For those of you who only recently joined our group shutterbugs, I have taken the liberty of expanding the old camera basics post with a newly-expanded handout dealing with the basics of the camera lens; another handout detailing the use of the camera shutter will be coming soon. This is quite a long handout topping…
After doing a bit of research and doing some experiments in the darkroom today, I think I’ve come to realize that the problem we’re having is that our chemicals have been sitting here too long. This doesn’t mean that they went bad, it just means that we need to decrease the water dilution a bit.…
I drew up the final handout for the film development portion of the class that discusses optimal development times and temperatures. If you want to take a look at it, the handout is here in PDF form. Please print a copy of it and keep it for future reference or ask me for a copy for…
I was told we have 24 hours to spend $25k but I can’t possibly spend that much on things we won’t need so we went through the darkroom during class yesterday and compiled a list of things we needed and proceeded to budget out how we were going to spend so much money on camera…
I have made a step-by-step handout showing how to load the film reels, for those of you who haven’t got around to sticking around for that particular lesson or simply want to have detailed instructions. These will also be on the wall of the sink room in case you need them for immediate reference when…
Mike’s Quality Camera came through with our new stuff today. 24 rolls of Kodak TX-400 film, two steel film retrievers (the best there is), D76 concentrated developer, concentrated stop bath, and four 25-packs of 35-mm archive sleeves. Those of you who want to try your hand with another roll of film before we go into…
“There are no accidental masterpieces in painting, but there are accidental masterpieces in photography” – Chuck Close, painter & photographer
As you guys could see in class today (for those of you who showed up) the chemistry while being a reasonably exact science, is not very difficult. I realize that there is a lot of numbers to learn but we just have to make sure we read the directions on the developers we use. The…
Today we learned a very important lesson when doing our agitations with the film tank. For reference as to what I’ll be naming, here is a labeled illustration of the developer tank parts: A lot of these tanks are pretty old and some of them are downright cracked and leaky. So it should come as…
We have to be mindful that the film we are using is extremely photosensitive. When we are in the spooling dark room, it’s very important to remember to carry all our materials with us before beginning to wind the film onto the spool. Even a sliver of light entering the room can affect your film…