The TRI-X 'look'...

neuroanatomist said:
zim said:
Meh nostalgia, it was a pain in the ass setting it up ;D

One nice thing about being in science is there's always a darkroom. Up through my grad school days, they were set up for printing - enlargers, automatic print developers, etc. Composite photos for scientific publications (and my dissertation) meant making small prints, labeling them with transfer lettering, mounting them on foam core, then photographing the composite and printing that. Takes ~5 minutes in Photoshop, now. ;)

We still have darkrooms, mainly for X-ray films and dipping emulsions used for autoradiography. If I really wanted to, I could bring in trays and chemicals for printing...but I'll pass, thanks.

I haven't used a chemical darkroom in 30 yrs, even though I've always had one within steps of my office/labs, but I remember with great fondness my grad school days (actually nights) spent making my own developers. I briefly taught photographic chemistry to the local camera club, but gave up when people's eyes glazed over. Not everyone was meant to be a chemist, sigh. Here are a couple of recent B&W images from a trip to Myanmar last March. They still have that Tri-X look, including the grain.
 

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funkboy

6D & a bunch of crazy primes
Jul 28, 2010
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dhachey77 said:
I haven't used a chemical darkroom in 30 yrs, even though I've always had one within steps of my office/labs, but I remember with great fondness my grad school days (actually nights) spent making my own developers. I briefly taught photographic chemistry to the local camera club, but gave up when people's eyes glazed over. Not everyone was meant to be a chemist, sigh. Here are a couple of recent B&W images from a trip to Myanmar last March. They still have that Tri-X look, including the grain.

Awesome shots dhachey. This thread rocks :)

Bringing the whole thing together, something that I almost dove into back when I first got a good DSLR but was still shooting film occasionally is making gelatin silver prints from digital files. I first learned about it from LensWork magazine, which is a lovely find in and of itself.

In a nutshell, we finally have a use case for the insanely high resolution that the inkjet printer companies have been using as a marketing gimmick forever. The printheads of even the now-12-year-old Epson 2200 are capable of small enough dots to print a negative with resolution surpassing film when used with the right transparency medium & inks, which can then be used to make a print with a traditional darkroom enlarger.

The process is laborious but I've seen the results in a gallery and the gelatin silver prints from an FF DSLR source file are every bit as stunning as medium format film.
 
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funkboy said:
dhachey77 said:
I haven't used a chemical darkroom in 30 yrs, even though I've always had one within steps of my office/labs, but I remember with great fondness my grad school days (actually nights) spent making my own developers. I briefly taught photographic chemistry to the local camera club, but gave up when people's eyes glazed over. Not everyone was meant to be a chemist, sigh. Here are a couple of recent B&W images from a trip to Myanmar last March. They still have that Tri-X look, including the grain.

Awesome shots dhachey. This thread rocks :)

Bringing the whole thing together, something that I almost dove into back when I first got a good DSLR but was still shooting film occasionally is making gelatin silver prints from digital files. I first learned about it from LensWork magazine, which is a lovely find in and of itself.

In a nutshell, we finally have a use case for the insanely high resolution that the inkjet printer companies have been using as a marketing gimmick forever. The printheads of even the now-12-year-old Epson 2200 are capable of small enough dots to print a negative with resolution surpassing film when used with the right transparency medium & inks, which can then be used to make a print with a traditional darkroom enlarger.

The process is laborious but I've seen the results in a gallery and the gelatin silver prints from an FF DSLR source file are every bit as stunning as medium format film.

I looked into the links you posted about gelatin/silver prints using an internegative process. Do you know of any print shops that perform this service? I gave up printing my own images a few years ago. I got tired of dealing with clogged printheads, etc. I use Costco for most printing, except the fine art prints I do on occasion. I just sent the two images shown above to Costco. You can't beat the longevity of silver based images, though. I just looked at some work I printed more than 45 years ago, still as good as the day they came out of the fixer (but not as good as I could do today).
 
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funkboy

6D & a bunch of crazy primes
Jul 28, 2010
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dhachey77 said:
I looked into the links you posted about gelatin/silver prints using an internegative process. Do you know of any print shops that perform this service? I gave up printing my own images a few years ago. I got tired of dealing with clogged printheads, etc. I use Costco for most printing, except the fine art prints I do on occasion. I just sent the two images shown above to Costco. You can't beat the longevity of silver based images, though. I just looked at some work I printed more than 45 years ago, still as good as the day they came out of the fixer (but not as good as I could do today).

Haven't used any personally but teg goog turns up several promising shops which you could probably research a little further before taking the plunge.

