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Mother's day was coming up and my daughter Ella has been working on a farm at University of California Davis. Ella has been bringing home some wonderful bouquets - and once again she brought home a gorgeous arrangement for her mom. Bouquet of flowers as seen through the cell phone camera Since getting a couple of reels from 20th Century Camera,  I've been itching to shoot more 8x10 and 5x7 film. They have a reel that fits four 8x10 films that fits in my exiting JOBO drum . Since testing on a Unidrum roller, it looks like this reel is real good (punny?!) Closeup of the 3d printed reel from 20th Century Camera My grandfather "Hal" (Milton or M Halberstadt) gave me an (even back then old) Burke & James 8x10 camera, and I broke that out along with a 12" Kodak Commercial Ektar to take one shot of the bouquet.  The camera setup for the shot in our dining room The exposure was 8 seconds wide open (f6.3) on Ilford FP4 Plus (outdated by a couple decades. The B and T

During the Covid Crisis, I'm bunkered down at home unable to use the college lab I manage. So I've been developing film in my films in the laundry room again with my trusty old JOBO tanks. School was wrapping up and a student found a holder with film in them and I offered to process. I can process 12 sheets at a time with my Jobo and I'm lazy, so I try to fill it and use semi-stand. So I took her two  sheets and found a few of mine to process and made a few to at least get close to the capacity of the tank. Also, recently I "repaired" my old Sakai (Toyo) half plate camera that was converted to 4x5. My high school teacher, Vince Bernucci at Independence High School was kind enough to give this to me in the mid 1980's. At some point the ground glass got broken and recently it occurred to me that I had a transplantable one I could replace it with. The bellows was also all squished up, and I sort of managed to partially straighten that out. Unlike some of my camer

If you use an old film camera you may have noticed there's a dial with the abbreviations ASA and right next to it DIN. You likely have already figured out to use ASA where your film says ISO. ISO and ASA are interchangeable. From prehistoric times (ok, since the middle of the 20th century) to the late 1980's ASA was what much of the world used as measure of film sensitivity. The abbreviation stood for American Standards Association. At the same time, the German version of the organization that measured film sensitivity was abbreviated DIN or Deutsches Institut für Normung meaning German institute for Standards. Germany was and to some degree still is an influential player in photographic innovation and manufacture.  DIN wasn't a linear measure. Doubling of sensitivity was shown by adding 3 to the number. For example 21 DIN (=100 ASA/ISO) and 24 DIN (=200 ASA/ISO.) DIN and ASA ISO are equal at 12. So: ISO 12 = DIN 12  ISO 25 = DIN 15 ISO 50 = DIN 18 ISO 10

I was photographing details of cameras I'm working on selling (and others I'm not selling) on my new website UsedFilmCameras.com. The resulting photos reminded me- I doubt many people wouldn't know what the numbers, marks, and colors mean. So I thought it would be fun to start a little series explaining all that stuff means. So here goes: Here's a shutter dial from a lovely Nikon F3 given to me from my old friends John & Phuong (not for sale.) So the numbers in white are fractions of a second. That's one of the things that makes photography confusing! The red number "60" is the same as the white numbers..... except: 1/60th of a second is the shortest speed this camera can sync with flash. The orange numbers aren't fractions. They are whole numbers. If you meant to expose for 1/8th of a second and moved the dial to the orange 8 you'd ruin your exposure. Bulb is an old term that now means that the shutter remains open as long as

ORWO Neopan Film Data Sheet Long ago, in a galaxy far away- well actually it was 1987 in what was the German Democratic Republic, I began a love affair, albeit with a film. Traveling on a day visa for the first time to the GDR with my friend Christof and his sister, I paid the DM5 for a day visa and exchanged the mandatory DM20 for the local currency, Mark der DDR. Though M20 was roughly worth US$8 it was hard to spend. The stereotypes of the East Block were that of empty shops and long lines. But at least in the capital of the GDR, neither of those issues were apparent. What was apparent, was that the prices of things were drastically different. Many of the day-to-day things that consumers would want were much less expensive. I ate and drank far more than I should have. If I remember correctly, a beer at a sit down cafe on "the Alex" was M0,70 (ca. US$ 0.30) or so. I had perhaps the best ice-cream in my life from a street vendor for a few cents (and later again a

Tmax (TMY-2) defect example Tmax (TMY-2) defect example- close up of backing (see the 10) and mottled pattern I bought a bunch of different emulsions about a year ago to try out in my Mamiya C-330.  I got some Fomapan in 100, 200, and 400 speeds (under Freestyle's Arista.edu label,) a pro pack of my old favorite Fuji Acros, and a propack of both T-Max 100 and 400. Just having developed a roll of the T-Max 400 I had a bit of a surprise. The good part of the surprise was the new emulsion's tonality looked great when I pulled it from the hangar. But on closer inspection I was a bit concerned. I thought I could see some modeling or splotchy pattern. I convinced myself it was because I was looking holding the lupe to a window and I must be wrong. But a quick scan on a Epson Perfection v750 scanner confirmed my fears. I figured at first I must have done something wrong - perhaps my development technique was to blame? But further examination led to a different conclus