The kit is rated for 12-16 Films, but you should be able to get a few more when you develop them all right after each other!”
Is it the same as the Tetenal kit?
“[I]t’s not the same, but we did do our best to rescue this lost formula.”
Powder kit?
“[F]or now only liquid, but let’s see what the future brings.”
You can preorder ADOX C-TEC 41 today from CineStill, Fotoimpex, and Freestyle Photo.
Fotoimplex has also uploaded instructions for the dev kit which include things like development times (i.e., 3’15”@38℃ + 4’ for bleach, which is very fast!):
#video: Brian Wright shows Linus how to clean up the negative transparency from the peel-apart instant film.
Brian is one half of the Brothers Wright ensemble (the other, Brandon), who founded the CineStill film company. In this video, Brian shows Linus a technique that the Wrights developed for freeing up the negative from the black goo that covers it:
Peel-apart film is a virtually extinct format that still has legions of fans admiring the fidelity of the images and the experience of revealing the photographs. Once peeled, you get a grainless positive and a negative. The negative is often discarded as it barely contains a picture — but the technique Brian shows here turns it into a scannable transparency using a bleach washing method.
Once scanned peel-apart negative transparency is a lot sharper and noticeably grainer than the print. One could argue it’s the most important/archival part of the package that is peel-apart film.
I am now curious if a version of this technique could work for the modern integrated Polaroid film frames, which are descendants of the original Polaroid peel-apart film (see this passage about the modern Polaroid film’s technical origins: analog.cafe/r/a-brief-hist…).
#TIL: Autochrome is a colour photography process patented in 1903 that uses multicoloured microscopic potato starch granules to make some of the first colour photographs.
Developing Autochrome glass plates is akin to making black and white positives (a process that’s still in relatively wide use today) — but with a twist. Unfortunately, constructing them is a laborious and expensive process. As noted on Peta Pixel, there’s just one person who’s actively working on it today: petapixel.com/2024/05/06/m…
Autochrome plates are created by methodically and evenly spreading a random mosaic of mixed microscopic starch beads, which are individually painted orange, cobalt, and green. When the light passes through that mosaic, it exposes black and white emulsion behind it while each bead acts as a tiny colour filter — effectively making a localized trichrome.
Once a matching light wavelength freely passes through the bead “lens filter,” ex. green light through a green bead, it registers on the emulsion. The emulsion, when developed as a positive, appears transparent — but the green bead makes it look green again.
Now repeat that for millions of other coloured beads, and you will get a full-colour photograph.
35mm film needs canisters, and they’re in short supply.
Kodak and Ilford manufacture and sell classic metal 135 film canisters, so they and brands like CineStill could package and distribute the most common type of camera film.
However, the demand for 35mm film has grown dramatically in the past five years, and the big two are struggling to meet it. Kodak even had to change their canister design at some point to circumvent a supply issue (petapixel.com/2021/06/30/k…).
There’s an alternative 35mm film canister build that has gained recent popularity:
The plastic 135.
It looks nearly identical and works like the metal — but I don’t think it’s as good. The plastic 135 canisters break and malfunction whenever I try to reuse them, which isn’t ideal for bulk loading.
Given their disposable nature and the severe issues with recycling (cbc.ca/documentaries/the-p…), these plastic canisters are just another source of plastic pollution and customer inconvenience that’s better avoided.
I understand the necessity and the convenience of the product. I can see that it’s easy to load the first time, and it’s more accessible than the metal canisters. But I’d always pick a metal can if there’s a choice.
Making CURSED Images | Can You Develop Film In BLOOD?
Yvonne’s side of the project adds serious Halloween vibes in May. This (below) video unveils her experience developing black and white film *for the first time* using the theory and methodology in this project.
While the pig’s blood developer-rinsed photographs were not included in the standard table of agents (above), the results were surprisingly good (?). That is, the roll of HP5+ Yvonne shot was exposed at box speed (EI 400), sometimes under-exposed, and yet, the frames scanned quite well. The negatives weren’t particularly thin, which is already better than most developers in this article. But she won’t say that the process was pleasant.
We tried almost all the things we could think of to concoct viable film developers (EpiPen, moss, pee, etc.) with our standardized bracketed samples on Ilford HP5+.
Really enjoyed the take in this video (and thank you, Daren, for inviting me to be a part of this experiment!) Very well explained, easy to understand, and lots of fun.
I’ve added new spaces on Analog.Cafe, where I’ll be organizing some of my thoughts on film photography.
You’ll probably notice #editorial the most since it’s where I write about product launches and share announcements like this. Comments under this tag may end up in your RSS feed, Community Letters¹, or you may hear about them from me on Mastodon and Bluesky.
A #video tag lists all the comments with a YouTube link. I’ve added a whole bunch of these, including this epic trilogy of Kodak factory tours: analog.cafe/comments/tnq0.
I developed & fixed film using nothing but edible ingredients from a grocery store. It’s been over twelve months, and it’s time to re-scan to see how the picture holds up.
Developing black and white film with coffee is a well-known trick. Many photographers tried this method and its edible variations. However, the last step usually involves industrial chemicals.
The Caffenol film development experiment I tried last year used an unproven substitute for the last step (fixer): table salt. It got results, but I wasn’t sure if the film would fade over time.
