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.

To correct or not to correct...

While driving home from a high school football game last Oct, we happened across North Algodones Dunes Wilderness Area. There was a pull-out, so I thought I might get a few snaps of the place. I think it would be worth going back at a better time of day or maybe pre-dawn and just sit and see what the light does. Anyway, I had Some Ektachrome Slide Dupe film loaded in my Fed-3 and I just snapped a few shots off casually. I developed the film a couple of months later and was in a bit of a rush when I decided to scan the negatives. So I just put them on the scanner and let the auto settings do their magic. Well a couple of things happened. First, I hand wound the film into an old 35mm canister and as it turns out, the light seal was imperfect, so there were some light leaks on the film. Some shots had worse streaks than others and so this in turn caused the scanner to make different decisions about what was 'white' in each frame. So when I came back to view the photos, these shots of the dunes, while taken at the same time in the same place, were different colors. It looked like this.

You can see that the center one doesn't have a light leak in it and it looks more 'true' to the color of sand (mid-day-ish). The other two got shifted with more red and blue. I thought this was sort of an 'interesting' outcome of some random inputs, but I wondered what the same triptych would look like with the color balance corrected so they all looked alike. So I went about rescanning them, using the RGB levels of the middle photo to adjust the other two manually. I do my scanning with the Epson Perfection V600 flatbed scanner and the Epson Scan software that comes with it. It is easy to use and produces results acceptable for sharing online which is about 95% of what I do with my photos. Here is the result of the adjusted photos (sorry about the dust, I didn't bother doing the dust spotting on the second scan).

I like this version, but not as much as I like the first one. That left me with a question though. Is it artistically honest to accept my scanner's decisions resulting in random changes to my images? Can I post those photos and tout their beauty when this was not my intention when I took them? I might just have to leave that one to the philosophers and accept the "happy accident" of light leaks and scanner color shifting. I like the results too much to delete them.

From Russia With Love

I might be in love. No, I’m not getting a mail-order bride. I am talking about the Jupiter-8 lens that was given to me recently. This is a copy of the venerable Zeiss Sonnar design. This design was patented in the 30’s and is still being produced by most major lens makers today! My copy was probably made in the 60’s, so the coatings are somewhat primitive, leaving it susceptible to flares. It is just something to be conscious of, not really a problem and sometimes flares can be used intentionally to add to a composition. This photo has a very subtle flare in the upper left corner, but I wouldn’t say it adds or detracts from the image (which is kind of boring to begin with). The lens was mounted on a Fed-3 which is also a copy of another German design, the Leica. This camera is built like a tank and just works every time I push the button.

I know the backlit dandelion has been done to death, but I thought I would do a little twist on it by shooting an unopened flower as the main subject and the ‘puffball’ as an out of focus element. The lens was wide open at f/2 and I may have missed focus by a centimeter or so. The film is expired Kodak Ektachrome Slide Duplicating film cross processed in Unicolor C-41 chems. The scan was done on an Epson V600 and dust spotting in PS. No other adjustments were applied.

Fresh or expired?

I use lots of different films. Mostly because I am cheap and will take just about anything I find at a bargain. So my photography doesn't really have a consistent "look". That bothers me sometimes and then not at other times. Today it isn't bothering me. I just got done scanning four rolls of film and so I am a little excited about what I got. Scanning film is on one hand really tedious, but on the other hand it's like being a kid again on Christmas morning. The first time I see the negatives in inverted color, I get that sort of 'awe' feeling inside. It is surprise and delight and relief all in one.

I had 3 rolls of 35mm film and one of 120. The 35mm was all Kodak Ektachrome Slide Duplicating Film that had expired back in 1981. The 120 was fresh Kodak Portra 160. I had developed them all in Unicolor C-41 chemistry which is 'right' for the Portra, but 'cross' for the Ektachrome. Read more of my Adventures in Cross Processing here. So why am I making yet another post about this technique with the same old film?? Well the point here is to compare fresh negative film with expired slide film using photos of the same subject(s). This isn't strictly scientific since the photos weren't taken at the same time of day or under any other strictly controlled conditions. If you want that level of technical correctness, you will have to look elsewhere. I do science for a living, so I'm in this for the fun of it. But it is worth a look just to compare.

First the photos on the fresh Portra 160. I used my Yashica Mat 124G to take these. This poor camera is barely clinging to life, but still takes pretty good photos.

Nice, huh? The colors are natural, the grain is quite fine. I could easily blow these up to 24x24 inches and hang them on my wall if I chose to. In short, it is everything we have come to expect from this exceptional film emulsion.

