So right before the crazy of Culture Crawl we headed out to the west coast for some scouting and what not.  Here are some Redscale images from Ucluelet

My favourite is this last one.

Here are three more photos from the first roll of black & White that I have run thought the Yashica C.

This is the train yard in front of my house.

These are actually my front steps.

An old Train Caboose from Westlock alberta.

Again it is a crappy scanner so there are blacks and there are whites and not much in between :)

Last week I developed my first roll of Black & White film from the Yachica C down in our darkroom. (side note.. It has been a really long time since I have developed my own film I nearly forgot how to load it) I am quite happy with the results. The DOF with this camera is very shallow, more then I would expect from a medium format f/3.8 so sharp focus will be a bit challenging, but the viewfinder is quite bright and it does have a built in loupe so I should be able to get the swing of it in another roll or two. The bokah is certainly peerrrrttyyy though so a few out of focus will be well worth it. These were just quickly scanned in with my Canon flatbed so the photos are laking in the mid-tones, they are full of moiré where the negatives touch the flatbed, and they are scratched all to hell. :) I am excited to get an Epson V750 and an air compressor installed downstairs in the darkroom. Together they should make short work of scanning in the future.

These are some photos of my wonderful Honda CB400T that I am reasonably certain your sick of hearing me talk about, but it is what it is.

Yup this summer has gone by so crazy fast that it seem like last week that I made this little film using macro lenses with my camera, but it was instead February.

Way back in the day when I was going to be the next awesome filmmaker, long before there was even high definition this is what would pass for a complex and beautifully done art film. It would have required expensive cameras and macro lenses and a larger lighting kit to provide enough light for the special expensive camera, not even mentioning the hours of computer rendering. :)

Seems so much easier to do now :)

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! :)

These are a couple of fairly old photos that I have been meaning to share for a long time time now. These were shot with my Pentacon Six TL from the windows of my old studio.

Why are you posting this now you ask?

Well, our new building has a 7000 square foot amenities building in it. In this building is a wood working shop, a metal working shop, a gym, music spaces (this is where My Friend Lisa Jams), a huge pottery area with a couple kilns & four wheels, and last but hardly least a ridiculously awesome but totally under utilized darkroom/photo user group.

What does this have to do with anything you ask? Well yesterday I officially became the head of the photo user group. Meaning that I am in charge of moving the photo group forward, running workshops for film, darkroom use, intro to medium format and more stuff! Exciting right! Well if you are me I am excited!

I can hear what you are all saying to yourselves out there in some highly sarcastic tone… “Great. Super. You are excited, whoopty dooo, thanks for rubbing in that you’re all Mr. Awesome for living in a really cool space with all this awesome cool stuff to use. Wow! you really are kind of a jerk.”

Why it is cool for you? Is this…. As I get stuff prepared for this thing that I have to do I will talk about those same things here. So basically you are reaping the benefits of my complete inability to procrastinate. however now I must go forth to collect many hard drives from the hard drive store.

Today I was drug out to a rummage sale of sorts at the Croatian Cultural Centre. At said rummage sale I discovered this beauty which I managed to haggle the seller down a little bit for.

It is a feature rich SLR for being made in 1982. It has shutters from Bulb to 1/1000, 2 stops of exposure compensation, a wicked metering system, & if I was feeling particularly lazy Auto mode. It is remarkably both small & light for an older SLR camera. It looks as though it was hardly used and it even came with a nifty leather case. :) I will drop of the first roll shot though it in the AM to Custom Color.

Yup it came this morning :)

After charging up a battery I took the video for a spin :)

It isn’t so shabby when it comes to Low light work as well.

I kinda like it for a Prosumer camera :)

I am headed up a mountain right now to play in what is hopefully awesome snow, but I also wanted to share some of yesterdays much anticipated film glory. It will be a day or so before it is all scanned in because I am an idiot and insist on scanning everything in at super high quality. It takes about and hour and a half to scan three 6×7 frames or 12 35mm frames and I have like 5 rolls from yesterday and I am behind another four or five from last week, so you can do the math. But I am super impressed with the cross process of the Kodak Portra 800. It was exactly what i was hoping for I just hope the 400 and 160 give me the same level of awesome. The tungsten Cross Process i am not so wild about. I think the next rolls i shoot of it I will just stick to regular process and shoot in the daylight. I have no examples yet but soon. For now i am off to cypress for snowboarding glory.

Today I shot with a model named Alicia whom I have worked with a number of times, but always on standard ordinary commercial catalog shoots. Today I really wanted to play with all my film cameras and such so 85% of the shoot was shot on old cameras. This is a just a smattering of the few digital/Polaroid shots that I took today. I will get more up when the film gets all developed.

Some Canon 5d shots

These are from the Polaroid Land Camera shooting Fuji FP100C

Type 600 shot on the SX70

More Polaroid Land Camera shooting Fuji FP100C

This is the analog product of the day. We have just about every (good) kind of film format known to man :) 120, 35, Type 600, Pack film, Type 55, etc…

Anywho I am off to a pub for food.

So like M I to am going to participate in NaBloPoMo! It shouldn’t be hard because I already blog nearly every day, but nearly is not good enough. So here we are! NaBloPoMo post #1.



So here are some of the first shots to be developed from the new Mamiya DSX1000. I love, Love Love, this camera.

Yup well a while back Coaxial and I went to The Frog and had a few beers… well truth be told we closed the place out. Once we were ejected from said bar we decided that because we were the better part of completely loaded, we should go and take random night time photos. All hand held of course because we didn’t plan this or anything so neither of us had anything that even looked like a tripod.  I loaded up the Canon EOS 3 with some crazy old (circa 2003) Fuji 1600 that I had kicking about, and together with the f/1.2 God lens I was able to do a decent job at this drunkin night time photo wandering. I love the grain of the 1600! It is so authentically gritty :)

These are some select shots from my first attempt at shooting some home spooled rolls of redscale film.  Redscale, for those that are not in the know, is when you shoot your film with the wrong side out. So instead of shooting the emulation side toward the subject like normal, you flip it over and shoot through the film backing.  You need to shoot your film about 2 stops over (for example ISO 400 film then becomes ISO 100 or another example is ISO 100 film would need to be shot at ISO 25) to compensate for the light lost getting though this backing. You can read about it here.  I have made up a few more rolls to shoot in the coming weeks. In fact I am going to try some different types of film in order to find the best one to use.

These shots are from an old (possibly expired) roll of Kodak Gold 200, but I have made up a roll of Kodak Portra, as well as buying some crap Kodak & Fuji 400.  It is super easy to package up yourself, here are some instructions.  However Instead of ruining a roll to repackage it as they suggest I would suggest unraveling the roll in a dark bag/room, then flipping it over, and reattaching it. I personally use double sided tape but any type of scotch tape will do nicely.  doing it this way the DX coding on the film canister matches what you are shooting (although you have to manually set the ISO anyway, but at least your auto camera will know how many exposures you are supposed to have)

If you don’t have a dark bag aka: changing bag and you dabble in this film mod thing often I would recommend getting one.  They are super cheap and incredibly useful. Get a small one that you can carry with you if needed.

One other word of advice, if you are shooting with an auto advancing camera, I would also suggest stop and manually rewind your roll on the second last photo, so there is less of a chance of a jam when you do rewind the film.  As you would no doubt notice when you make the film it can require a bit of wiggling to get the film to start going back in to the canister and unless your camera probably isn’t going to be good at wiggling if you advance past your tape job.