120 film fact

Did you know that 120 film used to be called cartridge film on account of the fact that the roll of film looked similar to a shotgun cartridge? Kodak films always used a Kodak Yellow backing paper. You can kind of see what they were getting at.

Polaroid Colour film is the same cost as Polaroid black and white film.

There is no cost penalty for shooting colour film when using a Polaroid  camera. It's odd because every other form of photography where physical media is used, it is lower cost to purchase film for black and white.

Indeed at the moment a roll of Lomography Colour 400 film is £8.00 for a roll of 120, whereas a roll of Ilford FP4 Plus is £5.00. The gap is even bigger when you look at Kodak. A roll of Kodak Portra 400 is £13.50.

When you buy Polaroid film from Polaroid in Holland, the cost is identical for Black and White and Colour film.  Each film pack is £17.99, regardless of B&W or Colour.

The same is true of Instax films from Fujifilm. The B&W packs are the same price as colour.

This is great news for instant film shooters.

I'm looking forward to getting my LomoGraflok back for my Chroma Camera 4x5 so that I can shoot some Instax Wide film.

I do have a Polaroid SX-70 that I have had refurbished, but my other half has nicked it from me.

It's a funny world.

developer hack

The do it yourself method of photography is very rewarding.  The advent of 3d printing has meant that a camera can be cobbled together out of bits and pieces that others are selling. If course these cameras lack some of the niceties like accurate focusing,  accurate framing and often use older styles of film with limited capacity for photos. A 6x7 roll film back allows 10 pictures on a roll of 120. That's not many.

One of the things that can be done  yourself is making your own developer.  There are lots of recipes for caffenol which works a treat.

I've been considering making the Kodak developer D23. This is made with 2 ingredients plus distilled water. Ansel Adams used Kodak D23 formula to develop his famous photo taken on Isopan film.

The recipe is

7.5 g of Metol

100g of Sodium Sulphite 

1 litre of distilled water.

I ordered the chemicals from firstcall photographic (https://www.firstcall-photographic.co.uk/) and they have arrived today.

So I've now actually made my very first batch of Kodak D-23 developer.  I'm looking forward to seeing what this developer will do for my photographs.

It was so easy to make the developer.

The method for making the developer is as follows

1. Heat 600ml water to 52 Celcius
2. Add a pinch of sodium sulphite to the water
3. Stir until the sodium sulphite has completely dissolved
4. Add Metol to the water
5. Stir until the Metol has completely dissolved
6. Add The remainder of the sodium sulphite
7. Stir until the sodium sulphite has completely dissolved
8. Top up with cool water to 1 litre

It is important to ensure that each addition of chemicals is in the order shown and that the powder has completely dissolved before adding the next chemical.

There you are a simple, low cost and more eco friendly developer that can be made at home.

This picture was taken on Fomapan 400 rated at EI 800 and developed in Rodinal 1+50 for 19 minutes

A time and developer saving hack

 N.B. I don't claim to have originated this hack and to some this is obvious, however it's a great way to cut down on time and chemicals used when developing 120 roll film in a Paterson Super system 4 development tank.

The bottom of the Paterson tank states how much liquid is required to develop a film. 

290 ml for 35mm film

370ml for 127 film

500ml for 120/220 film

The interesting bit is the 120/220 comment.  What that tells me is that each spiral, that is provided by Paterson, can hold either a 120 roll film or a 220 roll film.

220 roll film was a hack carried out by film manufacturers to allow photographers more photos per roll and still use the film in existing cameras. To do this they doubled the length of the film.  However when rolled onto a standard 120 spool, complete with full length backing paper, the diameter of the roll exceeded the flange on each end of the spool.  This flange prevents light from spoiling the film through the end of the roll.  Making the flange bigger would mean that the spool wouldn't fit existing cameras.  The hack that they came up with was to provide only enough backing paper to cover each end of the film for daylight loading and unloading but leaving the center length of film with no backing paper.

This being the case, two rolls of 120 will fit onto a standard Paterson spiral.  Therefore for 500 ml of developer you can develop 2 rolls of 120 film.  A 50% saving in chemical.  Also developing 2 rolls of 120 film at once cuts down time by 50%. Neat eh?

So how do you get 2 rolls onto the spiral.  I like to do the following.

1) Load the first roll of 120 film onto the spiral as normal.

2) When you get to the end of the film you will notice that the film is attached to the backing paper using masking tape.

3) Very carefully peel the masking tape off of the backing paper and continue to load the film onto the spiral until the end to which the tape is attached goes past the loading gate.

4) At this point start loading the second 120 roll by attaching it to the masking tape (sticky side will be towards you).

5) Continue to load the second 120 roll onto the spiral and you will find it all fits on.

I've used this method a lot and I'm happy that it works.

BTW when loading 120 film on a warm day pop the film and spiral into the fridge for half an hour or so. The gelatin becomes very sticky in warm weather and makes loading the spiral a nightmare. cooling it all down really helps.