I like Keith Cooper's quote on the care & feeding of large-format printers:

when recently looking into problems with our iPF8300, I talked to several people in the ‘large format business’, and lack of use was the number one cause of problems.

If I had to put a big sticky label on printers it would be:

** — USE ME REGULARLY — AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK — **

I keep a 24″ roll of cheap proofing paper in our iPF8300 and try and make sure I print every week (a diary reminder helps).
 
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I'm not one for the "packs" that transform digital photos to something nostalgic. I've tried a few and always end up with: why am I doing is, if I want that look, I'll shoot with that product!

As for the concerns about setting up a darkroom: don't set one up. You don't need a darkroom if you're OK with a hybrid flow (not everybody is) and limiting yourself to roll film. A changing bag is the only dark you need to transfer the film to the tank. After that the only thing that needs to stay dark is your developing tank. Once the negatives are done you scan them in and go from there.

Yes, purists might lament the fact I'm not making prints the analog way, I'm personally OK with that.

I recently took the plunge and started shooting and developing B&W film. I couldn't believe HOW easy it is to get going, and how ADDICTIVE it is once you've got the infrastructure (less the $100).

My journey, so far:
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/01/02/entering-the-analog-world-developing-your-own-film-part-1/
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/01/08/entering-the-analog-world-developing-your-own-film-part-2/
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/03/06/entering-the-analog-world-developing-your-own-film-part-3/

Have even gone the pinhole route, is this another form of GAS? :)
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/02/18/pinhole-heaven/

Back to Tri-X, here are a couple shot with Tri-X 400:
snow_fences-199x300.jpg

snow_roof_houses-300x190.jpg


Ironically I find my personal feel is more on the extreme ends. I love T-Max. Many say T-Max has a very "digital" look. I also LOVE Delta3200. It's raw graininess can make an OK shot really pop out. Plus shooting with film in VERY dark situations just feels different.

IMHO go for reel B&W film shooting, you won't regret it.
 
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zim

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agierke said:
zim said:
agierke said:
Additionally, I have discovered that using my 100mm macro to photograph my negatives gives really phenomenal results over straight scanning. You actually retain the grain structure in the negative rather than the weird pixel/grain hybrid look you get from scanning

Really??
That's very interesting, I'd love to know more about your setup for that please.
I considered getting an old FD slide duplicator (I already have an FD/eos adapter) but a quick Google put me off the idea at the time.

Regards

It was actually a forehead slapping moment for me.

It started with me acquiring a 1904 stereo viewer and the idea that I would like to produce my own stereocards. Picked up the kodak stereo camera soon after and shot the test roll. Then came the frustrations of trying to get decent scans out of my epson 3200 with the odd format of the stereo negatives. Back when I got the thing I felt that I got some decent results scanning 120 frames but with the slight curl of 35mm format coupled with the paired images being separated by three frames it was a complete nightmare getting anything remotely acceptable.

After a couple hours scouring the internet for different solutions, I ran across some guys blog expressing the same frustrations about direct scanning that I had and that his solution was to photograph his negatives with his macro lens. This was the forehead slap moment. Brilliance is often so simple...

Anyway, I use a simple light box (same one I used in art school for tracing stuff and viewing print files of negatives). I place the negative emulsion up and place a cleaned piece of glass over it. The guy from the blog suggested taking 4 sections of the negative and merging them in PS to maximize detail and resolution but as I was already shooting a smaller format and just doing a quick handheld shot I just did a single frame at the largest RAW setting.

Works brilliantly! I did have to do a perspective crop in PS as it was hand held my edges weren't perfectly straight and you do have to invert the image to get a positive but the results were CLEAN. Totally beats even the results I used to get scanning 4x5s on a Flex scanner.

Additionally, I used to have to do dupes when I worked at the lab and I always was surprised how much was lost in that process. I would say this process beats those results by a long shot as well.

If you have the 100mm L you should give it a try. I doubt you'd be disappointed. I'm sure the non L would yield superior results as well.

Unfortunately don't have a macro but..... This is doubly brilliant for me because I now have three valid reasons to move my wish for a 100L up the list!! ;D

Really appreciate the info.

Regards
 
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Ivan Muller said:
Here is another 6D image converted to Tri-X in Nik Silver Efex. Nothing remarkable about these three old ladies walking towards the mosque on busy Longstreet, except that it was made at 20 000 ISO. No noise reduction applied plus a 100% cropto show grain and sharpness....quite remarkable I think.

Very cool! In the digital world, I have had situations where I had to push the ISO so high that there was quite a bit of noise, too much for a colour image, but convert it to B&W and all of a sudden the image looked "good"!

Even so, ISO20000? That's an amazingly non-obtrusive amount of noise. That 6D is mighty impressive!
 
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