Bigger, Better, Faster, More!

Morning folks - I hope you are well!

Today's FB has a title that not only quotes an album by 4NonBlondes but also, I think, is at the root of what is currently wrong with photography.

Oh I know, chuck your coffee at the screen, drop your phone down the toilet, etc etc . . I know.

You see, to cut a long story short, megapixels, print size, formats, fps, USAF resolution charts, pixel size, face recognition, blah blah blah, you know, all the bollocks that (apparently) define a current photographer . . it's all, well, mostly, er, bollocks.

That new Sony camera that stops motion blur being a thing? 

What's the point in that? 

Someone dig up Jacques-Henri Lartique and tell him his photos of racing cars were crap.

For that matter, someone tell the ghost of Michael Cooper, that his autosport pictures were crap too. He was a hell of a photographer, with nerves of steel, a Pentax and a steady eye. I met him many years ago (he was a friend of my brothers) - to be honest you've not lived until you've stood with someone like Mike OUTSIDE the crash barriers at Brands Hatch on a F1 day . . . 

Anyway, back to the real meat and potatoes.

My friend and erstwhile blogger, Bruce Robbins of the Online Darkroom, has surprised me recently. Due to an overwhelming amount of 'crap' in his darkroom (OK, he has two dogs . . go figure) he has been unable to print anything. 

Fair enough. 

When life gives you crap, get the doggy poo bag out. 

In this case though, it has been the resurrection of his ancient Nikon D700 - a camera that is nearing prehistoric in digital terms - introduced in 2008; well regarded at the time, but still laughable in today's terms at a mere 12 MP. 

Even my Sony A6000 (which I have no fondness for) is 24MP . . read 'em and weep big boy!

But the thing is, as they said back in 1939, "'T'aint What You Do, It's The Way That You Do It  . . " because, to my eyes, with that and his cheapo Epson printer, he's producing prints that are every bit as good as what I am producing in the darkroom from a set-up that in current terms is around twelve times the price of his! 

Add into that, material costs, and, well, you don't have to be a brain surgeon . . . 

Yep - full print, borders and all.
Ilford's MGRC 'unusual' size.

Of course that's a gross simplification. I use my set-up because I love it. 

I love the fact that I really am limited to a roll of film. 

I love the fact that I can go and stand in a red room for a few hours and work away. 

I love printing. 

I love photographing with film. BUT, for how much longer can this continue?

I was saddened to hear that Newton Ellis the famous camera repairers in Liverpool will be shutting their doors this year. Wow. There's really not that many people left who can deal with repairing these lovely machines we still lug about. 

Yes, I know electronics can go on 'modern' cameras, but mostly camera electronics are pretty (relatively) reliable. 

Can you find anyone willing to have a go at your beloved Contax II from the 1930's these days? 

NO (or at least not very many who understand that camera). 

It's a big thinking point.

Allied with this, we have the cost of materials - yes I know it is all relative - as longterm reader and FB friend Julian said recently:

As I was a-meandering through my paternal plan chest, I came across a Silverprint catalogue, dated 2002. In it so much stuff we can no longer buy. And Silverprint - whither went they? Sniffs and gazes rheumy-eyed into the distance.

The cost of a 100 sheet box of 8 x 10 Ilford Multigrade IV RC then...

(including VAT @17.5%) is given as £38.04 crossed out, or, to you guv, £27.26.

I think the crossed out price is probably RRP and Silverprint could offer a good discount.

Putting that through the mills of https://iamkate.com/data/uk-inflation/ to compensate for inflation:

We'd expect that to be £82.17 full price, or to you guv £56.88

There's the small matter of VAT now being 20% and I really can't be bothered with the calculation to find out that it adds a couple of quid!

Going into ilfordphoto.com and checking their prices for Multigrade RC, 100 sheets of said paper comes in at £84.09, which is surprisingly close to the crossed out price with a couple of quid for the extra 2.5% VAT. Nowhere near the "to you guv" level sadly.

So basically,  Ilford MGRC is currently probably bang on the money with regard to inflation and so on. BUT, does that make it affordable? 

Well that is hard for me to judge as someone who has come to the end of their 'usable' working life - I don't earn a wage, so I don't know. 

What I do know, is that in pocket money terms, it is a huge consideration.

Bruce pointed out that Ilford Portfolio in postcard size costs me approximately 70+pence per card - that's quite a lot of money; an average session with postcards elicits 12+ images . . a not inconsiderable  amount of money for a morning's work. 

Were I to inkjet them on 'premium' Hanemuehle postcard paper I'd be well under 50p; use a different paper and I would be considerably less. 

It's quite a thought, because with my costs, stack them across the numerous film formats I use and differing paper sizes, chemicals, storage, time (and also the sheer outlay in cameras and lenses) etc, then I really am living up to that term "Luxury Photographer".

