Got any instant coffee laying around?
I have two rolls of TX400 that expired in 2021. They were in a bag, in a box. It’s generally cool up here, except for a month in Summer. I was thinking of using them for my first attempts at processing. Thoughts?
Probably fine to go with, people are shooting with stuff way more expired than that with good results. The downside is if the results are bad, you won’t know whether it was the film or your process.
If I get an image at all, I’ll know the processing worked.
Expired film is usually fine. It may be slightly fogged, but that batch is pretty recent, so it should be usable.
Does anyone remember the early-'80s?
I remember seeing K1000s, with a 50mm lens, in the camera display case at Kmart or Gemco for $129.99. I think I remember seeing them for as low as $99.99. Does anyone remember their prices back in the day?
TIL that photographic film is not vegan. I was thinking that film is a plastic strip that is coated by an emulsion of light-sensitive chemicals that are suspended in a gelatine base. I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Gelatine? That’s made from animals.’
ETA: Apparently most ink for ink jet printers also contain animal products.
If you really have some spare time on your hands, this series on YouTube is some of the most fascinating stuff I have ever watched. Destin goes to the big Kodak facility and spends a day with the scientists, engineers, and technicians that make the film. And they do talk about the gelatin component of the emulsion, and some of the testing they do to make sure it’s extremely tight to their specs. I recall they talk about even monitoring the cows’ diets. It’s been a deal in the past…
[In the '20s] Kodak used active gelatin then and the cows ate Mustard Grass which put more Sulfur into the gelatin and fogged the film. This led to the discovery of Sulfur sensitization and led to increased film speeds.
If you like that, you might also enjoy this:
I want to expand on this a little. In this video, they literally touch on every single machine that is involved in the process of making film, starting way back with the raw materials moving into and out of the storage and mixing machinery. It’s the kind of access that back in the day where there were actual competitors in the space, someone would have been dragged out back and shot for seeing. It says a lot about how Kodak feels in terms of their IP and the competitive space that they don’t feel like there’s any threat here. Still, I imagine a large team of lawyers arguing this project from both sides for hours if not days.
The coating machines alone are just impossible for me to wrap my head around. I knew that the emulsion was a number of extremely thin discrete layers, but how they are actually applied just doesn’t seem believable. Essentially, the chemicals for each layer come out of slits on a highly polished stainless steel inclined table that allows for completely undisturbed laminar flow. The top layer runs freely for about an inch until it arrives at the slit for the second layer, at which point it rides over that layer below without mixing, becoming turbulent, nothing like you would assume.
This adding of sheet flows under the previous layers happens several times until the whole sandwich drops off an edge and free falls as a coherent stack until it lands on the running film a few inches down. IT JUST GETS DROPPED ON.
The excruciating level of precision that sees each layer flowing at exactly the same rate as the new layers when they meet so there’s no stretching, bunching or mixing seems impossible to me. That these layers free-fall and hit the film running without splashing seems doubly impossible. If that film was running just a few mm per minute too fast or slow, the layers would be too thin or thick. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it.
The melancholy part of all of this is that each and every machine, tool and mechanism seen is a custom manufactured one-of-one kind of thing, made decades ago, run by control systems developed by people likely dead now. If something happened to that building, I suspect that would be it. It’s not so much that we’re not smart enough to recreate that, but that there just would be no will to sink the effort and dollars into the process. Just like the most sophisticated Polaroid processes. When that machinery was shut down, even teams of really smart people never got it working reliably again and now the product is lost to us. Sad days for some of this stuff.
I’m getting ahead of myself, as I haven’t received the B&W developer yet, nor have I shot some B&W to try developing it. But I’m watching a video about how to scan your negatives at home. It looks like the guy might be sponsored by Negative Supply. I looked up the negative carrier on Negative Supply’s site, and it costs $379. So I googled some more and found this from B&H:
Negative Supply Essential Kit for 35mm Film Scanning. Includes Film Carrier, Riser, LED Panel for $249. As I said, I have a Nikon D3300 24.2 MP CMOS Digital SLR with Auto Focus-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II Zoom Lens that’s just (literally) gathering dust. I guess I’ll need a macro lens. The guy in the video has a Sigma 70mm f/2.8 macro on the Canon EOS he’s using.
Thoughts?
