Of course, not news but negs.
On Friday I sent the Olympus OM-1n that @romansperson gave me in for repairs, and the Pentax SV and the K1000 in for CLA. Garry’s received them Monday. I’ve just received the invoice, and an email saying that all three have been completed. Garry says he’ll have them in the mail today, so I should have them soon. 
My near-mint Canon FTb came yesterday. Since I don’t have a mercury battery nor, yet, the converter, I put a 1.5v in and just now took it out to the catio.
With the apertures set to f/5.6 and the ISOs set to 200, both the Nikon FE and the Olympus OM-2 chose between 1/30 and 1/60 sec on one place, and 1/60 sec on the other one. Since the Canon has a 1.5v battery in it, I set the ISO to 100. At f/5.6 I had to set the shutter speed to 1/15 sec to put the needle in the middle. I also took a reading with my Minolta IV F light meter on the two spots. I don’t know to set the meter to display a shutter speed for a given aperture, or even if it can to that, but it gave me f/5.6 when I set the shutter speed to 1/30 sec.
So the cameras agree and the Minolta light meter kind-of agrees. I did order the 1.55v to 1.3v converter, so I’ll try that in the FTb when it comes. But the light meter in the FTb is so far away from the other two cameras, I think a recalibration is in order. Glazer’s Camera in Seattle says they can recalibrate the meter to read correctly with a 1.55v battery.
Here’s a picture of Wynona Ryder as ‘Lydia Deetz’ in Beetlejuice. She’s holding a Nikon FE2 with a Nikon Speedlite SB-15.
I don’t do flash photography, but I do have flashes for my cameras. In the case of the Nikons, I have a Speedlite SB-28. Per the manual, it is compatible with me FM2n and FM3a. It’s also compatible with the FE2… only I don’t have an FE2. I have the older FE. The manual mentions the SB-10.
Since I have little understanding of flash photography, and without having to study a bunch of manuals (for the FE, FM2n, FM3a, and SB-28), can anyone offer any tips? Like, can I use the SB-28 with the FE?
Sure, it will work. Some of the advanced features around TTL metering and range finding probably won’t work, but good old manual flash is right there for you.
And as a refresher, in the days prior to TTL metering of flash, you’d look up the guide number for a particular flash. The guide number represents its strength in some sort of units that I don’t know what they are.
But at any rate, imagine that your flash has a guide number of 100 and you look to see that you are 10 feet away from the subject you want lit, that means you shoot at 100÷10 or f10.
Guide number of 60 and a 12 foot distance? f5 or thereabouts.
Thanks for that. The last time I used a flash on a 35mm SLR was at a house party in the '80s, using an Olympus OM-4. The pictures turned out well, but I’m sure the flash and the auto exposure on the camera were talking to each other.
Also note that the shutter speed almost doesn’t matter in this case. It really only affects the non-flash exposure components of your scene.
Your camera, unless it has a leaf shutter, will have some maximum sync speed. If you exceed that shutter speed, the way the shutter curtains move means that some part of the film will still be covered during the flash event, leading to dark bars on the image.
Below that max sync speed, you could pick a really slow shutter speed to capture more of the ambient components of the scene, possibly with some motion blur. A faster shutter speed will isolate the subject from the background by picking up relatively little ambient lighting.
The SV, K1000, and OM-1n came back from CLA today. I’ve had this strap sitting in a bag for four years. It has a nice vintage look to it, so I put it on the SV.
@Johnny_L.A , for developer, I’d recommend going with a one-shot developer (i.e. something you mix a little of and discard after using) instead of something that you store in premixed stock solution. One-shot works better for the hobbyist lifestyle in my opinion since hobbyists tend to do things in bursts rather than a steady flow of work.
Currently I use HC-110, available at B&H or Amazon.
Whatever you use, go to the Massive Dev Chart and read up on it.
For example, if I look up “Kodak Tri-X 400” and “HC-110” I get this chart:
https://www.digitaltruth.com/devchart.php?Film=Kodak+Tri-X+400&Developer=HC-110%25&mdc=Search&TempUnits=C&TimeUnits=D
Read up on the various popular dilutions and pick one you like. For HC-110, I’d suggest dilution B. From the notes link, we see “Dilution B is 1+31 from concentrate”.
They have a handy Volume Mixer link on the left side, and you can use that to figure out the right one-shot mix.
For example, for a standard Paterson tank with one roll of 35mm I’ll use 350ml. Put in “1 + 31” as concentration, “350” as target volume, and it will reply with “11ml + 339ml”
Just add a few ml of 68F water to a grad cylinder then add the 11ml of concentrate, then fill to the 350ml mark in your grad cylinder with water at 68F.
Then look on the chart to find the ISO you shot at (not the ISO the film is rated at). You will see many for Dilution B, going from 200 up to 6400, so that’s how you would push/pull. I see two lines for 400 and pick the first one. It says 4.5-6 minutes, so I just go for 5 minutes.
This stuff is kind of loosy-goosy. Until you start messing with C41 color chemistry you can’t really mess up your film too bad. You can have the temperature off by several degrees and your times off by a few minutes and still get usable negatives.
With color, you really do need to run a tight ship, doing everything in a 102F bath.
For fixer I use Ilford’s Rapid Fix. It works for film and paper, so I like it.
Wetting agent–I use photo flow.
That’s about it.
And while you are assembling your film development kit, I’d recommend grabbing some old developed film and starting your scanning experiments to find how you want to best handle that end of the process.
Looking forward to seeing your first roll!
Well, that was confusing. [NB: Just got out of bed at six, I’ve only had one cuppa joe, and I’m being distracted by work.]
