Pig Sty Avenue

bulb for Kodak flash holder type B , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

I've been missing my original Ilford Sporti, but hip-hooray, there it was in an old suitcase I had a shufty in yesterday.  And, forsooth, a film in it, which turned out to be Adox CHS 25 Art, with three exposures left.  So I used them up with the wee National electronic flash to see if it was synching...  Devd it tonight: 20mins in ID11 1:1.  The whole roll is underexposed, from the negs, (what was I thinking of, putting 25iso film into the Sporti?  Hello?)  But the last three frames contain no discernible image, so, like the Sporti 4, it's not synching. Heigh ho.  I can live with this.  The theory is that these cameras will synch, with a flashgun. Actually, I was looking for flash bulbs when I found the Sporti.  And I found 22 PF1Bs.  Which was nice.  They fit a National flashgun I've also got, which has a capacitor.  I've ordered the  battery . That's for the Sporti, I also came across a Kodak brand flash gun to use w...

The sun was fairly low on the horizon - 7ish on midsummer evening in Scotland, subject looking west.   So you'd want a bit less light than that.   Going from the top: 20ft, 15ft, 10ft, 7ft, 5ft -  the focus looks at its best at 5ft, so good for (very) lo-fi portraits.  Lost three exposures trying the flash, again - it's clearly not going to synch.  I discovered an annoying feature of the Sporti 4: getting the old spool into the right hand side ready for the next roll is bloody fiddly.  

Gathering intelligence on flashbulbs:   Start here .

The processing of that roll last night seems to have worked out fine - though I did some unashamed post-processing to get rid of the worst of Velvia xpro's orange-rosiness. And I don't much like the photos - just people going by in a parade, boring, really.  I've uploaded them all as a reminder to stop random snapping. As I've been on a development bender this week, I've been thinking a lot about photography and what I'm going to do with it now that I've got a nice full camera bag, decent tripod, and a fair amount of technical know how. I started to formulate some ideas a few days ago , and I've gotten a bit further now. Here we are: Conceptualize: get an idea for a set of up to a couple of dozen photos, a situation, a theme, whatever. Visualize how they're going to look. Choose the best camera for the idea and the vision. Choose the best film, ditto.  Click, click, click... Keep in mind when clicking the WHOLE frame. Involve the sub...

The only funny thing I noticed when mixing up the chemicals was that the clear-ish liquid from the blix, (it came in two 200ml bottles in the kit, one dark and the other light, presumably one's bleach and the other's fix), had formed a thick crust on the outside of its wee plastic bottle.  I'd mixed the blix before I noticed that. I remembered the feeling of initial surprise about, actually, how straightforward C41 deving is.  The whole process takes about 20 minutes and reminds me of the water play we got in Infant School - apparently meaningful sloshing about of liquids from one container to another, with a handy sink of nicely warm water.  Meanwhile, listening to Radio 4's take on Ulysses. What's not to like? I pre-soaked the film in 38C tap water for 5 mins, (don't think I've done that before?) and the wash that came out was the most wonderful purple.  Thereafter it went all according to the instructions, without calamity.  The negs came out a n...

Down to the last two exposed rolls in the fridge, both colour 120.  I was disgusted to realize that one of them's Velvia for xpro, (if I wanted all those horrible oranges I'd go back to digital), but I'll use it to remind myself how to do colour, because it's been a while and the other roll's Portra, and I want to make a good job of that - I've never used it before, let alone deving it. Digging down through the layers of the Avenue's archaeology I find that I first did C41 in October 2009.  I bought a litre kit of Tetenal, and made up half a litre of developer, blix and stabilizer.  I continued to use it throughout 2010, though I can't easily work out now how many rolls I did, three I pooled in DIY Color on Flickr, but I probably did more.  Mostly slide for xpro, but some straight C41, too. During 2011 I was mostly in Shanghai, and just went to the Lomography shop there for any processing.  At the end of that year, though, I xproed a roll of Provia...

2012 1969? The first roll has turned out better than I could have expected. Out of twelve exposures, a couple were too underexposed, a couple more (taken on a dreich day on the Isle of Arran) are somewhat dark, but the rest are fine.  2 or 3 seconds indoors seems to work, too. On the 2012 photo, Molly was about 6 ft away from the camera, and she's a bit OOF.  Dad and Grandad are about the same distance in 1969, shot on the same model, and they too are a bit OOF.  So forty odd years have had no effect on the shape of a lens or the laws of physics.  The lamp behind The Bairn is about 10 ft away, and it's fairly crisp.  Even the doll's face is clear, and that's a foot or so deeper than Molly. So the focusing distance is looking like 7ft plus, as a rule of thumb.  In fact, at 10 ft or thereabouts, it's remarkably clear for such a low end camera: the scan's 1600 dpi, and I can read all the lettering on the framed poster by zooming the sc...

There's something that feels just right about a roll of 127 - easily handled, unlike a roll of 36 exposure 35mm, for example which is about 5' 6".  I developed the roll of 80s I'd put through the Brownie Reflex tonight. Quite a moment.  It was my first camera, (not this actual camera, God knows where that one got to, this one came off eBay for a fiver, on the upside of our globalized age).  I'm fairly sure that this photo was taken with it, and this one  , and this one , (both stupidly cropped when I scanned them, before I knew better). I dev'd it in the ID11 with bromide.  I gave it 20 mins at 22C, which was pushing it somewhat.  From the negs the exposures look lovely and crisp.  There are four or five from a day trip to Arran, and the rest I took the other week of The Bairn in the sitting room.  I used the tripod and B setting for those, 2 or 3 seconds.  I'll scan and upload them tomorrow.

