I love London Pride and i’m sad to see that this year it has been cancelled due to COVID-19. This will be the first time since the first pride march in 1972 that there wont be a march. It’s very sad and feels like the right time to post this roll of film which I shot last year at London Pride 2019 and then a few frames after at the London Wetland Centre.
Hey there!
In 2013 I bought 2 rolls of Fuji Velvia 50. I shot the first roll pretty quickly on a trip to New York City…to my surprise i’ve not uploaded that roll to the blog so at a later date will go back and rescan the negative for you all to see. Fast forward to 2020 and i’m shocked it took me 7 years to shoot the other roll (London Pride 2019)…I remember thinking it’s because Velvia is an E6 process. Which for the colour noobies out there E6 is a film processing technique using a different variation of chemicals and timings. The end results is a positive image instead of a negative image created with C-41.
E6 film is usually very fine grain, pin sharp image quality and vivid colours. However it doesn’t have the exposure latitude of C-41 colour negatives so your shots need to be perfectly exposed each time! For more information on the differences between E6 and C-41 check out this blog post from The Darkroom
As I don’t own E6 chemicals and wasn’t going to invest in any for 1 roll of film I decided to cross process with Tetenal C-41. Cross Processing is where you develop a roll of E6 > C-41 or C-41 with E6. For E6 > C-41 process you will usually get strong contrast and a lot of colour cast. For C-41 > E6 you’d normally see a flatter image with muted colours.
For my process I have a very prominent green colour cast.
Changing settings in Silverfast to compensate for Green Colour Cast.
You can see from the images below the highlights are blown out and the contrast is really high in places but overall i’m happy with the results!
Hey there!
Here is a collection of photographs from a visit to London Zoo, Devon and Trafalgar Square. To see the development recipe please check out my blog post Lomography 100 Color which uses the same Tetenal C-41 Developer
Southend Arcade, UK.
Welcome light leaks.
When I was a child my parents took my sister and I to Majorca for a family holiday. They gave us both a disposable camera to use and when we returned and had the film processed we found my roll had tons of light leaks. My father explained the reasons why this happened and seemed upset – but I loved them!
The Canon EOS 620 I use today has good light seals so I seldom see them anymore. So I bought a roll of Dubblefilm Sunstroke which is partially exposed Kodak film that simulates light leaks.
Dubblefilm comes in a variety of film types including:
Bubblegum 200 – Added tones
Pacific 200 – Added tones
Jelly 200 – Added mix of colour tones
Apollo 200 – Added tone to make highlights pop
Stereo 200 – Full red to blue tint across the negative
Solar 200 – Lightleaks
KONO! and Dubblefilm also paired up to created Moonstruck, Monsoon and Sunstroke film types. You will see on the Dubblefilm website they’re currently teamed up with Revlog.
Southend Arcade, UK.
Southend Arcade, UK.
London Zoo
During the summer my sister convinced my niece in to thinking she was coming to London to watch a rugby game with her. My niece was not impressed – complaining the entire run up to the weekend and wanting to stay at home. What she was unaware of was this ruse was because my partner and I had planned to have her stay over the weekend but wanted to keep it a surprise. My sister was still going to the rugby game with her partner but we surprised my niece at the train station…it took her a few minutes to work out what was going on but she was soooooo happy to NOT be going to rugby! Instead she had a weekend of fun things to do around London. Which included the zoo 🙂
Brad sitting at the Wetland Centre. Photo credit: James Wakelin
A Fresh Start
The first roll of colour film I developed at home for this blog was Lomography Colour 100 with Tetenal C-41. The results were pretty good and I wondered why friends in the photography community always claimed colour was more tricky…I agree one must be very precise with water temperature during processing but as long as you set up a good workflow you minimise risk of problems.
At the beginning a rookie mistake I made was storing chemicals in glass bottles on the top shelf of my wardrobe instead of plastic bottles on the bottom shelf. Unfortunately the shelf gave out from the weight which smashed everything on the floor…whoops! More about that can be read here.
Another mistake I made was not knowing colour chemicals do not stay fresh for very long once mixed (6 weeks), the concentrate gives you 12 weeks though, added to the 6 weeks after mixing is another 24 weeks. I tried mixing another 1000ml after the end use date and the bleach fix turned into a yellow lumpy cheese like goop. Not good.
