Brownie Hawkeye w/ flipped lens: St. Roch Cemetery in the Bywater

 

7564NEG0007, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

 

7564NEG0004, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

 

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7564NEG0008, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

 

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first color roll shot in the holga

Nothing really amazing here. Basically I just wanted to see what a color roll looked like in the Holga, especially before I went on vacation. I kind of forgot about this roll actually, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it in the mail yesterday.

first roll from the holga

Umm, apparently this was a roll of black & white? I KNEW THAT!

It’s harder to tell with B&W, but the light leakage appears to be manageable. Other than taping the clips that hold the back on, I really didn’t tape the camera when I shot this roll.

I think this one is actually suited to black & white.

shinn park & arboretum: diana F+, 120 film

I got this roll back yesterday, and most of it’s no good. It looks like it was exposed; which I was afraid of, because when I removed it from the camera it wasn’t as tightly wound as it should be. It was sort of bulging on one side. I’m not incredibly disappointed, because the park was actually kind of dull when I went; pretty much everything had already bloomed. The photos I took a few years ago when I went in April were a lot prettier. I just hope that the problem was with the roll of film (which was pretty ancient), and not the camera, because I will be veeery upset if my Diana is busted.

Anyway, here are a few that I was able to salvage with a little editing:

centerville pioneer cemetery, diana f+, medium format film

I got the roll I shot at the cemetery back from the developer last night. Seems like every time I use Dale Labs, they’re just a little bit quicker. I gotta look into Swan Photo though, because they’re actually in-state. But if their prices are way high, forget it.

october is prime season for bad movies

All done! I think the next one is Joseph and his coat of many colors.

I went to Ritz on Saturday, to get the wedding film and see what scanning services they offer. Answer: None. That really annoys and confuses me. There are people in my LJ photo communities that live out in the boonies of like, Oklahoma, who can get their medium format film scanned. I have 2 choices, basically:

1. I can get a print of every single negative made, at a minimum of $0.65 each. I have 10 rolls of film, 6 with 16 shots and 4 with 12. That’s going to be a huge waste of $$$, because obviously not all of them are going to be worth keeping. Or,
2. I can get each roll put on a CD (which they’d have to send out for), at $13 a roll.

I’m probably going to go with option #2, because that way I can upload them to flickr and get prints from them anytime I want. I’m irritated though, because I got the Diana weeks ago, and I still haven’t had any prints made. I have to pay my rent this week and I don’t have a spare $130 lying around, so I have to wait until I get paid again, then wait for the CDs, and it’s going to be another month before I have anything to show for my effort. Aaargh!

i lose my medium format virginity

Negative of a Chinese neon sign

I got my first batch of medium format film back yesterday! And it only cost $43 and change for 5 rolls, so either the price was less than I thought, or the discount I get with my membership bigger.

I haven’t ordered any prints yet, because obviously I need to go through them and see what’s worth printing. But I got a price list, and the prices are very reasonable. You can order them matted too, which is good because it’s almost impossible to find 3X3 or 6X6 ready-cut mattes nowadays. The turnaround time is kind of long, 2-3 weeks, but I was expecting that.

Some of them aren’t that great, wonky exposure times, but I was expecting there to be a steep learning curve at first, so I’m not disappointed. Now that I’ve learned the camera, I’m going to remove the frame and start shooting 12 exposures per roll, instead of the smaller 16 that I have been. The flaws and distortions–especially the vignetting–tend to be more noticeable in the bigger negatives. (Which normally would be a bad thing, except that’s pretty much the point of toy cameras.) But while I was still learning to use the camera, it made more sense to be conservative with my film.

weird graffiti and medium format film

This is one of the weirder pieces of graffiti I’ve ever seen, especially in Fremont.

So I finally got around to going down to Ritz Cameras with my film on Saturday. It’s in that monstrous shopping center, Pacific Commons, and it’s a pain in the ass to get to because it’s as far away from my end of town as you can get and still be IN town.

Plus, the center itself is fucking boring. I had to wait almost an entire hour for the bus, and there’s literally NOTHING worth killing an hour in. No Target, no Michael’s, there isn’t even a Borders! Half the places are restaurants and the anchor stores are all dull crap like Kohl’s and Lowe’s and freaking Costco. Feh. I wish there was a Ritz in Union City Landing. It’s easier to get to from my house AND it’s more interesting.

Anyway, they can’t print medium format at all, not even proofsheets. Which makes no sense to me, because you don’t need a special enlarger for proofsheets, you just lay the negatives directly on the paper and shine the light from any old empty enlarger on it for a few seconds. So I have to decide which ones I want printed (they send it out to a 3rd-party contractor) by looking at the negatives, which kind of sucks.

But their development service isn’t bad. It’s only a 24-hour turnaround time (I didn’t have time to go get them tomorrow, I think I’ll leave work a couple hours early tomorrow and go then) and with the membership I signed up for, only $10 per roll. The manager said he would also see about getting me a discount on printing, but of course he couldn’t promise because the contractor can charge whatever he wants. But if he’s interested in maintaining a good relationship with the company he might consider it.

I’d really like to start printing myself. The problem with that is that I’m fairly certain you need a special enlarger to print medium format, and I doubt any of the local community colleges have them in their darkrooms. Still, it’s worth looking into, maybe after the holidays.

stitching, film processing, and really weird spam

So yesterday afternoon I made it my mission to find a place that processes medium format film. Logically, I knew that it had become a niche film, especially among amateurs who don’t do their own processing. But it was still around when I was a kid, although mostly amongst people my grandparents’ age who never upgraded to 35mm. And you could still get it processed at most places.

Well, I’m apparently a dinosaur, because when I started with the logical places (Target, Longs), they didn’t even know what I was talking about. I would ask them if they processed medium format film and get “Med…i…um…form…at?” in return, like someone parrotting an exotic foreign phrase.

So after a couple of those calls, I decided to stick with camera stores. Ritz Cameras develops it, but doesn’t print it. However, they do have a third-party contractor that will print it. And they can make me a proof sheet, so I can more easily choose which ones are worth printing. I didn’t ask how much it cost or what the turnaround is; I suspect it will be neither cheap nor fast, but I really want to do this.

At some point I may look into enrolling in some non-matriculating classes at Chabot or Ohlone so I can use their photo lab. And I never did learn how to process color film (B&W only), so I’d have to take a class for that.

In other news, this is quite possibly the most bizarrely random spam subject line to have ever landed in my filter (click to get a bigger version):

Is “Plaster Wall” some white rapper I’ve never heard of?