Maybe Luxury Photographer, should be replaced with Financial Masochist. 

And not just financial either as I am about to recount. 

Again that thorn in my side Mr Robbins has shown me a different side.

We recently had a mini-road trip to a setting we've been to before . . however this time is was dreich. And I mean proper Scots Dreich. 

Misty; damp; warm and cold at the same time; humidity levels through the roof; constant rain - not heavy, but a proper Scots Soaker (believe me, you need to experience it to understand that it is quite different from just 'getting wet').

 

I had the 500 C/M and 40mm Distagon; an A16 back and Panoramic Mask set . . on a tripod . . with my old Gossen Lunasix 3S and a cable release all housed in a giant shoulder bag. 

Fortunately, I had the rain cover from a Think Tank Urban Disguise on hand, for without it, my camera would have melted away to nothing. 

The large rain covers often supplied with most bags, are not pieces of annoying shite (as I used to think) but actually superb at stretching over a really large camera set-up.

As a counter to this, Bruce had a tripod, his Ona manbag, the D700 and 2 lenses . . . and that was it.

His camera, is a bit weather sealed - not up to modern standards but good enough. 

He didn't seem particularly worried is what I shall say, whereas I was completely paranoid about trying to stay dry. 

As for my stuff . . well, when I got home this is what I had to do:

Lens off then take the camera apart: remove hood; remove Acute Matte; clean water marks off of mirror where the rain had funnelled through; thoroughly dry camera body including removing wind-on crank to remove water which had seeped behind it.

Film back: kitchen towel dry; remove film; remove insert; remove dark slide; pop whole lot in Ziplock bag with silica. 

Lens: kitchen towel off the worst of the moisture; remove hood; filter; dry threads of both; pop lens into large Ziplock bag with silica in it for four days . . . and twiddle thrumbs.

You get the drift. 

And of course the shoulder bag was soaked too with no cover. 

Tripod - saturated, so: set, fully erect in a warmish room for a couple of days . . . 

Finally, reassemble camera and lens only to discover that you've just fired the lens before mounting it on the camera and have encountered for the first time the Hasselblad lock-up.

Look up how to sort it - quite simple really with a good long screwdriver and some care.

Breath at last.

So, nothing short of a pain in the arse really. 

Although his lenses got wet too, I don't think they got quite a soaking as mine did. 

And I bet he didn't have to take his camera apart!

This being said, it was an experience and has given me a number of pointers to situations like that in the future. But at the end of the day I could have brought home the same bacon with his set-up.

That is quite a consideration.

The film was FP4+ developed in Pyrocat-HD. 

I printed the images on 11¾ x 8¼ paper; the image size is 10½ x 5¼". 

They look good and I am happy with them, but like I say, I could have achieved the same with much less. 

I will say (amazing what experience can teach us) is that the nominal 6x3cm image size of the panoramic mask using this film (and camera) combo, is probably as good as I could have achieved with a 6x12cm back on a view camera. 

Had I been in the same circumstances with just a field camera and a 6x12 back, I simply wouldn't have bothered getting anything out of the bag. It is as simple as that.

Anyway, here's the images.

Strangely, looking at them as scanned objects make them look better to my weird eyes.

But where does this lead me?

Remember what I said about bollocks up above?

Well, Bruce has proved to me that in modern terms, using something that is, in actual digital terms, as dead as a Dodo (and if you are careful and ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING) then you can produce work that stands up with anything. 

I hope he writes a post about this, because the prints are really good - I was impressed. 

As for l'il ol' me, well, despite the obvious merits and pocket money friendly benefits of squirting (inkjet printing) I shall probably carry on printing with gritted teeth. 

One thing is for certain though. I want to print a fibre-based archive and that means 10 x 8" WILL HAVE TO BE my maximum paper size. 

I simply can't justify paying £95 for a box of 50 sheets of 9.5 x 12". 

Of course if anyone would like to send me some larger fibre paper, I will happily receive it and send you back an archival Sheephouse print of your choice 😄 

As another aside though . . who prints 20 x 16" in fibre these days? 

Its current price is £256 for 50 sheets - that's a fiver a print, plus very quickly exhausted chemicals . . and the sheer space involved to deal with the prints.

If the shitake hits the fan as I think is going to happen, I can imagine that the larger paper sizes will go first.

There really can't be many people doing big ones now . . surely?

But if you are out there (and you're reading this) my hat is tipped to you - you're both brave and masterful (and either professional or quite a bit well-off).

Anyway, that's quite enough from me for another post - if you've been reading for as long as some of you have, Bless You. If you're new to this malarkey, Bless You Too.

I am now off for a haul around town, sporting (wait for it) .  . the Sony A6000 and 16-50mm OSS E kit lens. Bruce said I'd probably get more out of it, if I put as much care into using it as I do with a film camera. 

