So I have rounded up all the ingredients for My first attempt at Caffenol C Film Developer.  What is Caffenol C You ask? Well in essence it is developing your precious rolls of film in Laundry Detergent and Coffee! Yup, Homemade, green-ish developer, for super cheap!

This is the recipe I will be starting with (from the folks at Digital Truth)

Caffenol-C film developer
Water  8 oz (237ml)
Arm & Hammer Washing Soda 2½ tsp (level)
Vitamin C powder ¼ tsp (level)
Instant Coffee Crystals 4 tsp (slightly rounded, NOT decaf)
The Fixer is regular Ilford Film Fixer

I will be documenting this experiment in detail and I will let you know how it all goes. This is however nothing but a teaser because I doubt that I will have a chance to get to this till sometime next week.  Because it is a crazy weekend of awesome this weekend! It is Tanya & Barry nuptials day, where I plan on drinking heavily and groping my wife inappropriately in public. Perhaps I will make a drunken spectacle of myself by making some sort of heart felt slurred speech in which I profess nothing in particular over and over till someone (most likely my wife) hooks me with the proverbial cane and tears me away from the podium!

It will be fun! :)

More colour from my trip to the camera show last week. I heart New West for its old broken buildings. I fear that they are going to “clean up” the neighborhood and build shinny new uninteresting condos before I get a chance to explore them all. I suppose some sort of concerted effort on my part may be in order. :)

I enjoy that almost all the A’s are missing of some of the signs. I wonder if they were stolen or if there wasn’t enough A’s in the letters that they used? :)

DUDE! He deletes a horse! Then he makes it prance about like it’s a mother fucking unicorn!!!

Looking at the last few weeks I think I have been going crazy with the Black & White! So I think I will jazz things up with a bit of colour!

These are from my long walk from the commercial Skytrain station to the PNE yesterday!

I walked around the block to take this one.

I wonder how many times this wall has been tagged and cleaned and tagged and cleaned again.

In addition to being world Pinhole Camera Day, yesterday was also the Camera Show & Swap out in Burnaby. I decided to get up early and grab the long train out to Loughheed Mall instead of driving mostly so I could take photos on the way. While the show itself didn’t present any super awesome deals, the train did provide some awesome photos :)

This guys was seriously hitchin a ride on the skytrain. He had his thumb out until the train audibly started slowing down :)

I meandered out to New Westminster as well on the way back where I found many awesome photos. After, I went to commercial station and walked up to meet up with Miranda at K&E’s. So many photos but for another time. Off to collect peeps from airports soon :)

In addition to being international pinhole day, Sunday is also the Vancouver show & Swap at the Cameron Recreation Centre in Burnaby near North Road

I am thinking i may get up early and hop the skytrain out there for the early bird morning thing :)

Yesterday morning I went to drop of some redscale sprocket pinhole film that I took to the lab.  Gearing up for World Pinhole day this weekend I needed to fire a test roll to perfect my pinhole camera. Of course on route I took photos.

I make no apologies for liking the Black & White so much as of late.

I am off to run some errands in a few moments one of which is collecting said film from the lab. Excited I am! :)

So I have this link that is up on the top of the blog called ask the jerk. where people can ask me questions, and if they can’t be answered by doing a google search first I will answer them.

For example Mr R Wiedlin asks I really enjoy your photos. You really capture vibrant colors which I just can’t seem to pull out from my pictures. Do you have any tips, or can recommend resources for getting rich colors from photos, either during shooting, or during editing and cleanup phase?

The number one thing I can say is get your exposures right. A properly exposed photo will always have the best shot at giving you great color.

Second is shoot in the right light. The light will do more to determine if a photo is vibrant or washed out than anything else. It may sound counter intuitive but over cast and rain soaked days are the best to make colour POP! Sunny direct light will wash out the colour and make it look far more bland. Similarly, direct on camera flash will wash out some of your colour as well.

Third thing is simply the time of day that you are shooting. Certain colours are much more vibrant at different times of the day, golden hour (the hour before sunset) didn’t get this name because this is when the money shots are taken, instead when conditions are right red, yellow, & orange colours tend to pop. Similar to that there is what I like to call the post-golden 15 min of Blue. Which is the few minutes after the sun sets but before it is actually dark out when the blues and greens are most vibrant :)

Forth depending what camera you are shooting with there is often a setting for in camera colour profiles. These will let you control things like saturation contrast & color tone. Adjust accordingly.

In the post processing world you can start by correcting any exposure issues, followed by increasing contrast, then lastly if there is not quite the colour Pop you are looking for you can increase the saturation but I would be careful about that particular slider because it is really easy to make your higher saturation colour areas clip (meaning there is only one shade of colour found in a portion of the image as apposed to the a more life like gradient of colour)

I hope this all helps in some way.

I recently have surpassed the 10,000 photos on flickr mark! (only 9,225 if you are not my friend) and in typical jerk fashion they are about as organized as a rugby srum!.  So I thought it best to perhaps pull out all my favorites into a single collection. So check out my 360 favorite flickr photos :)

For those not in the know this Sunday is the 10th anniversary of world pinhole day!

Yup that is right so get your crafting scissors out and start making your pinhole camera now cause i think everyone and there dog needs be out on Sunday taking ridiculously long exposures with camera that are held together with duct tape :)

Need some help or info on making a Pinhole camera?

well You can get instructions for your very own home made camera here!

dippold pinhole camera tutorial, originally uploaded by Dippold.