That was one of the confusing things. I was like, ‘Wait. Tri-X 400 is ASA 400. Why is it saying it’s something else?’ But why are there nine rows for ASA 400?
This was confusing too, until I looked at a note and found the ratio. I’m guessing ‘4.5-6’ is the time in minutes that the film is in the developer. I did watch a video over the weekend that showed a guy mixing liquid developer with water. I think it went like this: ‘You need 30 [units] of solution, so subtract the amount of developer from the total, and that’s how much water you use.’ Or something like that. I’ll have to find it again. It was either from Analog Resurgence (43 minutes) or B&H Photo Video (6:38). Probably the former. I don’t have time to watch them right now though because I’m supposed to be working.
You are correct that hobbyists – for any hobby – tend to go in spurts. It’s certainly true for me, and I have a lot of hobbies. Photography involves actually, you know, going out and taking pictures. Many subjects up here are not really interesting to me, so I have to go elsewhere. Hard to do sometimes, when your wife is a homebody. 
In any case, using liquid chemicals sounds like they would be easier to use. I dislike dissolving sugar in water for the hummingbird feeder, and that doesn’t need to be as precise as mixing specific solutions. (I got an A in Chemistry, but it was not my favourite class.) Any recommendations for specific liquid chemicals (Developer, Fixer, and Wetting agent)?
I’ve searched (but not researched) negative scanners at Amazon. I think what I’ll do is develop first, and have the negs scanned at the local shop until I get that down. Then I can look for a scanner.
Me too.
In other news, I pulled that strap out of my bag o’ photo stuff and found an Olympus T32 flash. Looks like it is custom made for my OM-2. I don’t do flash, but I should learn how to. Up here at the 49th Parallel the Sun is low a lot of the year; and that means shooting into it if I want the bay in the background. It would be good for fill… If I can find someone willing to have their picture taken.
Oh my, yes. If you’re not doing consistently high volumes of developing, reusing dev and setting up a replenishing schedule is hard and fails probably as much as it works.
Conversely, reusing fixer is easy. It goes bad more slowly and the amount of time to add per roll is straightforward. Even simpler is to do a snip test before each darkroom session. You snip a small piece of the leader off and drop it in your fixer in daylight. Watch to see how long it takes for the film to clear. Double that amount of time is your fix time for the actual roll.
When the snip test takes more than 2x the time that fresh fixer took, your solution is toast, mix a new batch.
You can’t really over-fix negatives, it’s a ‘done-to-completion’ process. Only risk is if you leave it in for a really long time. Film emulsion gets softer as it sits in water and there’s some eventual point down the line where it becomes super easy to damage.
One thing I would recommend: when people say to let your film rinse for 10 minutes, do it. My first few rolls I was like “Wow, 1 minute in and they look clean…let’s get some rinse agent in and pull them out!”
The problem is that the additional rinse time is not about today’s scanning; it is about removing all of the fixer for archival longevity.
I don’t know if my first rolls are slowly degrading, but these days I just leave the water running into the open Paterson tank for about 10 minutes while I watch YouTube videos.
(NB: This is about fixer in film; fixer in paper is its own subject, and I haven’t dabbled in fiber-based papers precisely because of the huge wash times needed to get the fixer out)
This is what I use:
Kodak HC-110
Ilford Rapid Fixer
Kodak Photo-Flo
Looks like about 80 bucks + tax and shipping for enough to develop several dozen rolls.
If I find the motivation this weekend I’ll shoot a roll and do a 10-minute or so video of soup-to-nuts developing the roll using the bare essentials, explaining the thin path from beginning to end rather than diving into details. Sometimes that’s easier to work with.
(No worries about this being any burden–I really like making videos, and new topics are welcome).
Due to the way my darkroom is laid out (running water not accessible, but jugs of water are) I use the Ilford spiral tank method. I’ve never heard anyone say that the results are not great.
Note : For spiral tank use, the following method of washing is recommended. This method of washing is faster, uses less water yet still gives negatives suitable for long term storage.
After fixing, fill the spiral tank with water at the same temperature, +/– 5o°C (9oF), as the processing solutions and invert it five times. Drain the water away and refill. Invert the tank ten times. Once more drain the water away and refill. Finally, invert the tank twenty times and drain the water away.
Great recommendations. As a long-time user of the T-Max developer, I have come to love the Ilford DD-X developer as it has similar characteristics, and at least until recently, it was easy to get locally. Both T-Max and DD-X are specifically designed for t-grain films like Kodak’s T-Max and Ilford’s Delta films. Realistically I probably can’t tell the difference between those, HC-110 and D-76.
But people that shoot a lot, and refine their workflow to wring every bit of performance out of their film often have strong opinions about developers as they do each have a slightly different “look”.
That would be nice. I tend to learn better in a classroom environment, so virtually ‘being there’ is often better for me than long texts. The more videos, the better! I did watch the shorter video from B&H a few days ago. I haven’t had time to watch the 43-minute one.
I appreciate it!
I’ve added those to my B&H shopping cart - Total $107 with a $7 funnel. (Incidentally, I love B&H. They still have the invoice for the Nikon FM3a body I bought in 2007.)
I’ve watched the 43-minute video. It sounds easy, but I sure wish I had a local mentor. Now I’ve found a 33-minute video…
Update. I’ve ordered the following from Amazon:
- 1000ml Darkroom Chemical Storage Bottles
- Graduated beakers
- Patterson developing tank
- 35mm cassette opener
I’ve also ordered the chemicals recommended by @minor7flat5 . Well, they’re in my cart anyway. Being Friday, I can’t actually place the order until after sundown in NYC tomorrow.
I removed the changing bag from my shopping cart because I have one as a backup for 16mm film loading.