Personally I can't see it, but we shall see.

The older I get, the more I think, Feck it . .WHY NOT?

Over and Oot.

H xx

Stretch Your Brain, Stretch Your Waistband, But Don't Forget To Stretch Your Negatives

Morning playmates - my apologies for not getting back to you before this, but, well, life can be an adventure at times can't it! Over a month has gone by and I've done precious little in the way of photography, but I will explain . . .  

The source of my adventure? the dreaded unsupported-ness of Windows XP . . . 

Yes I know it should have been ditched years ago, but I've had far more prioritorial things to spend my hard-earned ackers on and a new computer wasn't one of them (though hopefully that will be changing soon)!

Anyway, around Christmas it occured to me that using XP was no longer really sensible - the world was getting slower and slower, browsers were taking forever to load and to be honest the sheer amount of time I wasted on keeping this machine running smoothly and securely was getting beyond the pale. I call myself the IT Department here at home, simply because I was spending a large proportion of every day just footering around and trying to get things right. But that was my position - a new computer wasn't possible, so, what was a man to do? Well it occured to me there was something that could help me out of a fix without costing the earth . . . well, without costing anything actually . . . it was something I had been contemplating for a while:

the weirdly techy world of Linux! 

Oh yes, I thought, a free operating system that can help me out of a fix! So, suitably determined, I backed up all my important files on an external drive, burned several discs of different Linux Distros (their word for variations in Operating Systems) slapped one in the drive, restarted, hit the BIOS settings of my machine, set it to boot off a CDRom, restarted and joined the world of the labcoat brigade.

Let's get this straight - my machine is ANCIENT as in 10 years old, tiny memory, small HDD, it was a low-level Tesco (but Philips built) machine designed as a package to get the average home user using. But it worked. That is until the world decided it was no longer fit for purpose and demanded bigger, faster! So, where did that leave your unfortunate hero? Up a bleeding gum-tree, that's where.

The thing is, maybe leaving the coat-tails of something you've been familiar with for years is a daunting prospect - I know it was for me. I've been a Windows user ever since we first got 'proper' computers in work back in about 1992 (and prior to that everything was done with catalogues and an Amstrad home computer). We used Windows 92 and then when XP came along everything changed - here was something that was useful, worked and was fun too and when the net came to work, well, when most of your day is spent researching new releases and reissues, then obviously it had its advantages!

So yes, making the big leap from unsecure and slow (in 2016) XP, was to say the least daunting.

But you know what, like a terrible landlord, once you've got past the onscreen "Oh you fecking idiot, you know you're going to completely evict 10 years worth of XP schtuff!" and "Help, No! We've nowhere to go!" then a real cavalier devil-may-care attitude overtakes you and before you know it, you're uninstalling and installing Linux Distros with gay abandon!

And that's the state I am in now. So here's a boring list of everything that did and didn't work - as you can see, I've been busy:

Ubuntu (doesnt work on my old machine).

Lubuntu (does work, but updates and then fails)

Xubuntu (does work)

Mint (does work but weird onscreen sizing made it unusable - I have a CRT monitor too!)

Debian (works well, but why breeze through something when you can spend an hour or two doing the same thing)

Elementary (the most user-friendly, but again onscreen sizing made it unusable)

Zorin (works, but can I get it to talk to my Epson scanner? can I feck**)

** In fact it was this thorny problem that stopped me using all of the above that worked. Linux does have a scanner system called SANE, but to be honest if you have an Epson machine you'll be hard pressed to get it functioning. I've downloaded goodness knows how many times the drivers from Epson; I've unzipped, unpacked, installed, un-installed, followed onscreen instructions from everywhere, used command line, used everything until I didn't know whether I was coming or going and to a man, they all failed . . apart from one.

At the moment I am using Q4 OS - it's a variation on Debian and is fairly user-friendly and actually looks and acts a little bit like Windows, except it isn't.
As I described it to my father-in-law, Windows and Mac OS is a bit like a lovely shop window and shop - you see something you want in the window, go in and take it to the counter and buy it - you then take it home and it works.
In Linux (any of them) you don't always see what you want in the window, but it is the correct shop, so you go in, walk up to the counter, ask if they have it in stock, get a part number and bin number and then go through to the stockroom and pick it yourself; then you take it home, plug it in and it might well work, but then again . . .

The thing is Linux is a fine concept, but as a community it is incredibly split-apart - now if ALL of the programmers got togeher in one great brain-mash and said look, this is this, that is that - they're both great (and believe me, a lot of Linux stuff is truly great) how about if we made it this way?
If a UNIFIED FRONT were applied, Linux (per se) would be an OS that an entire world could enjoy with ease.

