Month: October 2021

Semi-stand Development with Kodak HC-110 Black and White Film Developer

Recently I’ve developed a few rolls of Arista Premium 400 (rebranded Tri-X) that I shot in 2016 and put away on shelf without freezing. The expiration date of the films is 2013 — they had always been frozen before I shot them.

I tried normal development for several rolls and pull development two rolls (just curious) in the past week but the results were just “boring” (a.k.a. normal). So yesterday I decided to experiment stand development with HC-110.

It has been well established that one roll of 36 exp 35mm film requires minimal 3ml HC-110 syrup for one shot development. Typically, I used dilution H and made 480ml developer solution from 7.5ml syrup. This solution allowed me to develop two rolls of 36 exp 35mm film in a 500ml stainless steel tank. It had worked very well in the past.

Call me cheap, I have always been wondering whether it is possible to use even less syrup, which would cut my negligible cost on the developer even further! I know many of you probably are already rolling your eyes at me. That’s OK. Heck, even if it fails, it’s just a small lesson of don’t be cheap!

The true reason to use even less syrup is to make further dilution and still fit into the 500ml stainless steel tank. So after researching a lot online with no conclusive result, I decided to conduct an experiment.

I diluted 5ml syrup into 500ml developer AND soaked two rolls of 36 exp 35mm films. The temperature at the beginning of the development was 70F. After initial agitation of 30 seconds, I put the tank in the refrigerator for 40 minutes. At 20 minutes mark, I gently agitated the tank twice.

The result floors me! The contrast, the well-controlled highlight, the deep shadow, and the grain are among the best I’ve ever got out of Tri-X. The pictures really shine in front of the other rolls developed last week. The only flaw that I can see is some small highlight at the edge of some pictures, which looks like a bit light leak. I got this similar issue a few years ago when I tried stand development with Rodinal. It is due to inadequate agitation. Agitating the development tank for one minute at the beginning of the development process largely eliminated this problem.

At this moment, it is hard to say whether it’s because the subjects of these two rolls were well thought through to make the pictures stand out, or the development method is the magic bullet. But I will definitely try this method again — still have several rolls of Agfa APX 100 and Plus-X to go!

Revealing First Large Format (4×5) Photo

Twenty years ago, before I purchased my first SLR camera, Canon Rebel 2000, an old friend, my college roommate had pointed me an humorous online article [1] about the danger of entering into photography — it will be a long and costly journey. At the moment, I didn’t think too much about the warning signs ahead of me. But today, I come to report that everything told in that article became true.

If there is one takeaway in the article that has left the deepest impression to me, it is the size of the photographic negative decides the most about image quality. In order to pursue better image quality, starting from 35mm film camera, I’ve come through Xpan, 645, and 66 medium format cameras. But there is always a dream hidden in my heart — large format.

Large format is the ultimate crown jewelry. After two decades of photography, I finally step into this world, and purchased my first large format camera, the Intrepid Mark IV 4×5 field camera. I used it once during the recent trip to Eastern Sierra, and took the picture, North Lake Morning Reflection, with two sheets of Ilford Delta 100 4×5 black and white film. The result is phenomenon — the amount of details captured by this primitive camera far exceeds the pictures made by state-of-the-art Nikon D850 digital SLR camera. Please forgive the small picture shared here. It does not do justification to the real image.

[1] https://www3.xitek.com/papers/viewfinder/viewfinder1.htm

Chinese Camp

Chinese camp, once a booming town with over 10,000 residents during the Gold Rush, is a small community today next to Highway 120, near the junction of Highway 120 and 49. We’ve passed by it numerous times but never gave a second thought about it. On the way back from Eastern Sierra two weeks ago, when spotting the sign of it, the impulsive nerve hit us. So we decided to have quick stop to explore it.

It turned out that, to this day, the community is having only about 120 residents, of which most are farmers. No gold is mined today. It still has a USPS office. However, the Main Street is largely abandoned, with deserted buildings slowly turning into ruins. The owner of the Chinese Camp Store & Tavern was kind to give us a brief history lesson of the town.

All photos here were taken with Fomapan 100 B&W films, which seem to be an appropriate media to record this out-of-fashion place.

An efficient workflow to scan Xpan panoramic negatives

Being an Xpan user for a long time, scanning Xpan negatives efficiently without sacrificing quality has always remained a pain point to me.

In the past, I used a Nikon Coolscan 9000ED scanner with a glass holder to scan three Xpan negatives in a batch. The negatives were carefully cut into short strips of three pictures, and positioned parallel into the glass holder. For the first negative, I previewed in Vuescan, and selected an area slightly larger than the image. Hit the Scan button to scan the first picture, keep the Frame number to 1 with the Frame offset 66 for the second picture, and change Frame number to 2 with Frame offset 49 for the third picture. Scanning with Nikon 9000ED was painfully slow. And often I had to deal with Newton rings caused by the glass filter. The process always made me think twice before taking pictures with Xpan.

On the other side, scanning regular 35mm negatives with Nikon Coolscan 5000ED scanner has always been a joy. 5000ED produces high-quality scans with up to 4000dpi and ICE, the same as 9000ED scanner. With an SA-30 holder (actually modified SA-21 holder), I was able to scan the entire roll in one batch, with a single press of the Scan button in Vuescan. Of course it would take an hour to finish the task, but it did not require my attention at all.

Unfortunately, Nikon Coolscan 5000ED does not support Xpan format. Many creative minds have come up with various approaches to scan Xpan negatives in two passes (e.g., [1], and [2]). However, often such approaches require a lot of manual intervention during scan, or was not entirely clear about their details.

So here is a workflow I figured out recently. It exploits the SA-30 holder to scan a whole roll of Xpan negatives in a batch, with minimal user intervention. It does two passes to scan the Xpan negatives, and requires software stitch after the scan. But it is a huge improvement compared to Coolscan 8000ED/9000ED workflow.

  1. Feed Xpan negative to Nikon SA-30 film holder on a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED scanner.
  2. Launch Vuescan, click Input tab, and turn off Frame alignment.
  3. Click Preview button to get the preview of the first picture. Set appropriate Frame offset so that the beginning edge of the first picture is close to the edge of the scanning area.
  4. Click Crop tab, set manual crop size, making sure that the crop area covers the full length of the scanning area.
  5. Adjust all other settings as your wish.
  6. In Input tab, check Lock exposure.
  7. In input tab, set Frame spacing to 66.500. This is arguably the most important parameter to set!
  8. Turn on Batch scan, and press Scan button to scan the whole roll for the first pass.
  9. Increase Frame offset from its old value by 29.5. For example, if the old Frame offset is 3, you should change it to 32.5 (= 29.5 + 3).
  10. Set Frame number to 1, and press Scan button to scan the whole roll for the second pass.

That’s it. You will get two batches of images that are ready to be stitched in software. After saving the settings to a Vuescan profile, the only thing you need to do is to adjust the Frame offset after the preview.

SA-30 holder is hard to find on the market. Fortunately, there is an easy hack to turn a regular SA-21 holder into an SA-30 [3].

I hope this will not further push up the now already hefty price of Nikon Coolscan 5000ED and Xpan cameras. But who knows?

[1] https://www.stockholmviews.com/xpan-scanning/index.html
[2] https://www.l-camera-forum.com/topic…coolscan-5000/
[3] http://www.helmut-stoepfgeshoff.de/sa21-sa30e.html