Learning cool things from friends

This post is more a stream of consienceness than a tutorial.SO please keep this in mind..

 A cold and wet day in Picton, a rare to myself and I was chatting to Tim and Kevin in a yak conference whilst I took some BW400CN and reversed it. Before you all scream REDSCALE I would like to remind you all that BW400CN Is black and white. Kodak is the only maker of chromographic film with an orange backing (mind you, all Of kodak's c-41 film has a deep orange backing) and yes, I know there is ilford and Fuji, but their backs are clear (shows up grey) so no good for this experiment.

This is so I can have a built in filter for my black and white film. All the time I was doing this still chatting. All finished and I proudly show off my new pink film.. And suddenly Kevin asks innocently enough.. What will you shoot it at? Aargghh I had forgotten to work out a filter factor. And of course a camera can't work this out being on the wrong side of the lens. Lol. I took a guess at 2 or 3 stops and it was then that Kevin and I dug out our lightmeters. I couldn't find the one David lent me, think its in my camera bag.. Anyway.. He showed me how to measure the light drop off of a film. He didn't have the same film but it works and my brain had a click moment. OF COURSE!!

He measured the light. I used an app called Light Meter not my usual one, but does this job.

So you set an arbitrary asa, and select an arbitrary shutter speed measure the resulting f stop.

Hold the film over the the light Meter and measure again. The first reading with no film was f/4.5. Holding the BC400CN in front of the light meter I measured again and got f/2.2 that's close enough to two stops.

So I have to adjust the exposing times by two stops. That's rating it at 100asa. 



Kevin's example, before putting the film across (Kevin's photo)

 

Kevin's example 2 with asa 100 film (Kevin's photo

In Kevin's Example, he selected 1/30th of a sec and asa 400 (The figures don't matter) and he got f/11 when he put his asa 100 film across he got f/1. He is meauring the whole thickness of the fim but if we redscale we are only looking to get the light through the anti-halation layer and not all the way through that would be 2.5 stops. 

My meauring was 7.5stops. and using a 100 speed film gave me 6 stops. all this runs around 2-3 stops we have to allow for the anti-halation layer. Now of course this is all witch doctory and at the end of the day, red-scale is always 2 stops at least depending on your wanted result. Slightly underexposing  will ove a deeper red. This only means in my case that the red/orange filter strength for my B&W film is 2-3 stops strength.

remember this is only to get you a ball park place to start. by all means just shoot at 2 stops and if you are wanting a different result move over or under.I feel 4 stops would be too much and you would lose too much detail. Then again if you are using colour film and want yellow then 3 stops would be a setting to use.

My town was hit with another heavy storm and I had to toss stuff into David's car and go to a safe place for the car.

Sitting in a cafe watching the storm, I went to load the newly re-spooled film into my F-1. Um. D'oh! In the rush I had forgotten to cut a new leader. Sigh. Going to Coles, I found the cheapest scissors i could find and a laundry marker. Problem fixed. But my photo op had passed. Oh well.

Contact printing

It was suggested to me by Kevin that as I don't have a 8X10 negative scanner, I should put the negative on a piece of photo paper and expose that. BRILLIANT!! I actually rushed home to do this and exposed one piece but as my dark room was being used as a bedroom, I had to leave it and go to bed myself. The next night, David was awake and he helped me expose a second paper, this time using his flash at 1/1 power. I set about developing the papers. This required me to look at paper developing techniques. As I didn't have any Paper developer, and no acceptable alternative my thoughts turned to my always reliable caffenol. Looking up a paper caffenol recipe, I was delighted to find one. The link to the original post is here The recipe was by József and I have summarised it below. 900ml water (József says distilled but I didn't worry) 12tsp instant coffee 6tsp washing soda 3tsp asorbic acid Water temp 20c Develop for 2 minutes (YES ONLY 2 MINUTES) for the 1st paper, add 30secs for every additional paper ( I made 900ml but you only need 250ml tubes of 8X10 not trays so only used fresh for each paper) Throw out your caffenol that has been used for 6-8 papers when the development times exceed 4minutes Agitate continuously. (I use tubes so spin continuously) Wash and fix as usual. I fixed for 3-5 minutes. My first two papers were over exposed. Fully black but inspection of the paper revealed that the developer worked fins and it was only over exposure. So David insisted we try again, I loaded another paper and placed the 8X10 on top. David flashed my paper at 1/128th power. And I developed exactly as above, alas I had only wet tubes.. BUT this time we got an image.!!!! It was now 1 am so we hung it to dry and went to bed. Next experiment will be at 1/64th power. So a work in progress but this is the first time I have seen David so interested in my film play. So YAY!!!