by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 26, 2006 | Photography
Last night I developed my 2nd roll of film, this one went a lot better than the first.
I got the film into the spiral without any hassles at all thanks to some tips on the Flickr “I Shoot Film” group. There are also several other useful resources, a photoset that shows it step by step complimented with some text to describe it and also a very good PDF from Ilford called Processing your first B&W Film.
I am using all Ilford chemicals and film at the moment based on the PDF file above and I am happy with the result so I’ll stick to it I think.
In terms of cost, it’s hard for me to say exactly now since I bought all the actual equipment from Jessops due to the website I got it from screwing me over, if you buy from the right places and do some research all the chemicals and tools you’ll need shouldn’t set you back more than GBP60.
There are some recurring costs for the chemicals, below a little table of costs and estimated amount of film I should be able to develop with each:
| Chemical: |
Cost: |
Expected use: |
| Ilfotec LC 29 Developer |
GBP5.68 |
17 |
| Ilfostop stop bath |
GBP3.36 |
34 |
| Ilford Rapid Fixer
|
GBP6.96 |
17 |
| Ilfotol Wetting agent
|
GBP8.14 |
100s |
Based on the above the cost of each development is around 84p, add to this a fair amount of tap water but that can’t really be quantified in an amount.
Films I have bought till now at GBP2.99 each from places like Jessops, but I am waiting a shipment of 25 rolls of Ilford HP5+ from 7dayshop that cost GBP1.89 each.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 21, 2006 | Photography
I’ve recently blogged about my Kodak Retina Reflex camera and wanting to do some development etc.
I ordered all the needed goodies from http://www.firstcall-photographic.co.uk/ who I at first thought had a good service, I mailed them and they confirmed the order was shipped and should be with me today, at 4pm the ordered arrived incomplete! You’d think if you mail them asking for a update they would tell you they’d only ship half of it. Anyway, so I won’t be using them again in a hurry.
I rushed into London at the 5pm rush hour to the Jessops and spend another small fortune on tanks, measurement beakers, and all kinds of other crap to get this going and developed my first roll tonight.
There were some hiccups getting the film into the developer tank coil as you have to do this in total darkness inside a bag and it involves cutting bits etc, it really is not fun, so I managed to get some kinks into a frame here and there but I guess I’ll improve in time.
Overall I am very pleased with the first attempt you can see most of the roll here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 15, 2006 | Photography, Photography Equipment
My trusty Nikon D70 has been in for repairs for the best part of a month now, it is suffering from the Blinking Green Light Of Death which is a pretty common bug in the first batches of D70.
It’s now around 2.5 years old which is pretty good going for me with a camera, yet Nikon is still fixing the problem under terms of the warrenty, the only problem is it’s taking some time.
So I picked up a Nikon D80 2 days ago, the body cost me 600 pounds including delivery and a 2 year warrenty, I also got a Nikkor 18-200 VR lens. I am especially excited about the lens as it was promised to be in the shops last November already but it never made it, I’ve been obsessivly looking for one but no suppliers have been able to get stock, 3 weeks ago I found one just sitting on a desk in a shop and immediately picked it up.
I am very impressed with both, the combination together is a really good combination and I do not regret the ยฃ1100 the set put me back for 1 second.
I’ve only taken a few shots with the D80, you can see them here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 30, 2006 | Photography, Usefull Things
Yesterday Flickr announced the previously leaked new feature, an integration of Yahoo! Maps and Flickr.
It is very slick, the integration between Organizr and the maps is way kewl and it does not suffer from the problem of making a mess of your Tags like some of the other options as it maintains an internal data structure.
Their map placing method isn’t too accurate but if you open up a photos properties you can type in exact coordinates which is nice. Searching for photos is now even greater, you can search for photos matching a keyword near a location, or simply explore photos at a specific spot which is great.
The problem is of course that they use Yahoo! Maps, it’s crap unless you live in the states. Resolution and street level maps in Europe and elsewhere leaves much to be desired. It is also much slower than Google Maps.
Today Flickr posted an update to their blog firstly pointing out the amazing uptake in use of this feature in the first 24 hours:
When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we’d hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!
That is impressive! they also acknowledge the Yahoo Maps problem and I hope they can work with the maps team to quickly address this, though I am not holding my breath, more likely is someone will take the new API calls that Flickr provide and write a mashup using Google Maps that uploads data into this new internal data structures.
I dragged a couple 100 photos onto the map, you can take a look at a map of these here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 6, 2006 | Photography
A problem with DSLR’s seem to be that images tend to be a bit soft and fuzzy some times, this might just be because I do not spend 1000 pound on each lens or it might be a general problem. Regardless a solution exist in Photoshop.
Photoshop has a number of sharpening tools the most used one being the oddly named Unsharp Mask (USM). 100s of websites cover the USM and its drawbacks, a good one can be found at The Luminous Landscape. The short of it, too much sharpening a image leaves artifacts on your image like little halos and stuff.
Photoshops CS2 has a better sharpening tool called “Smart Sharpening” but I still prefer a bit of USM, I found a article that discusses both these sharpening tools and gives a sample technique for using the USM on edges of your image only, this effectively removes the problems with halos and so forth and means you can be more aggressive with sharpening your images.
I tried out the above edge sharp technique and really like it, I was considering buying a commercial sharpener but now I decided against it in favor of this technique.
I have a sample image up done with this method you can see the before and after.
I’ve made a Photoshop action for this technique, tested in CS and CS2. It’s very simple it should be the last thing you do to your image right before putting it on the web. Don’t sharpen your full size image then resize it, first resize and then sharpen. Sharpening is as easy as running this action and after some steps it will show a standard USM dialog with preview, you should immediately see the results by dragging the sliders.
The action can be found here, just drag it onto your Photoshop and look in the Actions Palette
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 31, 2006 | Photography
Today I received a comment on my photoblog from photoblogdirectory.org.
Our robot found your rss-feed you are providing
on your photoblog website (http://photoblog.devco.net/) and added it to our listings.
Would be nice to see you claiming your blog @
http://www.photoblogdirectory.org/claim/xxxxx/
http://www.photoblogdirectory.org is dedicated to support the photobloggers community,
feature new/interesting photoblogs on the scene, rate the best
and send visitors to the photobloggers sites.
regards,
Gloria Jones
Webmistress @
http://www.photoblogdirectory.org
What can I say? This is just the worst kind of site promotion I’ve ever seen, they are really showing that they are just one step above common viagra spammers, online casino spammers and the like.
I’d urge any photographers who read this site to boycot photoblogdirectory.org.