Tetenal can process around 30-40 rolls of film so these two mistakes are an expensive lesson to learn. At the time I didn’t have the money or free time to invest in 40 rolls of film to shoot – I was looking for a new job and had a lot of changes happening in life.
I regularly wrap paper around my film telling me what is on the roll for a later date when i process.
Fast forward to Autumn 2019 and in 3 months i’ve shot 20 rolls of film to develop and will be ordering some more for a short trip away in October – so fingers crossed I should hit that 30-40 number making things way more cost efficient.
Mixing Tetenal C41 developer.
How I develop
Follow the instructions in the Tetenal guide – they’re fool proof and super easy! Each time I develop a roll of film I tally up the guide to track the life of each mix. The development and bleach times are extended depending on how many rolls you have developed or if you are push processing.
Everyones workflow will vary but i’ve found that if I fill a bowl with water to around 50ºc the heat transfer warms up the chemicals with enough time during cooling to 38ºc to load the film to the spools & development tank. Once the bowl temperature reaches 39ºc I start a 5 minute film bath at 38ºc (water taken straight from tap and temp measured using thermometer). By the time I have finished preheating the film the temperature in the bowl and my chemicals are 38ºc exactly.
I always put the development tank in to the bowl to keep the temperature up and I regularly check with a thermometer! If it starts dropping below 38ºc I top up the warm bath with hot water to a couple of degrees higher to keep the chemicals at 38ºc.
Scanning:
Once the negatives have dried they are cut in to a strips of 6 frames and placed in an archival box. I use industry standard archiving from when I was working as a retoucher – date backwards, followed by job number, then by product, and client or location. Underscores are used instead of spacing. So the latest project is always at the bottom of the list. For example the roll of film for this blog post is 19090601_KODAK_PORTRA_400_LONDON_WETLAND_CENTRE
The job number goes up depending on how many jobs I have that day. This is handy if i’m with the same client but on a different shoot or location or batch. I.e 19060101_PORTRA, 19060102_PORTRA, 19060103_PORTRA, etc etc etc
I scan my negatives flat without adjustments or sharpening using a Plustek Opticfilm 8100 at 3600 dpi which produces a 50mb file at 3300 x 4968. The scanner can do up to 7200dpi however the scan time is too slow and I don’t require that much data for web use. If I ever print the images I would rescan at 7200dpi and reprocess for print. The images are saved as PSD’s which increases their compatibility with Lightroom and Photoshop. Lightroom is my main tool for global adjustments such as colour, cropping and batch processing. Macro adjustments and cleaning are done in Photoshop.
London Wetland Centre
This roll of Kodak Portra 400 has been processed with warmer tone that I feel reflects the warmth of the summer day I shot it on.
Limehouse to Camden Canal Walk
Lewisham twilight
These photographs are some test shots I took for a future post about Reciprocity Failure.
Full development stats:
I am in love with JCH 400. The results are outstanding. Great tonal range, contrast, sharpness and grain. This film was shot during the London snowy period (Feb 2018) and the following week (1st week of March).
I decided to go crazy and push a roll of Kentmere 100 to 1600iso.
It took a while to decide which development time I should go for. Kodak, Ilford, Adox and various forums all suggest different timings. I was reading from one commenter to double the timings plus 20%. The Massive DevChart has a rough guide on how to work out timings when pushing however did not extend to four stops. I decided on Rodinol 1+100 at 120 minutes, 20ºc. The first 5 minutes I agitated the soup every 30s for 15s. After 30 minutes I agitated for 15s.
Full development stats:
I must admit when I pulled the negative out of the soup I was expecting a series of black frames from either the contrast going crazy or from over developing. I peeled back the first few frames to check the fix and to my surprise saw some well developed shots!
Kentmere 100 is rated best between 50-200 ISO….. so I was expecting a lot of grain….once I dried and scanned the negative I was blown away how detailed the shots are. The grain is fairly small and overall contrast not as intense as I expected. The night time/darker photos are when I was drunk on a night out and was underexposing instead of overexposing. The daytime photographs on the street I overexposed by at least a stop.
There is change in the contrast levels of each photo, some pictures (such as the swimming pool shot) have a lot of grey tone without much highlight and shadow whereas other pictures are more contrasty.
I will push this film beyond four stops in the future to see how far it will go and still give me useable shots.
The 35mm Project 