To Bleach Or Not To Bleach

Bleach bypass is a process that has intrigued me for a while. Recently, while listening to Matt Melcher's podcast Box of Cameras, he mentioned using this process in an upcoming project. I had tried this before and not really liked the results, but this prompted me to try again since he specifically mentioned Fujicolor film and I happen to have some of that in the fridge. It is Expired (2010) Fujicolor 100, and he is using Fujicolor 200, but I figured "How different could it really be?". It's that kind of thinking that often gets me into photographic trouble. But that's how I think, so waddaya gonna do?

To take a step back, what is bleach bypass? Well to answer that, you have to know the various steps in color film processing. The steps are:

• Develop
• Bleach
• Fix

There are various stop baths and rinses and washes in between these, but these are the chemically important steps. So knowing that, it becomes obvious from the name, that bleach bypass skips the bleach step. So what does that mean? Well, let's dig into the process chemistry a little more.

• Developer does what it says. It develops the silver image, just like with black and white film. Byproducts of the silver development activate the color dyes selectively so that color dye clouds are formed in the emulsion.
• Bleach converts the developed silver back into silver halides, basically 'undeveloping' the silver image.
• Fixer, then dissolves away the 'undeveloped' silver halides, just like in black and white development, leaving just the color dye clouds in the emulsion layers.

So, if you skip the bleach step, you are leaving the developed silver black and white image on the film. If it isn't converted back to silver halides, then the fixer does not remove it. So what does all of that mean? What is the point? Basically, what you get (to varying degrees with different films) is an image with muted (possibly shifted) colors and higher contrast. It is a distinctive look, but don't take my word for it. Take my pictures' word for it.

I developed this picture of a mural in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego using bleach bypass. Now I didn't get quite what I thought I would or even what I wanted. There was a base fog because the film was 10 years expired and of unknown storage history. So the negatives were very dense and my scanner (Epson V600) had trouble pushing enough light through them to get the image. So there is electronic noise on top of the add grain from the remaining silver. So what to do? I just took the strips and dunked them in the bleach (room temp for about 15 minutes). Curiously, I did not need to re-fix. The negatives were nice and 'clear', that is the base fog was gone and they looked like normally developed color negatives. One more note is that I used ECN2 chemistry on these. That system is meant for use with motion picture films, but this was just regular old color negative (CN) film designed for C-41 development. So technically, this is a cross process, though not a drastic one like developing slide film as negatives.

So here are the results, first the bleach bypass, then the same image after bleaching.. Let me know which you like better. I personally like the bleached image better, but I will definitely try this process with other film stocks. Since it is 'reversible', there is really nothing to lose.

An Unexpected Leak

That's like a chapter title from a bad spy novel (or maybe a bad plumber's manual). Anyway, I just thought I would make a brief post to show the dangers of using thin base films. Generally we think of film as just emulsion layered onto a sheet of flexible thin plastic that is then cut, perforated (optionally) and rolled. I realized when I started developing my own film that the 'base' support is quite different for different films. Certainly color films are different than black and white. The support material on most color films is some shade of orange, while on black and white films it is either clear or a neutral grey. But what I hadn't really thought about was that the support material is different thickness depending on the film and it's intended purpose. Movie film needs to be thick and strong enough to stand up to the forces that are pulling it through a movie camera. Still camera film can be thinner so that more exposures can fit into a standard roll. Then you have specialty films like Kodak Plus-X Aerecon II. I have written about this film before, but I don't think I have mentioned much about the consequences of rolling it into standard 35mm cartridges. Standard cartridges have a little fuzzy piece of fabric around the inside of the opening where the film leader comes out. That serves dual purposes. First, it keeps the metal edges of the canister from scratching the film. Second, it acts as a light seal so that light does not enter the canister through the slit and fog the film. Well that's all fine if your film has a thick base support layer and it takes up all of the space between the two light seals on either side of the slit. However, Aerecon II was intended for aerial reconnaissance photography. When flying long distances, it is important to economize on weight so that your fuel will last for the entire mission. So the film was made with a very thin base so that a big roll of a few hundred or a thousand feet would weigh significantly less than it's consumer counterparts. This means that the film does not fill up the space between the light seals in a standard 35mm cartridge and if you are not careful, the light will come in and make nice stripes on your beautiful pictures. So let this be a warning to all of you shooting thin base films. Load and unload in the DARK! Not the shade, and not 'subdued light'... the DARK. Cautionary photos to follow.

