Worthy of Redundancy

Ultrafine Xtreme! It seems a little silly to brand something with "Ultra" and "Extreme" in the title. In Latin, the prefix 'ultra' means 'extremely' or 'beyond'. So they are trying to send a message here. They want us to know that this film is fine grained. Now if you've shot enough film, you know that these claims are largely created by the marketing department of the film company and don't always hold true in real life. Especially with black and white film, grain is affected by so many variables from EI (exposure index or apparent iso) to the plethora of developers, dilutions, temperatures, agitation schemes... The list goes on. So I'll be forgiven if I approach "Ultrafine Xtreme" film with a touch of skepticism. This is compounded by the very (not Xtremely) reasonable price, which in Western culture means lower quality. I bought 10 rolls of 120 Ultrafine Xtreme 100 for around $5 per roll. For comparison, Ilford Delta 100 and Kodak T-Max 100 are both over the $6 mark (what? no more Acros 100?? BOOOOO! to Fuji!!!). So let's see what my $1 per roll savings is going to cost me.

I loaded my roll up in my 'chrome-tastic' Bronica S2a (read more about that camera here) with the always pleasant and reliable Nikkor-O-C 50mm f/2.8 lens. This is the sharpest medium format option I have and a great camera to use, so why not? I shot the film at iso 100 because that's what the box says on it. Can I push it? Can I pull it? What are it's reciprocity characteristics? None of these questions mattered. I just wanted to shoot it straight and see what the baseline is. And that's what I did.

Before I get to the shots, I'll describe my development scheme briefly for the home developers out there that nerd out on this kind of stuff. I used two DIY developers mixed together. First was My-tol (Kodak X-tol look-alike). I mixed that up at 2:1. Then I added some Parodinal at 1:100. I developed the film for 11 minutes at around 70F using the usual agitation scheme (constant for the first minute and then 4 inversions every 30 seconds). Fixer was Ilford Rapid Fix 1:4. There, how's that for brief?

One of the tough subjects when it comes to fine grain and sharp lenses is animal fur. I scanned this shot at 1200 dpi and I think I am running out of pixels before I run into grain.

Here is a 100% crop of that shot.

I have to say I was impressed. At least with this developurr combination (sorry), this film does indeed show very very fine grain. Is it "Ultrafine"? Well, we are dealing with sort of subjective, qualitative terminology here, so I'm going to say YES! It is Ultrafine! Put this film behind your sharpest lens, develop it with a high accutance developer, and be confident that you are going to get some Xtremely good results. "But James", you say. "Doesn't high accutance and sharpness mean that the low contrast areas are going to look grainy?" Let's see. Here is a 100% crop of the blank out of focus wall behind the subject.

The answer is "yes, there is some visible grain." Is it distracting? Is it "golf ball grain"? No. It is what I would characterize as "filmy" grain. It's the grain that lets you know that you are shooting film. I personally like grainy film (usually). The exception to that rule was Fuji Acros in Caffenol-CL. That was so smooth and creamy and lovely. I could just stare at the blurry backgrounds. But usually I like to have some grain in the image just as a creative device, sort of like the way I left the S2a film mask in this image as a border. It's a layer of abstraction that adds interest.

Now we come to the 'caveat emptor'. Here we see what saving $1 cost me. There were two shots on the roll of 12 that had artifacts. These looked like perfectly round clear spots on the film. I don't think that they were air bubbles that didn't get developed since that is not ever a problem with my agitation and there were only two of them on the whole roll. I think these are actually flaws in the emulsion. Take a look near the bottom of the gate. I'll keep an eye out for more of these in future rolls. I hope this is a Xtremely rare slip up by the QA department. If it is truly a "feature" of this film, I'll probably spend the extra $1 per roll and use T-max. But if not, if it turns out that Ultrafine Xtreme 100 is a good reliable fine grained film, then I will certainly buy more.

This Argus is Super

Thanks to Madmen, midcentury modern is the bee's knees. Generally people are looking for furniture and design elements for their homes. Me? I love 50's cameras. Give me bakelite over titanium any day. The classic "faux TLR" is the Brownie Hawkeye Flash. I have two of those and they are genuinely fun to shoot. Taking a (small) step up in control brings me to another favorite, the Argus Super Seventy-five.

