Photographic tinkering

It occurred to me that very few occupations are as inviting to experiments and improvising as photography is. It's in principle a very simple craft and its main tool is really just a box with a provision for some layers of glass elements stacked on top of each other through which light falls on some light-sensitive plane: film or nowadays sensors. The three parameters that interplay when a photo is taken (shutter-speed, aperture of the lens and sensitivity of the light-capturing thing behind the lens) are all easily understandable and all that one has to worry about when being in the field.

And since there is so little to do while taking a photograph, a lot of enthusiasts haven taken things into their own hands to make it more interesting. The internet has detailed instructions on how to build a pinhole camera out of a matchbox, your own tilt-shift lens, even a whole medium-format camera from scratch. And those that are less adventurous, can at least squeeze an infinite amount of entertainment from meticulously developing their film in different developers, comparing the results, or even make their own developer.

For weeks now I had this one sore spot in my refrigerator, namely a left-over roll of Kodak Ekta 100 color-negative film for which I couldn't really find a use. I am really not good at dealing with colors and also despise the fact that C41 film is not very conducive to development at home. Unless of course you pretend it's B&W film and cross-process it in B&W chemicals which is the only type that I have here.

The expected results are basically monochrome photos with low contrast, but with an unpredictable color cast. Depending on the film it's either orange or (quite common). You never really know what you get. Sometimes you get negatives with an enormous amount of grain, sometimes however you wont. You also wont find these handy development charts that tell you how long to develop a particular type of film short at a particular speed in a particular developer at a particular temperature. It's a photographic wild-west, so how could I resist?

So I did what I generally do nowadays when I don't want to leave the house. I set my camera on a tripod, find some domestic item to put into my macro studio (a pair of sunglasses this time), spot-meter off a gray card and then quickly shoot away to get my 24 or 36 exposures done. Since I really didn't have a clue how any of my available developers (DD-X, Ilfosol 3 and HC-110) would behave towards color-film, I just grabbed Ilfosol (it served me well with my previous roll of Efke KB25, so why not) and used the development times for Delta 100 as a starting point. I would have developed for nine minutes, but my tap water is at best 21 degrees in summer, so I subtracted half a minute and I was set.

And here's what emerged from the development tank:

I very slightly adjusted curves in Photoshop (mostly clipping on the right side of the histogram to make the whites actually white) but that was all. I like it a lot. In particular, the film has retained all of its good traits (low grain, high resolution) and lost its bad ones (lab-processing, the color;-). As expected, there is a noticeable color shift, but its towards the warm amber instead of the dreaded orange. Funnily, it's an accurate reproduction of the glasses' real colors.

Two shots, same setup, different premises

I've been quite prolific over the past few weeks. Last weekend was a bit of a two-faced affair, with a gorgeous Saturday (which made me go out and waste a roll of Delta 400 - results slightly meh), followed by a Sunday with incessant rain. This gave me the opportunity to finally build my little macro studio which mostly consists of a box of cardboard with the two sides cut out and the gaping holes covered with tracing paper as a diffuser. Softly bent white poster board serves as the seamless backdrop. These things have been done and written about to death so there is no point in further going into great details here. Find DIY instructions on the internet, for example here.

Now, while a setup like this gives you pretty well controlled and soft lighting, it's still not quite as straight-forward in practice as the idea is to eliminate all shadows and get an almost pure white as the backdrop for the object. This shows what I mean:

This I shot digitally and while this gives you an infinite amount of retries, even then you will have to battle with slight unevenness in the lighting, Look at the upper-left corner. This is not lens-vignetting but rather a slight darkening caused by lack of light. So the diffusion is not perfect. Also, take note that this is not what it looks like straight out of the camera. It requires post-processing to make the whites as white as it is and, in particular, to fix the white-balance which always has the tendency to be off. Both the camera and Photoshop will distrust all the white in the frame, resulting in an amber tone.

Using film for shots like this requires a different strategy: First off, you don't get to re-shoot until it's right and you wont get any kind of feedback until the film emerges from the development tank. On the plus-side, it's easier to obtain pure white as bumping the development time will leave the shadows largely intact but bump the highlights. Finally, film (especially B&W) is much more robust as far as white-balance is concerned.

And now behold the following two shots: Identical setup (well, close to; ignore the slightly different angle and relative size of the object), the same lens (Tamron 90mm f/2.8) but different cameras (Pentax K10D versus Pentax K2) but most importantly, one shot digitally and the other shot on film:

The digital one offers color which is nice as it literally makes the coating of the lens visible. The depth-of-field is too low. I was impatient and wanted to try out the just completed macro studio right away, hence I shot hand-held. At ISO 400, I needed f/4.5 to obtain a barely hand-holdable shutter speed of 1/60. The white-balance is slightly too warm, too.

For the second shot, the camera rested firmly on a tripod and this time I used a much smaller aperture (either f/11 or f/16) at a shutter speed of one or two seconds. The film is Efke 25KB. Film of such slow speed is really an anachronism but it's paying huge dividends here. This is almost medium-format territory as far as sharpness and details are concerned. Noise is low but this being B&W film, it is of course still discernible. Find larger-sized versions of this shot here.

What is most striking however is the appearance of a much sharper contrast even though a histogram would disagree and indicate that the above digital shot has in fact darker shadows and brighter highlights.

For those keeping book, I developed the roll of film in Ilford Ilfosol-3 (diluted 1+19) for 7 minutes at 20/68 degrees. Ilfosol is said to be a good developer for slow film and I would agree. The little bit of additional grain it induces is a low price to pay for the higher accutance and local contrast it delivers.