Galleries

Old Camera – Funky Light

An afternoon stroll through Philly’s Christmas Village with a couple rolls of black and film.

Yashica D TLR loaded with 120 format Ilford Delta100
Hand processed in Perceptol. Scanned at Halide Project.

Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100
Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100
Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100
Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100
Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100
Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100
Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100
Philly Xmass Village – Film Scans: Yashica D Ilford Delta 100

Kodak DDX 200

Every once in a while I get suckered into trying out a new – or at least new to me – film stock. Pulled in with the promise of ‘unleashing my full creative potential’ or interrogating a new ‘look’. Afterwards I always feel a little used lol. I’m thinking that part of the appeal is people looking for in camera effects or a ‘signature look’, a film that renders like its been through an IG filter (looking at you Pheonix200 lolz). Which is an interesting exercise but IMO always ends up being limited by the character of the emulsion. If I want a ‘filmic’ image I’ll just shoot with my Fuji digital.

So I bought 2 rolls of Kodak DDX, a re-rolled monochrome cinema film that seems to have been around for a while. I shot one roll at box speed (200) and the other at 400. Developed both in Rodinal 1+60. Maybe not the best choice but that’s what I had on my shelf atm and I was impatient… I mixed the chems with the box speed in mind, but then looking at the massive dev chart there were no times given for DDX @400 for the 1+60 dilution, hmmmmm…. So since I had the chems mixed I just guesstimated and approximately doubled the development time given for 200 for the roll exposed at 400, a stop is a stop is a stop, right?

Weirdly, the roll shot at 200 turned out underdeveloped while the one shot at 400 was pretty much perfect. Maybe that was user error ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe it was my 12 year old half empty bottle of Rodinal finally giving up, but it was a surprise as I was mentally prepared for the pushed roll to go sideways since I was playing fast and loose with dev times. Other than that the DDX was pretty well behaved with pretty wide latitude. I’m thinking a nice people and pets film and maybe landscapes/cityscapes. I can see the appeal, it is a very pretty emulsion and It does scan very well, but it’s too clean for me.

So a pretty, fine grained, easy scanning, black and white film, just watch your dev times. But I’m going back to the basic grittier – and cheaper – TriX and HP5 (or FP4 if I want something slower) – which seems to be what I always do after trying something new….

Flowers and Bees

A few minutes in the garden with a macro lens.

I got this old manual focus macro lens pretty cheap when the pandemic lockdowns hit last spring thinking it’d help pass the time. I ended up ‘essentially’ working through the past year though so it didn’t get the play i thought it would. I Stepped out the front door the other morning and saw the bumblebees on the coneflowers and took the opportunity.

All shot hand held – Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 105 f/2.8 AIS Micro

Come To The Promised Land

Took some time this summer to go camping at Promised Land State Park in north east Pa. This part of the world has seen more than one boom come and go. The timber was clear cut in the 19th century ( the forests we see today are second and third growth), the coal and steel are gone and with them the railways. Once industry had extracted all the profits from the ground, the land was turned over to the state and the ‘taxpayers’ (that’s us) for ‘rehabilitation’.

For a hot moment there was money to made here as a mountain resort town but those glory days are long gone. Now we are left with the lake and hiking trails, the WPA built dams and campground, struggling working class communities getting squeezed by  New York City developers…. and a lot of empty space.

 

Color pics Nikon D300. Black and white images Nikon FE2 on Kodak TriX and Ilford HP5 film – developed and scanned by hand. Minimal processing in Adobe LightRoom.

Lenses used: Nikon 24mm f/2.8 AF-D, 50mm f/1.4 AF-D, 50mm f/1.4 AIS, 105mm f/2.5