Anyway, enough of that, I got my scanner working (thank heavens) though now, this morning the fecking prtiner has decided it doesn't want to work again! Schiiiiiite!!

You know, I read something funny along the lines of "Linux is only free if you don't value your time" and I am slightly of a mind to agree with that.

Anyway, enough, your toast is getting cold -

Photography Here

You know when you can't get a full-frame 6x6 print through a letter box, because letter boxes aren't square and the print is?
Yeah, it's quite a problem, so what do you do? That's right, you slice bits off of the top and the bottom so the print resembles a letterbox shape, that's better - it pops through nicely!

What am I talking about?
Well, it's that little known and very rare, but rather handy 6x3 Hasselblad panoramic adapter!

Back when  I bought Victor, I tried to accumulate a bunch of accessories too and this was one of them - it'll come in handy I thought - I rather like that stretchy panoramic look and allied to this, all the Hasselblad panoramic photos I had seen all had that nifty little marque of THE TWO V's - but the thing was and little did I realise at the time, that it apparently DOES NOT work with a 500 CM.
I exhaled a loud "Oh Shite!" when I read that.
Admittedly, I should have known -  it didn't fit in the customary Hasselblad way - but it did sort of.
For those of you who haven't a scooby about what I am on about, the adapter is an approx 6x6cm piece of metal with a precision cut (approx) 6x3cm slit in it - if you were to saw one in half, it would look like one of those squared-off bracket thingies you have to the left of the Enter Key on a standard keyboard!
You stuff it in the square opening by the light curtains on the back of a 'Blad and then mount your film back onto the camera. There's a plastic mask (ostensibly clear, well it is for the image bit, but then surrounded by a weird dimply/spotty bit, showing you what will and won't be masked) which  you pop onto the focus screen and then fit your weapon of viewing choice on top of it..
So where was this weirdness getting me?
I know, I really do - it's anathema isn't it - you get a 6x6 frame and then you waste approximately half of it!
But that isn't the point, and anyway, why should you care it doesn't fit the damn camera? It's my camera and my film, I'll do what I like.
Well, whisper it . . . actually . . . if you can find one, buy it now. It fits the 500CM.
OK, it doesn't sit in the space exactly properly - though it will actually, just not snug:


Correct way - might work:

[  Camera Body

Incorrect way - but it does work

Film Back ]

if you can make sense of that!

So, anyway, suitably armed and with a roll of 5 years past it's Use By Date Neopan 400, I set off on a dark and dismal day to see what would happen . . . oh, and I was under the cosh with regards to time - Dad Taxi waits for no man . . .

It was strangely easy getting used to using the cropped viewfinder - I'd had this before on the Rollei whereby I'd used the 645 adapter and this was much the same. Composing was (relatively) a cinch - just had to be careful of verticals (which I wasn't ).

Now these were all taken with the 60mm Distagon, but can you imagine using it with a 40mm Distagon?
It looks really wide already, and using a slow film and a non-grainy developer, you might well get some results that would make you think of larger or more famous Panoramic cameras or backs.
I could have got a Pano back for the 5x4 Wista, but you know what I am struggling to focus that these days - this is just so much more convenient (and not to say more stable in very windy conditions)

Stretch 1 - Crop
Yes I Know I've Got Converging Verticals.
Paper As Below.

Stretch 1 - Actual Work Print- Really Bad Scan
The Perils Of Scanning Resin Coated Paper.
Marks Are From Resin/Scanner Contact Point
Paper Is Ancient Fotospeed, Hence A Bit Lacking In Contrast.

Stretch 2 - Crop
The Perils Of Using Unfamiliar Software . . .
This Is XnView - I Am Used To Irfanview.
Paper As Above

Stretch 3 - Crop
A Bit Squinty, But A Bit Better . . .
Random Puddle At Dundee Uni.
Paper As Above

Well, they're pretty crap prints aren't they, but never mind, it was an experiment - I see where I went wrong and won't do it again (promise) - I reckon in the landscape with a good vista, they might be fine - also, naturally the film plane on the 'Blad is rock solid, so you've no problems with curves or anything - take it from me, the frames are pin-straight.

I'll take more care next time.

Anyway, I s'pose the whole point of this is that if you have to, you can change things and think outside the box. I've made something work that wasn't supposed to work, and with regard to my computer I am having to relearn new software just to replace my old stuff.

XnView and Gimp seem pretty decent replacements for Irfanview and T'P'shop (CS2) respectively. No doubt if I had had more time I could have used Gimp more effectively, but the scanner problems were such a total nightmare that time shot out of the window never to return!

So until I win the lottery or something, this will have to be this - who'd have thought getting a Blog up and before your eyes could take such an amount of effort . . and was it worth it!

Anyway, till next time, one potato, two potato, three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.