Why is my film blank? (and other FAQs)

Developing your own black-and-white film isn’t especially difficult, but it can be tricky to get the hang of the whole process — especially when problems don’t reveal themselves until the very end. Many of the questions that get asked on photography forums relate to troubleshooting the development process. Here, as a community service, are some…

Crossed leaves

Posted as-is from a drugstore scan (1500×1000 pixels) of cross-processed Ektachrome GX film. The scans were mostly blown out, but I liked the look. They say that Kodak film works “best” at cross-processing. I have a lot of 120-format Provia lying around, so it might be time to test that hypothesis. I shot this at…

Wheel of Light

I’ve felt a bit uninspired lately, so I decided to kick-start what’s left of my artistic brain by giving myself a project. For about a week, I carried around a deliberately limited rig (the Nikon FG loaded with a single roll of ultra-slow Efke 25, mounted with a slow and somewhat unsharp Sigma wide-angle zoom).…

Rays of light

I developed a few rolls of B&W film last week — the first home B&W I’ve done in about six months. (Having a baby in the house will do that to you.) I mixed up fresh fixer and a new batch of Thornton’s metol two-bath developer, then proceeded to soup up two rolls of Neopan…

Unexpected places

.flickr-photo { border: solid 0px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 0px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } You can sometimes find photography in unexpected places. On Saturday, while leafing through a profile of Groupe Aeroplan CEO Rupert Duschene in Report on Business magazine, I learned that the man…

In-Camera Diptych

.flickr-photo { border: solid 0px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 0px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } You’re looking at two adjacent 6×4.5cm frames from the Zenobia 6×4.5cm folding camera (which I don’t use too often). The film was Fuji Neopan 400 developed in Rodinal 1+50 (9 mins…