Hard Times

When photographers mention frugality or a budget approach to their craft, the conversation inevitably revolves around low-cost cameras, the Lomography Sprocket Rocket springs to mind here, or budget, low-cost film stock. Even when it comes to low-cost cameras, there are those who will search out a charity shop bargain and make use of that.

All of these things are valid. Reducing the cost of photography, especially during the current cost-of-living crisis in the UK, is becoming more and more important to photographers.

I understand the mindset of buying the best camera you can for the little amount of money you have available and taking your photographs with that. A nice SLR, even with a so-called "kit" lens, will take some lovely photographs. Sometimes, using what you have to hand is better than not getting out at all.

One of the things that hardly ever gets discussed when talking about budget film photography is how to save money on developing chemicals. I understand that photographers want to get good results and that they believe this is an area where saving money is a false economy.

However, I have a different point of view.

I have mentioned before that I am a user of Ilford PQ Universal developer. I think the clue is in the name. It's a universal developer.

The chemistry behind PQ Universal has a history that goes back to a company called May & Baker, who sold a related developer under the trade name of Suprol.

Suprol was marketed by May & Baker primarily as a paper developer, but the story doesn't end there. May & Baker were a major photographic-chemical manufacturer, and their technical literature covered considerably more than simply developing prints. Suprol was used in technical photography and, according to recollections from photographers who worked with the product, in commercial black-and-white film processing as well.

There is an interesting historical point here. Suprol wasn't simply something that photographers experimented with in their darkrooms. May & Baker supplied photographic chemistry to the professional processing industry, where developers needed to be capable of dealing with a range of films and processing conditions. There was no practical option of saying, 'Sorry, we only develop sheet film in this.'

Ilford's modern documentation takes a much more cautious position with PQ Universal, specifically recommending it for technical and sheet films while saying not to use it for general-purpose 35mm and roll film. That's their recommendation and it's perfectly legitimate. But 'not recommended' isn't the same thing as 'doesn't work'. So the absence of the 1+29 and 1+39 dilutions from Ilford's current recommendations simply suggests, to me at least, that Ilford's documentation is not incorrect as much as incomplete.

My own experience would suggest that the distinction matters. At 1+29, PQ Universal produces perfectly good negatives from 35mm film, and I've got the negatives to prove it.

If May & Baker's own technical literature was prepared for different forms of photographic processing, and Suprol could be used at different dilutions for different applications, then the modern idea that using a paper developer for film is somehow photographic sacrilege starts to look rather silly.

There is the further dilution of 1+39. This dilution wasn't simply an internet-era experiment. There are recollections from photographers familiar with the original May & Baker documentation that Suprol was used at 1+39 for fine-grain film processing.

I use PQ Universal at a dilution of 1+29. My negatives are lovely, fine grain examples.

At a dilution of 1+29, one litre of PQ Universal makes 30 litres of working solution. I use 350ml for a 35mm film, which means I can get around 85 films from a litre of concentrate. That works out at about 18p per film at £15 a litre. And because I use it as a one-shot developer, every film gets fresh developer and is processed in exactly the same way.

And here is the real cost saving: I don't buy Ilford PQ Universal. There is a company called Fotospeed who produce a product called PD 5. I phoned them and asked if I could use PD 5 in the same way as PQ Universal, and they confirmed that it was a suitable alternative to Ilford PQ Universal.

It's a fiver cheaper than Ilford's product, hence my £15 a litre cost. The Ilford product costs nearer £20 per litre. In fairness to Ilford, that still only makes the cost per film around 23p when developing at 1+29.

To contrast with the standard developer from Ilford, their ID-11 product will develop 10 films per litre when the stock solution is reused. At a tenner a pack, that's a quid a roll! And to get the full 10 rolls you have to increase the development time after each successive film.

I don't keep the PD 5 as one large litre bottle once I've opened it, either. I decant each litre into four 250ml bottles. Before capping them, I give each bottle a small puff of butane into the top. Butane is heavier than air, so it sits above the developer and helps prevent oxygen getting to the concentrate and oxidising it. That way, I'm only exposing 250ml of developer to the air each time I open a bottle.

Fotospeed are worth checking out because their FX30 fixer is cheaper than premium-badged alternatives and lasts well. I make up a fresh litre of diluted FX30 at 1+4 and check the time it takes to clear the film. This is usually around 30 seconds. When this changes to 2.5 minutes, I change the fixer, given that the typical MDC fixer time is 5 minutes, and my rule is that fixing time should be double the clearing time.

Reusing fixer like this also saves money and, in my experience, doesn't compromise quality.

