by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 26, 2006 | Photography
Last night I developed my 2nd roll of film, this one went a lot better than the first.
I got the film into the spiral without any hassles at all thanks to some tips on the Flickr “I Shoot Film” group. There are also several other useful resources, a photoset that shows it step by step complimented with some text to describe it and also a very good PDF from Ilford called Processing your first B&W Film.
I am using all Ilford chemicals and film at the moment based on the PDF file above and I am happy with the result so I’ll stick to it I think.
In terms of cost, it’s hard for me to say exactly now since I bought all the actual equipment from Jessops due to the website I got it from screwing me over, if you buy from the right places and do some research all the chemicals and tools you’ll need shouldn’t set you back more than GBP60.
There are some recurring costs for the chemicals, below a little table of costs and estimated amount of film I should be able to develop with each:
| Chemical: |
Cost: |
Expected use: |
| Ilfotec LC 29 Developer |
GBP5.68 |
17 |
| Ilfostop stop bath |
GBP3.36 |
34 |
| Ilford Rapid Fixer
|
GBP6.96 |
17 |
| Ilfotol Wetting agent
|
GBP8.14 |
100s |
Based on the above the cost of each development is around 84p, add to this a fair amount of tap water but that can’t really be quantified in an amount.
Films I have bought till now at GBP2.99 each from places like Jessops, but I am waiting a shipment of 25 rolls of Ilford HP5+ from 7dayshop that cost GBP1.89 each.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 24, 2006 | Uncategorized
DPReview has finally posted their in-depth review of the D80, in the past with my D70 I waited for their review before buying the camera because there were a lot of questions about it, with the D80 I didn’t bother waiting since the word on the ground from those in Asia who got it first were very good.
From the conclusion part of the 29 page review:
The number of cons, and the fact that there are no serious ones, is a testament to the thought and work that has gone into the D80’s design. It’s one of those cameras which just feels ‘right and sorted’ from the moment you pick it up. Things just get better the more you use the camera, you will begin to discover the usefulness of major features like the customizable automatic ISO and the subtle touches like being able to tap the DELETE button twice to delete an image
This is a very good review and they give the camera a 8.83 average out of 10 points.
Very interesting to me are the new areas they’ve started including in their reviews, these relates to RAW vs JPG performance and for me it validates what a lot of people have been saying, always shoot RAW the advantages are staggering, now it’s been quantified.
If you look at Page 19 of the review they go through a test that defines the color range captured in JPG vs. RAW – a full explanation of dynamic range is in their Glossary. The test clearly shows that in a RAW file will give you a lot more luminance out of your images than just shooting JPG would. The D80 now has a RAW+Fine JPG mode so you can get best JPG and RAW files out of it for each photo, this gives you the best of both worlds.
Another RAW vs JPG related test in the review is that of resolution, it basically just takes a group of lines on a piece of paper that comes ever closer to each other, this demonstrates when the camera just cannot tell the difference between 2 lines anymore. The D80 test is on Page 16 near the bottom. From the samples you can clearly see that by just shooting JPG you will loose a lot of finer details in some circumstances.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 21, 2006 | Photography
I’ve recently blogged about my Kodak Retina Reflex camera and wanting to do some development etc.
I ordered all the needed goodies from http://www.firstcall-photographic.co.uk/ who I at first thought had a good service, I mailed them and they confirmed the order was shipped and should be with me today, at 4pm the ordered arrived incomplete! You’d think if you mail them asking for a update they would tell you they’d only ship half of it. Anyway, so I won’t be using them again in a hurry.
I rushed into London at the 5pm rush hour to the Jessops and spend another small fortune on tanks, measurement beakers, and all kinds of other crap to get this going and developed my first roll tonight.
There were some hiccups getting the film into the developer tank coil as you have to do this in total darkness inside a bag and it involves cutting bits etc, it really is not fun, so I managed to get some kinks into a frame here and there but I guess I’ll improve in time.
Overall I am very pleased with the first attempt you can see most of the roll here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 20, 2006 | Uncategorized
A quick post to point out some Apple freebys that I’ve come across recently, first up is a replacement for the standard unzip tool that comes with OS X, it is called Unarchiver and adds support for a ton of new formats from inside Finder:
It is very simple to use and install – simply copy it into your Applications folder or
whereever you prefer, and then set archive filetypes to open using it. This can either
be done the usual way, or by double-clicking the icon to show The Unarchiver’s
preferences.
Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt
and many other more or less obscure formats. Support for so many formats is
achieved by using the libxad unarchiving library.
It’s opensource and unobtrusive, there really is no reason not to use it.
Second app is a replacement for the normal Flickr Uploader, this one is called Gleam, it is still early days for it but already it shows major potential, supports Geotagging, setting custom descriptions etc before uploading and some other nifty stuff, if you’re a Flickr person and you use a Mac you should check this out.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 20, 2006 | Photography Equipment
I recently posted about my circa 1966 Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera, it came with a manual and as you can imagine these manuals are very rare. I took my scanner and scanned in the manual, the result is available on my Flickr Stream.
I’ve already come across one very happy Flickr user who had the camera and no manual, I hope more people get some use out of this.
