Author: bt

What I’ve seen and tried up till now when I process my own black and white films is either to use one of those off the shelf chemicals to get rid of water marks on films hung out to dry, or even novel ideas like putting a little amount of washing detergent into the final rinse. I’ve done the later quite a bit and noticed that after scanning there’s stain every once in a while. They’re washable but a hassle.
Just today I tried to do something different, but probably what I should have done all these while. I was processing 2 rolls of Ilford FP4+ and just as I was rinsing the film and tank after the fixer stage, I thought about pouring fresh water on the film after I hang it on the hanger. What you want to do is to pour it in a steady stream, without any splashing so that the water just flows from one end at the top to the other end. I was hoping that this prevents or minimises beading and if you dont splah, you dont get pockets of water droplets that just wont flow to the end of the film.

So far so good. The 2 rolls of FP4+ that’s hanging to dry right now looks cleaner than ever before and I dont even have to buy any gimmicky chemical or rubber squeegee to do that!

Ah well, might as well write something about this new camera that was just released this week. There has been a lot of rumours and if you go around the photography forums, where people seem to be more interested in noise and megapixels and all those technicalities, and then showing off mundane everyday photos that could have been taken with a cheap point and shoot… there has been hits and misses. Anyways, DPReview has a nice preview and its amusing to see that they had a preproduction body before the info embargo was lifted… all these time and they didn’t even leak anything to us underlings!!!
Anyways… what do I think?
Continue reading “Nikon’s D80 Digital SLR”

This is my take on titles that rhymes… a la “Sense & Sensibility”.
Got my shipment of 100 pack Printfile Archival film sleeves for 35mm films (7 rows of 6 frames) just yesterday and I was going thru the bible of archiving photographic materials, Wilhelm Imaging Research’s excellent book on their site and guess what? Looks like low density polyethelene which the Printfiles are made of are crappy for storing photos despite what the stuff on the packaging says. According to WIR’s observation, low density PE seems to stick to the film in high humidity storage after around 5 years and not forgetting that it tend to scratch the emulsion layer when inserting and removing from the sleeves! Nicely done.. now I’m left with a whole pack of film sleeves that might need to change in a few years.

Developed my first roll since coming to France yesterday, and noticed that the 2 rolls of Kodak 400TX yielded results that are a little cloudy. Googled the internet and it DOES seem that expired fixer will give you cloudy negatives. The fixer I have is about 1-2 years old and its been in the original bottle since then. According to the instructions on the bottle, the fixer will stay fresh for 6 months in the bottle and 1 year in an airtight bottle. Looks like I will have to go out this weekend and look for a new bottle of fixer! I have at least 10 rolls of B&W backlogged for development.