Something reminded me of this experiment today, and I decided to scan the film again to see how well it held up.
Turns out it held up well. I see no significant difference between today’s scan (attached) and the results I got in December 2022 (see the article ☝️).
The salt fixer works!
My fixer recipe used 300g of iodized salt with 1L water (or as much as could dissolve). After some agitation, the film was soaked in salt overnight.
I can confirm this works, but could this recipe be altered to be more practical? Would an hour or even less time in salt still work?
The exposure tests appear to show that the EI 50 I chose (the box speed of this film is 80ASA) is a decent choice for this film. It can still be shot at EI 100 or the box speed with good results and more contrast but adding light doesn’t seem to look as good (while there are more details, changing the contrast of this film in post will add grain thus unless the “washed-out” look is desired, this is probably not the way to go).
Development times still need work as the base fog is still significant and I wonder if I could reduce the grain meaningfully.
Once I finish my tests, I’ll post a review and development times and also consider selling some rolls on filmbase.etsy.com
ORWO NP 20 is an aging black and white film for novelty half-frame cameras that expired back in 1992.
(Coincidentally, this is the same year Lomography was formed; these numbers are also used in their brand-new emulsion: Lomochrome Color’92 — analog.cafe/r/lomochrome-c…).
I bought three bricks of this film earlier this year in an attempt to figure out how to use it with my Welta Penti 0 camera (analog.cafe/r/welta-penti-…) which uses specialized film canisters that hold short strips for 24 half-frame exposures.
A few burned rolls in, I’m finally starting to get some promising results. They’re still quite grainy and the base is rather foggy but it feels like I’m on the right track and I’d like to share some of the successful takes so far.
Exposed at EI 50 and developed in Ilfosol 3 for eight minutes at 1:9 dilution.
Here’s a short video that shows the process of retrieving the film leader. It’s not superbly methodical; essentially you need to twist the spool whenever the retriever tool feels too tight when you try to push the next plastic tongue in. Other than that, with some practice, it gets easier: youtube.com/shorts/3ADmdia…
Plus, it’s faster to load film into a Patterson spool and you get to keep a canister that you can use for bulk loading later. Or, once you accumulate a bunch of used canisters you can sell them to someone looking to bulk load.
This is my first time cross-processing slide film at home. This roll of Ektachrome 200, expired many years ago so I am not yet sure whether the chunky grain is the result of using an alternative chemical process (C-41 instead of E-6), the age, or an older technology. Nevertheless, I’m rather happy with the results. The colours look accurate with a good amount of saturation and plenty of fidelity — which is more than I expected.
I have one more roll of the same emulsion which I hope to shoot in the coming months and process as a positive (the way it was meant to be). It then should be evident whether getting the “proper” chemicals is worth the extra effort and expense with this film.
Here’s a short vlog of the Lomochrome Color’92 sample roll going through re-spooling, home development, and some of the results that I got with it: youtube.com/shorts/1vlwzcd….
As you can see from the video, Color’92 negatives are pretty dark compared to other C-41 films (Portra 800 in this case), but that shouldn’t cause any issues with scanning. I haven’t tried printing it in a darkroom though.
My negatives turned out looking very purple. Here’s what one of the frames in this article looks like on film. I had no issues with it after scanning. Hope this helps!
Edit: I replied earlier but it didn’t show up on the article because of a bug. I fixed it, so, hopefully, no more lost replies. 😅
Just watched grainydays (Jason) push Portra 800 +1 to EI 1600. He didn’t seem to like his results, but I think this film is still worth a push if needed. If you do that, I advise using better scanning techniques and beware of the sharp falloff in the shadows.
I happened to have recently shot mine pushed +2 stops to EI 3200: analog.cafe/r/kodak-portra…. Coincidentally, I also used XPan with it (reviewed here: analog.cafe/r/hasselblad-x…), which indeed needed those extra stops of light sensitivity in the dusky Vancouver winter.
Whereas some shots didn’t work out as well as I hoped they would, I had no trouble getting rid of the colour casts and haven’t found the grain that bad in my scans.
To get my results to look as they do now (no colour casts in the shadows, accurate overall colours), I inverted the negatives by hand and added a touch of colour balance adjustment in Photoshop. This is what I do with most of my colour film. And this is the guide I wrote on how to do this, should you like to push your Portra 800 and get results that do not suck: analog.cafe/r/how-to-scan-….
I’ve been testing ORWO Wolfen NC 500 for months, trying to understand how to use this film best. It demonstrated promising results in promotional samples ( analog.cafe/r/film-photogr… ) and in some examples mentioned by other reviewers.
But the testers’ feedback is very inconsistent — this film seems to have impressed them at one point and disappointed at another.
This film seems to shine in specific light/scenes/applications.
I’ve got results that looked like expired Portra: excellent skin tone reproduction with chunky grain and low saturation. Hoping to find a strategy to make the most of this film consistenly.
I’ll test another roll and publish my results soon.
What do light leaks look like on colour film negatives?
A few days back, I pulled my film from my home-developing tank to find prominent green blotches across several frames. They were shot on my daily-use camera, which I knew had no light leaks until then, so the first suspect was my possibly-bad agitation technique or improper film loading onto the Patterson reels.
YouTube Video