Next, the photos from my Chinon CP-5. This was the first time I had used this camera, and I am pretty pleased with the quality of the glass and the exposures all seem correct.

This film creates a (to my eye) VERY different look. The colors are shifted (even when 'corrected' by the scanner) and saturated a little bit. The grain is noticeable, but not obtrusive. I think it lends a bit of a painterly or 'pictorialist' quality to the photos. It is short of the 'hipster/lomography' look that I think has been a bit over-done (just my opinion).

The bottom line is that I like both sets of photos, but I slightly favor the Ektachrome. It's very subjective and my opinion is likely to flip flop over time. Whichever you like better, I hope you enjoy them and have fun shooting some expired slide film on your own sometime.

Landscape Details

Here are a few photos I took just around my workplace. The camera was my Yashica Electro 35 loaded with some expired Kodak Ektachrome Slide Duplicating Film. For these I used an EI of 100. These are pretty much straight off of the scanner with a little bit of dust spotting. Enjoy.

Sprockets!

This post will have nothing to do with Mike Meyers, other than to show the youngsters what enters my mind when I hear the word "Sprockets!"

What I really want to talk about is the practice of putting 35mm film into a camera of a larger format so that the film is exposed from edge to edge, and then scanning or printing that film from edge to edge so as to show the sprocket holes perforating the image.

Almost every camera has a 'mask'. This is a square or rectangular frame that sits in front of the film and blocks light from reaching some parts. In a standard 35mm camera, the mask is 36mm wide by 24mm high. That is what gives you that nice 2:3 aspect ratio. So when you take 35mm film and put it in a camera that has a larger mask, the top and bottom parts of the film are not blocked and so the image extends out to the edges.

In my case, I used a Kodak Brownie Fiesta camera. This was designed in the 50's to use 127 roll film and its mask is about 4x4cm square. That is more than enough to expose the entire 35mm height of 35mm film. The final image will then be 35mm high and 40mm wide, almost square. So I measured the length of a standard 127 roll of film and cut a piece of string that long. Then I taped it down to the counter in my darkroom (bathroom). Boom, boom, out go the lights and out comes my 100ft roll of Kodak Ektachrome Slide Duplicating Film. I roll out a piece the right length, measuring it against the string on the counter which I can feel in the dark. Now is the tricky part. I have to tape the film to the middle of the backing paper and I have to do it so that the edges of the film are parallel to the edges of the backing paper... in the dark. It took a few tries, but eventually, it 'felt' like I had it all pretty close. There were creases in the backing paper where the film started, so I was able to get it easily to the right place longitudinally. So I roll up the paper and film on a 127 spool and emerge into the light and load it into the camera.

Now the Brownie line of cameras are very simple. They have fixed focus plastic meniscus lenses, a single shutter speed and usually just one or two apertures to choose from. I think they were made with 50 - 100 speed film in mind. So even though this film is probably closer to iso 25, I figured the latitude of the C-41 process would compensate and I would get images, even if the quality was sub-optimal. It's all about experimentation, right? Nobody makes anything awesome by doing what everyone else does. Ok, that's not exactly true, but it sounded sort of inspirational in my head. Anyway, here are a couple more "Sprockets!" images from my Brownie. Enjoy.

Summer in December

Here in San Diego, we don't get a lot of variety in the weather department. Some people say we have "perfect" weather, but I would beg to differ. I grew up in E. Washington where we had four very distinct seasons. Even within a season, the weather would vary and you could have warm winter days or cool, rainy summer days. I have heard it said that San Diego has two seasons... warm Summer and hot Summer. We are now in the midst of warm Summer where the daytime temps are in the 70's and the sun is shining. I took the week off of work for Christmas and so I have had time during the day to go out and walk around the neighborhood, seeing things that normally happen when I am at work. One of these things is that the landscapers are hard at work keeping things tidy and growing. I took these two photos near where one guy was working. He probably thought I was crazy, taking photos of such mundane things. Why would anyone want a picture of this stuff? I guess that is where 'taste' comes in. I like photos of the ordinary, every day stuff that surrounds us. Also, having an idea of what the final image will look like helps. 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. All of these things were in mind when I composed these shots. So I had a feeling that this 'mundane' subject would be helped out by all of the stuff going on with the film itself. I could have also done other things in PhotoShop after scanning the negatives, but I chose not to do that. These are pretty much straight off the scanner with a little dust spotting. I think they are interesting, especially the shot of the rakes. Let me know what you think.