Frugal photography doesn't have to mean cutting corners. Sometimes it simply means understanding your materials well enough not to throw perfectly usable chemistry down the sink.

*Note, the photographs shown in this blog post were taken by me and developed in PD 5 at 1+29.

2 Person Icon and some fruit

When you venture out with your Holga, set to 645, you definitely have to accept a lack of control and lean into the unpredictable nature of the camera and lens.

However, every now and again, the universe aligns just so and the unpredictable and inconsistent Holga produces a decent negative amongst the rest.

I like this photograph because the light is hitting the fruit and veg on the stand outside the greengrocer's shop just right. The shadows surrounding the produce have some detail, but also serve as a frame for the subject.

The focus is spot on and was set using the two-person icon.

A decent photo from a walk roll.

Four More Chances

When I got my first Holga all those years ago, the camera was a Holga 120S. It was supplied with a 645 mask, and the door on the back that lets you choose between using 12 exposures for 6x6 and 16 exposures for 645 had been glued to 645.

The rumour goes that the designer wasn't happy with the performance at 6x6, due to the heavy vignette, and so demanded that the factory leave out the 6x6 mask and glue the number door at 645. I don't know if this is true, but if it is, it was a sensible move for general photography.

Today, most people will want the Holga look: the heavy vignette, the weird out-of-focus areas of the photograph and the less-than-sharp focus. So they all use the 6x6 format, and there aren't many people who use 645.

Recently, I've given it a go.

Aside from the fact that the 645 mode makes the normal photograph portrait orientation, and for landscape you have to turn the camera through 90 degrees, the 645 mode works really well.

I rather like it.

You get four more exposures per roll, which allows for a better choice of negatives when the film is finally developed. And with a Holga, those extra frames can really make a difference.

The photograph below was taken in 645 mode, and I think it has worked brilliantly.

It also occurred to me that the 645 format actually suits some subjects rather well. The portrait orientation gives a photograph somewhere to lead the eye, and that seems to work naturally with this sort of close-up subject.

I set the camera's zone focus to the one-person icon, which is 3 feet or 1 metre, and didn't bother framing too carefully because, at such a short distance, it's not that critical.

The A on the sign is out of focus, while the S and E are correctly focused — or at least as correctly focused as anything ever is with a Holga.

But isn't that the idea?

To embrace uncertainty, lean into the unpredictable and maybe, just maybe, have a photograph that works despite its humble origins?

 

A Gift to my Future Self.

Sometimes the only thing to do is grab a Holga and go for a walk.

I needed to get out of the house. I'd been working on the laptop all blooming day and just needed to be outside. When this happens, the likelihood of returning with a roll of portfolio-standard pictures is pretty remote, but that's OK.

You can go out and just snap the things you notice. The things that catch your eye. There doesn't have to be a plan, a project or even a particularly good reason for taking the photograph.

I loaded my Holga with a roll of Kentmere Pan 100 and headed out.

I'd configured the Holga for 645 mode, which meant I had 16 frames available to me. My Holga has been modified to have a genuine f/10 aperture. I'd also taped a yellow filter to the lens and screwed a lens hood into the filter.

My meter was suggesting 1/40th of a second at f/10. Add in the filter factor and the ISO 100 film really needed to be treated as though it were around ISO 200.

More accurately, given the very limited parameters you're stuck with on a Holga, the film needed a little more development than normal.

So I was out for nearly two hours and eventually returned home with a roll of film on which every frame had been exposed.

All 16 of them.

That's a small victory in itself.

This frame, in my opinion, was the best of the 16. It was the final frame on the roll and was little more than a grab shot.

Technically, it isn't perfect. But it has something else.

It has atmosphere.

I returned home looking forward to processing the film, and that's one of the great benefits of shooting film. You're gifting your future self a surprise.

You don't know exactly what you've got until you develop it.

Sometimes, that surprise is a technically imperfect photograph that somehow says more than you'd have imagined. 

And that is a win in my book.

Film photography, a new approach.

I use a hybrid approach to film photography. I shoot film in a camera, develop the film myself and then, when the negatives are dry, I scan the negatives using a DSLR, an led light pad and a Pixl-ator. 

That work flow allows an accurate copy of the physical negative to be made in the digital environment. 

Further processing can take place in a photo editing suite to convert the negative to a positive and make it look like a photo.

Up to now I've been happy with the workflow and if a negative isn't what I'd hoped then, that's the unpredictability of film photography isn't it?

Turns out that this isn't the case.

So I've sought some help in improving my technique.