The Return of the Slide Dupe

Almost a year ago, I posted "The Last of the Dupe" as I shot, developed and scanned the last roll of my beloved Ektachrome Slide Duplicating Film. What is so lovable? I suppose it is really subjective, but I just like the way the grain and colors combine. Note: I always cross-process this film in Unicolor C-41 and scan. I do the normal things for scanning film like make sure my stupid scanner (Epson V600) isn't cutting off half of the histogram. But I don't do anything really in the "color correction" realm. So recently, I was looking around the interwebz for some more. I do this periodically, but not usually with any success. Either it is just a single roll, or it is so over-priced, I won't buy it, or both. So when I came across two 100' rolls of Ektachrome, I stopped for a closer look. The were unopened, expired in '80 and '81. One roll was regular Ektachrome 64D and the other was SLIDE DUPE!! I got very excited until I saw the price. $120 plus s/h put this expired film at ~$0.66/foot. That is about 3x what I usually set my limit at for expired film especially with no guarantee, returns, etc. So I put a watch on it to see if it would sell, just out of curiosity and I also wanted to keep track of it if it didn't sell. The film didn't sell and was subsequently relisted as an auction starting at $0.99. Now that's a starting point I can get on board with! I would usually wait until the end and try to snipe the auction, but I really didn't think this was going to stay reasonably priced. So I threw a bid on it for $30 ($0.15/foot). Who knows how, but I won the auction with a winning bid of $10.50! Including s/h the film came out to be $0.12/foot!! If the film was any good, I got a really great bargain. If the film was trashed, I was out $23, which I could live with.

So here are the results of the first few shots. Taken with my trusty Pentax K1000 equipped with the SMC 50/1.7 lens. I set the meter at iso 32 and then I took one shot on center, the next shot was one stop slower (iso 16) and the next shot was one stop faster (iso 64). The roll was developed at regular temps and times for Unicolor C-41.

I did not adjust any levels or anything to make one shot look better than the others. I just set the histogram limits for black and white. At first glance, the iso 16 shots look best. But if you look at the last shot of the rose bud, you will see that the highlights blew. That is the only one taken in full sun, midday. So maybe 16 would be a good number if you are shooting this in diffuse or dim light (golden hour), but I think the iso 32 and 64 shots are more usable as far as the highlights and shadows go.

Here are the 32 and 64 shots from the middle set. I have adjusted these individually in order to compare on level ground.

It is easy to see that the shot at iso 64 has more grain and is a little cooler in tone. That is good to keep in mind in case that is a look I want. I might try another short roll like this and shoot at 64 and 125 and then push the development one stop. That might bring the warmth back to the colors and help with the grain a bit. If I decide to do that, I'll link it here. Until then I am just going to enjoy shooting my favorite film again.

The Resilience of Film

I decided to visit a thrift store down in a part of town that I don't really get to very often. I had seen on CraigsList that they had some "darkroom equipment", so I thought I would go check it out. When I got there, the selection was sort of meager, but the prices were better than the 'bay', so I decided to have a closer look. There were a couple of Watson daylight film loaders and I can always use another one of those, so I picked one up. It had a typed (like on a typewriter) label on it that said "KODALITH ORTHO type 3 / 6556 film". I had a thought that there may still be film in it, so I did what any kid rummaging around under the Christmas tree would do... I shook it. It rattled a bit. It wasn't heavy like it had a full roll, so maybe there was just an empty spool in there. I decided to take a peek. What's the worst that could happen? If it was empty, no harm. If there was film in it, it wasn't very much and it was old iso 6 ortho film that had been sitting on a shelf for who knows how long and was probably fogged anyway. But I didn't just tear the lid off, I carefully cracked it a little and looked in. There was indeed film in there. Was it labeled correctly? Had someone else opened it and exposed the whole thing? How old was it? These were all unanswerable questions that really didn't matter. I needed the loader, so I bought it. The only question that mattered about the film was "Is it still any good for taking pictures?" and the only way to answer that was to stick it in a camera and shoot it. So that's what I did.

I loaded one roll of about 24 exposures and put that aside. I figured if my peek had fogged anything it would be most evident on the 'outer' parts of the roll. So I loaded another roll of about 20 exposures and put it in my trusty Pentax K1000. This was just a test roll, but I still tried to make a little effort to get something I would like to look at. I have never shot a picture of a test chart and I'm not going to start now.

I had some Kodak X-Tol developer mixed up already, so I decided just to use that at 1:1 with dH2O. I cut the leader off and did a quick test to make sure the developer was still good and to check the fixing time. I dunked the leader in developer for 5 minutes and it looked pretty opaque. Then I fixed for 4 minutes and the undeveloped area cleared in about 2 minutes, but the developed area got a bit less dense too. So I decided on a 10 minute dev time and a 5 minute fix. I don't have enough of this film to worry about figuring out 'the right' times and concentration. I probably only have enough in the loader to make 2 more 24exp rolls, so this is just for fun and for the information of anyone who might find themselves in a situation where they have to decide whether to keep some old unknown film or toss it.

So without further ado, here are some of the results... The highlights (and some of the mid-lights) are blown in all of them, and there is indeed some fogging (probably from my peek) on some frames. In fact in some (not shown here) there are only blown highlights! I think I may have over-exposed using iso 10. Next roll I will try iso 20 and see what happens. It is high contrast film by design, so a full range of tones is not to be expected. But the mere fact that I got recognizable images from this poor tormented film is really a credit to the medium. This film went out of production in 2002. Digital formats that old are already obsolete! So I'm going to enjoy my last few feet of this good found film and treat it with the respect it deserves. Thank you Kodak for making products to last decades, indeed centuries!!