These were made in the mid to late 50's in Ann Arbor, Michigan and man were they well-made! Of course they are pretty simple, but the overall quality of build is just very good. The apertures range from 8 to 16 and the leaf shutter hits in the 1/30th to 1/50th range. Fortunately, the heft of the camera (about 1.2 lb (530g)) and the neck strap make it pretty easy to hold steady. The lens is a simple 65mm "Coated Lumar" meniscus, so don't expect anything tessar-like, but for those of us who enjoy the nostalgic feel of the photos taken with a simple lens, this performs quite well. I have flipped the lens backward in mine, so I get a characteristic radical blur around a reasonably sharp center. Focusing is by range, lining up your subject distance (in ft.) with a pointer next to the lens. At f/8 or higher, you don't have to be extremely accurate with your estimation. It will focus down to 3.5 ft. There was originally a slip-on closeup lens, but I don't have that accessory and probably wouldn't use it if I did. Correcting for parallax with a camera like this is going to take practice and I have too many cameras in the rotation to remember the quirks of each one. In the picture here, you can see the red indicator in the taking lens that says that the shutter is cocked. The shutter button is pretty stiff on this camera, so the chances of accidentally tripping it are practically nil. The real highlight of this camera is the viewfinder. It is so big and so bright that composition is a true pleasure. It is a reflex, so the image is backward, but not upside down. Remembering to focus the lens is the only down-side of having such a nice viewfinder, but get the process locked into your brain before you go out and you shouldn't have a problem (focus, compose, focus, shoot, wind). Lastly, it is worth mentioning that this camera takes 620 film. So get on the google and either clip off the outer edges of your plastic 120 spool or rewind the film onto a 620 spool and you are good to go. New plastic 620 spools can be purchased from the Film Photography Project store, or buy some cheap expired 620 film from Etsy or Ebay and get some classic metal spools with it. However you go about it, these mid-century beauties are well worth the effort to get out and shoot.

These shots were taken on Ektachrome that expired in 1981 and were developed in my own DIY C-41 soup. First up are shots from a cloudy day at the beach.

These next shots were from a sunny walk near the beach in La Jolla. I was surprised at the vast difference in color saturation with just a few more stops of light.

Reversal - The Finale

Well, it took a while to get this all together and done, but I finally finished the project that I initially had in mind when I bought the Ansco 3A 122 'Postcard format' camera. I wanted to shoot paper in the camera and reversal process it to positive images and send them to friends as postcards. And that is what I did. I made 20 individual exposures on 20 pieces of Arista Grade 2 paper. I had to take the photo, then take the camera off of the tripod and put it in a film changing bag where I had an envelope for exposed sheets and one for unexposed sheets. Then I would remove the back of the camera and take the exposed paper out and put a fresh piece of unexposed paper in. Repeat x20. That took about 2 1/2 hours, just to take the pictures. Fortunately, I chose a beautiful location, the Old Point Loma Lighthouse, so spending time there was a delight. It was mid-January so it was pleasantly cool with a little breeze from the ocean and sunshine just barely filtered by some thin high clouds.

Here is a shot of it on expired Fujicolor, taken in my Vitomatic II, just for reference.

I have gone through the processing steps in previous posts and there is a long discussion over on Photrio about it, so I won't rehash it all here. I will just mention that the paper was graded at iso 2 which resulted in a 12 second exposure at f/64. So with no further ado, here is the result.

And here is a scan of the one of the postcards itself.

This was a super-fun project and I love sending these postcards off to friends and family. The Ansco 3A performed beautifully and was great fun to have out in the field. I highly recommend making postcards and sending them with hand-written notes to those you care about.

Reversal Revisited

If you remember this post about reversal processing images taken on photo paper (enlarging paper) in-camera, then this might be of some interest. I have done some more experimenting. At first, I made the terrible mistake of changing too many variables at once. I was trying different papers and rushing through the processing procedure and the results were all bad. In order to understand a process like this, you have to isolate a variable and just change that incrementally so that you can see what effect that variable has on the end product. So I decided to just use one paper (Arista Grade 2), one camera (Graflex Speed Graphic with the Graflex Optar 135mm lens), and one dev/reversal process (outlined in the aforementioned post). So I took 4 shots of a high-ish contrast subject. I only varied the exposure. I used iso ratings of 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1.0. I know those seem like extremely low ratings, but it turns out they are in the right ballpark. I started here based on some vlogs by Joe Van Cleave as well as some initial Googling and experimentation. Anyway, I wanted to share my results, so here goes.

These are in order of low to high iso rating. The subject is a scooter and a padlock against a brown fence in direct sun. The exposures were all done at f/16 and the times were 4, 2, 1.5 and 1 second respectively.

I can tell very little difference between the last two, but they both look about right. They might tolerate a bit less exposure, but for a regular scene with more mid-tones, I think iso 1 will do nicely. So here's what I think I am learning about this process. Expose more than you think you should. Develop to completion on both dev steps. Stop and wash completely! Keep the bleach fresh (I make 300 mL and discard after 4 sheets). If you have bleached adequately, you don't need to restrain the second exposure. I am using bright bathroom lighting for 2 minutes.

Now the next step will be to make exposures in my Ansco 3A and get some postcard format pictures out that I can send to my analog photo friends. I might even try tank developing those and see what happens. If you are doing reversal processing, drop me a comment and let me know how it's going.