Last weekend I went on a day trip and so I took my Nikon F75 loaded with a roll of FP4 Plus.

Given the dreadful conditions, the incessant rain that was falling with no sign of stopping, I dialed in -1 exposure compensation to shoot the film at an effective ISO 250. 

The camera sets the film ISO using DX encoding on the film cartridge. So the only way to change the effective ISO is to dial in exposure compensation.

Anyway I shot the film on my day out, returned home and developed the film, ensuring the development time was adjusted to take into account the reduced time that the film was exposed at.

After the film was hung to dry and then sleeved, I left the "scanning" for a day when I could give the job my full attention.

That day was Bank Holiday Monday.

So I started on with the scanning work. I set my DSLR on to a tripod and setup the Pixl-ator.

So the new process.

The Camera will need to be configured to capture RAW files and the shutter needs to be set to delay by 2 seconds. That way everything has two seconds to settle before the shutter is fired. On my camera there are beeps during the countdown.

When you have the negative in the holder, configure the camera for manual exposure, an ISO of 100 and set the aperture to f5.6. To configure the exposure, you need to switch to "live view" and then bring up the histogram for the live view. Adjust the shutter speed until the histogram is just shy of the right hand side. It's best for the histogram to be just short of the right hand side rather than up against it, which could cause clipping.

Now roughly frame the negative so that it fills as much of the DSLR frame as possible but leave a small border.

Now to focus. Switch the lens, I use a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, to manual focus on the lens itself. Now on the live view on the camera zoom in to 10x so that you can see the grain of the film. Now adjust the focus so that the grain is sharp. Thats the focus locked in. Zoom out again so you can see the whole negative.

Frame the negative making final adjustments. 

Take a photo of the negative.

Review the photo on the camera and review it's histogram.

Before continuing to scan the rest of the roll, it's worth transferring the photo to the laptop to review it on a bigger screen and preferably in a RAW converter.

Thats the basics of the improvements to my scanning technique, And I'm really please with the results.

Fire, Fire!

I had the opportunity recently to go to a Music and Motorcycle Rally near Stonehenge in Wiltshire. I took lots of photographs of the wonderful array of bikes on display. The amount of time, skill and patience that people put into their machines is astonishing, although perhaps not surprising. These are skilled machinists, fabricators and welders, and their bikes are a reflection of their skills and their owners.

I'll be posting more photographs through the coming week.

But for this post I wanted to show a photograph of something that simply caught my eye.

I was sitting at a communal table with a group of other like-minded motorbike enthusiasts. The organisers turned out to be a motorcycle club from Wiltshire, and large canvas roofs had been erected to provide shelter, with tables underneath.

Bikers are an interesting bunch. They take danger and laugh in its face. Riding a motorbike leaves you remarkably vulnerable when things go wrong, and the SMIDSY (Sorry Mate, I Didn't See You) is always a possibility as is The Song of the Sausage Creature, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote.

Anyway, lots of bikers still smoke.

Given that the statistics would have you believing you're unlikely to reach forty if you ride a motorbike, a few cigarettes probably aren't going to make much difference.

So the organisers had put little fire buckets on each table, half-filled with sand, for cigarette butts.

And that's what caught my eye.

I had the LC-A with me. I set the zone focus to 0.8m, put the camera down on the table and took the photograph.

There was no careful framing or looking through the viewfinder. There was no guarantee that I had even got the focus right,  but it was worth a try.

And I rather like the resulting photograph.

 

Mad Max Vibes

There is something quite interesting about the amount of work, the skills and the creativity of bikers on the custom motorcycle scene.

This trike was ridden to the bike rally by someone who has clearly spent a fair amount of time watching Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior. 

It's the little details that caught my eye. 

The trike rear subframe had been fabricated from scratch buy someone who knew what they were doing, the welds were superb, suggesting a skilled welder and the whole affair looked like it had always been a trike. There was nothing about it that immediately suggested a motorcycle that had simply been converted. 

The Hannibal Lector mask on the handlebars and the skulls add to the vibe.

The army surplus ammo boxes on the back, give the whole bike an authenticity that shouts post apocalyptic in a way that simply bolting on a bunch of shiny parts could never achieve.

Finally the knobbly tyres set the whole bike off.

I took this at a bike and music rally using my LC-A, with the focus zone set to 1.5 meters. 

I'm always astonished that such a low tech camera can accomplish excellent results in difficult conditions.  It was a blisteringly hot sunny day with no shade and I think the little Soviet built camera did a fantastic job of capturing the moment in those conditions.

Most importantly, it captured what caught my eye in the first place.

I am very pleased with this one.