Dress Like Your Grandpa

The second photo in the series is of a few of my clothing items. Now keep in mind that I am not a 'hipster', nor am I trying intentionally to be an oddball attention seeker by dressing weird. But I do strive to have some style. I think in this age when you can show up at an upscale restaurant in torn jeans, a t-shirt with some snarky slogan and a pair of flip-flops that it shows some dignity and self-respect to dress up a little. In some cases it does bring attention, but in my experience it is invariably positive and complimentary. In fact just today I was complimented 3 times on my bowtie at church. People like it because it says that I think the people I am around are worth a little more effort than just pulling on a sweatshirt. Our grandfathers did this (mine was born in 1922). They wore hats for pragmatic as well as reasons of style. Living in So. Cal. I frequently am thankful for a brimmed hat to keep the sun out of my eyes. I have short hair, so it prevents my head from getting sunburned and when the weather cools off, I appreciate the warmth of some wool covering my cranium. Trilby, bowler, homberg, pork pie, panama, I don't care. Put it on with a bit of a nasty angle and style is yours.

Here is my grandpa on the right with his two sisters and his mom and dad. He looks maybe 17 or 18 in this picture. Look at those hats! Looking sharp Gramps!

My point here is that we don't have to be so casual all the time. It's okay to put on a nice gingham shirt, learn to tie a bowtie, polish up the brogues and top it off with a stylish lid. Make some effort. The people around you will notice and appreciate it and you will feel better in your own skin. You might even see some of your friends start to step up their style game.

The photo was taken with the following:

• Standard Cameras 4x5 1.0
• CatLabs XFilm 80 pulled to 25
• My-Tol 1:1 x 8.5 minutes

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.

Moving Forward in Reverse

If you read my article on lumen printing, this is sort of an addendum or appendix or epilogue or sequel. I had the paper cut, but for the lumen prints, I had cut it in sort of dim diffuse room light, so those pieces are really only good for lumen printing since they are a bit exposed already. So I went and cut some more 8x10 Agfa Multicontrast paper under my red led headlamp (hung about 30" above the work surface). Those pieces went directly into film holders. I had read about reversal processing film a while back (reversal processing is how slides or transparencies are made) and was sort of interested, but the bleach put me off. Most reversal process bleach is made with dichromate or permanganate compounds which are pretty toxic and best avoided if possible. So I shelved the idea of diy reversal. Then I read an interesting article about a fellow who made a working reversal bleach with just household hydrogen peroxide and lemon juice (the active ingredient there being citric acid). WHAT!? This I've got to try. I didn't have any film ready to develop, so why not try with the papers? It's more or less the same emulsion, just with a different base and in the case of RC paper like mine, a different top coat. What the heck, let's just experiment!. The article called for caffenol for the development steps, but I didn't have any of that ready to go. I did have some homemade my-tol(X-Tol knock-off), so I figured I'd just use that at stock concentration and see what happens. I read on APUG that you can develop paper with X-Tol stock for about 5 minutes, so that's where I started. Here is an overview of the process I used (note, I used 9g/L dry citric acid in place of lemon juice):

>

STEP	TIME
1st developer (my-tol)	5 min
Wash	5 min
Bleach (cit. acid-hydrogen)	11:30 min
Wash	5 min
Re-exposure 300W at 1 meter	2:30 min
2nd developer (my-tol)	5 min
Wash	5 min
Fixer	5 min
Final Wash	5 min
Wetting agent	2

The first sheet I did with straight stock my-tol for 5 min in both development steps. Here it is. This is a straight color scan without any added colors, curves or contrast.

A couple of notes worth making here... I was tray developing under red light so I could see what was going on. After a couple of minutes in the first developer, the paper looked completely black. I couldn't see any image at all. I was a little worried, but I kept going because I knew that this was not necessarily an indication of failure yet. The bleach brought out a little bit of an image. I could just make out some light areas. Once I turned on the room lights for the re-exposure step, I could tell that the image was there still. It looked bad and was very low contrast. I thought, "well I guess I'll have to correct it in post." That's not what I was hoping for with this process, but sometimes that's all you get. But then I poured in the 2nd developer (same developer as I used in the first developer step) and there was the image, nice and crisp and contrasty in tan and deep black. That is when I got excited. The fixer didn't change the image since there really isn't any undeveloped silver left at this point.

The next set of exposures I did with 1:1 my-tol, thinking that I might lower the contrast a bit. Unfortunately, I was tray developing these together in an under-sized tray and so there are artifacts where the sheets contacted each other. But these are experiments, not art. What I was trying to see was whether the dilute developer would lower contrast. I don't think it did. Maybe more dilution or a different type of developer (vit. C based like caffenol or parodinal) would work. Maybe something as simple as preflashing the paper would work. These are all variables that can be explored.

So there you go. I think I really like this process. If anyone else has experience and wants to share some tips, please do!