (lensed) end of the bellows can use LTM M39 lenses. You are now the proud user of a lens for macro work that I would dare propose a guess that will blow away any "proper" macro lens away for sheer image quality.
As a matter of fact, this is a good use for any reasonable "retired" enlarging lens. I would imagine Schneider Componon S lens (merely great lenses compared to this one) would be kick butt as macro photo lenses as well.
Art Kramer would sometimes stop by and help me when I ran a darkroom live chat forum on Compuserve (and I read many of his contributions in the popular photo magazines when i was a youngster). He is a wonderful gold mine of all sorts of photographic arcana. Ask Art to recall the story of W. Eugene Smith, and the Zeiss Biotar testing program he took upon himself back in the early 1950's. It is a wonderful tale that refutes the modern axiom that "true artists" don't worry about equipment. It will make you feel better Mike, when you start to think you worry too much about equipment on these very pages!:)
Darkroom Isn't Dead, Part LXXXIX
I don't know about you, but sometimes I follow interesting auctions on eBay just to find out what will happen. So look what just sold for a respectable $3,000: (Note: the link won't be permanent.) The Apo-El 105 is one of the very few true apochromats available to photographers, and one of ...
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