I bought the Massive Dev Chart app. I’ll have to watch your video again to see how to use it.
I use this guy on an old micro-nikkor 55mm f/2.8 and it works great:
I also have a decades unused Nikon Cool-Scan V, but using the slide duping set-up is so much faster, even if I lose automatic dust and scratch technology (which only applies to color film, anyway).
Negative Supply is probably the most expensive option. They have an entry level (what you were looking at), and it goes up from there.
Questions…
Are you handy with a 3D printer (this will determine which direction to go)
Do you want to do 120-format as well as 35mm film?
Do you have any of the pieces already? (copy stand, light source, macro lens)
@Pork_Rind , that looks specific to mounted slides, is it?
I’ve never even seen a 3D printer.
I’d like to pick up a Yashika MAT 124G one of these days.
I have none of those.
I got the D3300 before I had an iPhone, and wanted something that took better pictures than whatever phone I had at the time could. Once I got an iPhone, there was no need to use a full-size DSLR… until, apparently, now.
Assuming I’m looking at the right thing, it looks like the examples show roll film. It’s an expensive item though. I’m not entirely sure I want to scan with a digital camera, but if I were to do so, I’d pick this up instead as it’s cheaper, has more film size options, and allows me to use my own, better, tripod.
Mostly I’m just a little disappointed in the state of home film scanning options. I got spoiled by having free/cheap access to pro drum scanners during a lot of my time shooting. There are some pro-grade lab machines available for not a ton, but you have to setup a laptop to run an ancient OS and equally dusty software and then not think too hard about the availability of parts. I still send my film out for scanning.
Johnny, you might want to go for that DigitaLIZA thing!
I use the Valoi 360 setup, but it cost a very pretty penny–I just wanted a good setup without any fuss. Had I seen the DigitalLIZA setup I would have probably gone for that.
You will still need:
- Copy stand - see if you can find one cheap on eBay.
- Cheap macro lens with adapter - Try a Canon FD 50mm macro, so you can also use it with your Canon cameras. You will need an adapter to mount it to your camera
- Lightroom
- Negative Lab Pro
Because of the cost of the equipment, I’d recommend doing a test run with a demo version of Negative Lab Pro just to see if you like the output.
For the test, use any light source you can, even a white computer screen…place your negative on the light source with some decent space (e.g. 1/2 inch) so that the light source is way out of focus.
Now use whatever lens you can to take a photo on a tripod of the illuminated negative, filling as much of the frame as possible. Might as well take a few dozen. The Negative Lab Pro website has tips for this–use RAW, set a sharp aperture, set manual exposure so that the light source alone just barely blows out your histogram (the film will bring it back down).
Use the focus peaking feature of your camera, with the display zoomed in, to ensure you manually focus perfectly.
Once you have this, import to Lightroom and follow the steps from NLP’s tutorial to convert the negatives to photos.
At this point, you want to see if you can get something that looks like photos. If you think it’s going in the right direction then go for the gear.
Pork Rind is right–this is not as good as a commercial drum scanner, but it is good enough for posting to social media, sharing with friends, and keeping in your own collection. The real differences only appear when you start pixel peeping or doing side-by-side comparisons with the drum-scanned photos (contrast is a common difference).
Here’s a typical example of one of my scans.
This is good enough to post online and do whatever I want, except maybe printing wall-sized posters.
It was on 35mm Kodak Gold 200
I like that it has a negative-advance knob, which the NS Basic Kit doesn’t have.
I’m working, so I could only take a quick look. It looks like copy stands are expensive! Except for the homemade ones. Still, if I get the NS stand from B&H and the DigitalIZA, I can save ten bucks.
Unfortunately, this is a small house. I don’t have space for a darkroom, let alone a lightroom. 
That’s the program I was trying to remember. Thanks.
That’s the immediate plan. I took some film to the local shop a couple of weeks ago, and it’s going to be at least a couple more weeks before I get it back. While they have to send film out for developing, I think they said they scan in-house. So if I can process my own B&W, I can take the negatives there and (I hope) not have to wait a month. (I think I found a quicker lab for colour, that does business by mail.)
Do you have a tripod? A copy stand is nice but a tripod and a bubble level will get you there just fine.
I probably also lean towards using either a cable release, the camera is self timer, or one of the wireless shutter releases. Even a sturdy copy standard or tripod has a little bit of motion