These were a bit underexposed, but that's down to my sunny-16 miscalculations, no doubt.  A pretty good show for film that's nearly 40 years old .  That P bromide is the bollocks for fog.  Rolls 4 and 5 of the OFP, I'm going to do in the F, such venerable emulsion deserves a meter.

Glasgow Subway, 2009.  This sort of disgraceful behaviour, taking photos of your family, will be illegal if SPT get their way .  They say that this will reflect"existing policies", and furthermore it's required for "security reasons" . What security reasons?  And what brought about the existing policy?  Another argument is that it's the norm elsewhere.  It is against by-laws on the Tyneside Metro, I've been told , though that never stopped me . It's like a disease, treating every one as a terrorist, looking for excuses to molest the law-abiding.  Don't get me fucking started.

The Old Film Project looks to have gone very quiet, but I've just gotten around to developing the third roll, (subject "People", a cinch when most of your photos have people in them). If you don't have an attention span of several years, the OFP arose when whitenviro  kindly decided to give away 400 rolls of Efke 100, expired in 1977, to applicants around the globe, in batches of five rolls. In the group we debated and agreed on themes for each roll. I did the first roll in a 127 camera, to get sprocket holes, the next in the FED2.  This third roll I did in the FED also. This evening, until I'd dev'd it, I couldn't recall when or where I'd shot it, but a quick look at the negs tells me it was the St Patrick's day parade in San Francisco.  I developed it in an ID11 mix, with added potassium bromide to help combat any fogging.  The suggested time for the film was 11 mins at 20C, so in view of its age I gave it 20 mins at 22C. More than half the ...

Untitled-3 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . From a roll of Delta 3200 I put through the F in Shanghai, before it was CLAd. Pushed it to 6400 in Rodinal. (20 mins at 20C, 1+25) Only got a few images, it was a very dark bar. A bit less grainy would have been better, but it's getting there: what we call Shanghai Dirty. I've opened a set on Flickr.

Untitled-3 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . However, one good thing has emerged out of a mostly underexposed roll, where there's a lot of black: no dust. The method is to set the shower going a few minutes before I take the film out of the tank; then pin it diagonally between a couple of shelves in the bathroom. And then take a shower. This is significant if your favourite genre is photos with dark backgrounds, where the tiniest dust particles show up brightly in the scan.

Untitled-9 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Most of a roll of NP 1600 I shot at Kelvingrove was underexposed. I should have allowed a couple of stops for the red filter I had on - or maybe not used a filter at all. Also, take more time focusing. Take more time, full stop.

This is where the F would come into its own, nothing else I've got could take pics like these . Film and developer here .

Bicycle Cart People Nanjing Lu , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . OOF, I'd like to say on purpose, but I like the effect - I'll try to do something similar with one of the 127s when I go back out. I like the way the NP has worked with the Rodinal

After a hard day chained to a hot laptop, puzzling over the relationship between functional language constructs, pedagogy, and assessment, it's nice to spend a bit of time in the kitchen shaking a dev tank.  Last night I did a roll of Fuji Neopan in Rodinal and Fixer 24, and I'm going to scan it now.  From the negs, it's a roll I shot in Shanghai a month or two ago on the FED2. The other night I dev'd the roll of 127 I'd put through the Baby Brownie.  Hello.  There was a mark along the edge of the film which looked like a light leak, (which would have been fine), but the rest of it looked as if it hadn't been exposed at all... When I looked again, there were numbers from the backing paper.  I've looked at the camera, and the shutter appears to be going fine.  So I don't know what to think about that.  Pity, because the Baby's such a cute wee camera to use. Meanwhile, for when I get to the bottom of the exposed film mountain, I've been looking...

Medium term memory loss.  As I've come over all 127 the last couple of weeks, I resurrected the Sporti 4, and  was pleased to try out a flash and find that it fired, sans film.  Oh joy.  And then this morning, when digging back into the Avenue, I found - with no sense of deja vu whatsoever - that I'd been here before, almost exactly three years ago, and it wasn't working .  Heigh bloody ho.   As I remember it now, the flash fired, apparently as one clicked the shutter, but must have fired out of synch.  Other posts indicate I went at it with WD40, at some point...  I wrote back in 2009, " What I'm after is a kind of flash-gun look, where the background is in deep shadow, and the foreground overlit. And I want to do that with a very simple camera like the Sporti 4, to get the vignetting and other distortions."  Nothing has changed.  I've got the F for straightforward photography, but a very simple 127 camera, with flash, is the thing. ...

I've got seven or eight films in the fridge, waiting to dev.  I decided to put one in the tank the other night, and dev it tonight, and then I remembered why I've got such a backlog, I've lost - or any rate mislaid - the lovely old Ilford thermometer.   But meanwhile, when looking for a recipe for the Rollei 80s shot in the Baby Brownie I was going to dev, I came across this .