The Last of the Dupe

So it happened. I shot the last roll of one of my favorite "no longer in production" films. It is Kodak's Ektachrome Slide Dupe (Duplicating) film emulsion #5071. It is a color reversal (slide) film that was designed to make exact duplicates of existing slides. It was intended to be processed with E-6 chemistry, but I only ever processed it at home with C-41 chemistry (cross processed) to make negatives. It is probably the height of vanity to quote one's self in one's own blog, but since I have now referred to myself as "one" two times in this sentence, why not just go for it? From my first post using this film..."I knew that the film I had loaded in my 1967 Nikkormat FTn was expired 30 years ago, so there would be grain. I also knew that I was going to cross-process the film so there would be color and contrast shifts. I also knew that the film was tungsten balanced, so shooting in daylight would throw the color balance toward the 'cool' spectrum." And those characteristics pretty much drove my love for this film right down to the last frame. I have been looking for another 100' bulk roll of this, but it is getting scarce. I guess I will have to direct my x-pro love somewhere else, so this could be the very last post of slide dupe film images on this blog. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.

Fall Color

Okay, that title is a little misleading since I am only going to show black and white photos in this post. But I was out around the neighborhood shooting some colorful leaves the other day and the film I had loaded in my Pentax K1000 was my trusty Kodak Recordak Dacomatic. This film was intended for use in the Recordak Microfilmer.

I am old enough to have used microfilm and microfiche in college. It was just for copying text and half-tone images, so really it was just a high contrast medium, not intended for pictorial use at all. There was no need for it to be even panchromatic (sensitive to all visible wavelengths of light), so it was orthochromatic (sensitive to the blue/uv end of the spectrum). That means that red things tend to be dark, even black when photographed with this film. So I had this in mind when I went out for my walk. There aren't many colorful trees here in San Diego, but one that does turn a nice color is the liquidambar tree. The leaves turn a deep red color from November throughout the winter. If there isn't much wind or rain, many leaves stay on the tree. So I decided to try a few shots of these red leaves using my orthochromatic (red insensitive) film. I got pretty much what I thought I would... some very dark colored leaves with good detail. I developed the film in X-tol diluted around 1+3 for 11 minutes with agitation every 30 sec. The film was exposed at EI 100 which is a little fast for this, especially with red subjects, but I still got some decent images.

This last one is of a red Christmas Cactus with some water drops. The red subject with this film becomes pretty abstract, which I often like.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip down 'Orthochromatic Lane'. Expired microfilm is a fun change of pace for people who like black and white images, but are a little bored with the usual offerings of Tri-X and FP5. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!

LC-69 Process Film

What's that?? You've never heard of LC-69 film? Well apparently, not many other people have either. I certainly never had until I was given a very generous gift of a Pentax K1000 with a few lenses, filters, and not surprisingly, an old roll of film forgotten in the bottom of the bag. The canister said "Images Professional Color Print Film". Then it had three little boxes where you would put a check mark next to the speed at which you shot the film, 100, 200 or 400. then there was a mysterious marking, "Process LC-69". What sort of color print film was this? Well, straight to the Googlz I went and oddly, there was very little to be found about this beast. What I did find was not very informative as far as how to process it. So, I figured, what the heck... shoot it at iso 100 and process it in C-41 at room temp and see what you get. Worst case, I would have wasted some time on murky brown images. I did learn that this film was used by the mail order places like Seattle Film Works where you would mail them your film, pay for processing and they would send you replacement film for free. I also read somewhere that there was rem-jet on these films, but more about that later.

The Pentax had been stored for quite some time, but it was in a bag with silicone packs, so I figured it was probably servicable as far as shutter speeds go. Heck, the battery that powers the meter is still holding a charge! Anyway, I went down to the lovely Balboa park on a sunny December morning (yes, most December mornings are sunny here in San Diego) to meet some friends from work. We were going to do a photo walk for a couple of hours and I was heading the charge. Of course everyone else was shooting nice digital cameras, both SLRs and mirrorless. I shot up the LC-69 film and some Dacomatic copy film as well as a roll of Acros in my Bronica S2a. But you are here to read about the LC-69, right?

I decided that I would follow a procedure outlined by Reinhold of Caffenol.org fame whereby regular C-41 chemicals are used at room temperature instead of the usual 102F. I figured that would be more gentle on the emulsion if this happened to be a sensitive film. So the temperature in my house was about 70F and Reinhold's calculations said that I would need 17 minutes in the developer. That seemed like a long time, but I'm all about the trust. So 17 minutes with 4 inversions every 30 seconds passed. I did a strip test on the leader in the Blix and it looked like it cleared in about 3 minutes, so the usual 6.5 minutes in the Blix was going to work. It didn't look to me like there was any rem-jet on the leader after the blix test, but I did a 1 minute soak and agitate in some Borax at the end of the Blix cycle. Nothing really came off, so I think that part was erroneous.

The scans look like regular expired cross processed slide film. Nothing surprising or extra special about the LC-69 film. Sorry, that's anti-climactic, I know. But here are some nice pictures for you to look at.