Recipes I like (VI)

Part of the fun of shooting black and white film is experimenting. Once you develop your film yourself, there are numerous developers to try. Also the number of films available in the market is solid. Actually, the situation has gotten better in the last years. There is plenty to choose from.

It’s not all roses and sweetness, though. As mentioned before, things are getting more expensive. As in my last recipe, this recipe is another one that came out of a quest to lower cost a bit.

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Recipes I like (V)

Everything is getting more expensive these days; there seems no escaping that every day you run into something that costs more than you cared to remember.

Shortage on electronic components sure drove prices for digital cameras and lenses up. Increasing popularity of film photography drove prices for old gear up in many cases. As I already mentioned some time ago, prices for film consumables (film and chemistry) have also gone up.

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Why?

Earlier this week, I received an email from a mailing list of a website for music production. It was about a blog posting on their site with the simple but inviting title: ‘Why do you make music?‘.

The article comes up with some very good points, but truth be told: I don’t make music at all yet. Trying to learn, but that’s another story. Obviously though, it made me wonder: why do I make photos?

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Bye, 2021

Celebrating a new year is to me a bit a silly and useless event. The sun goes down and comes back up every day. There is nothing special about that. The definition of things as year, january and the first of the month are just conventions. Not entirely random, but still… just conventions.

But it doesn’t hurt to look back every now and then. A bit of retrospective to help frame where to go from here.

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Exchange

In a way, making photos is a solitary thing – it’s you behind the camera, and the rest of the world on the other side of the lens. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is a lonely thing.

As an aspiring photographer, there is a lot of value in meeting other photographers. Exchanging ideas, experiences, war stories and all that provides useful input to exploring yourself further.

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Hybrid Workflow

Hybrid workflow – it sure sounds a lot fancier than it is. What I mean with it is the roundtrip from film to digital to print. And that again sounds a lot less complicated than it is.

There is quite a lot of choices in the process, and multiple ways to skin the cat. In fact, it’s a recurring question on many photography forums. On the better forums you will get multiple answers, all valid. So what is what?

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Recipes I like (III)

In previous posts with a very similar title, I described two combinations of film and developer that I like. One my general purpose recipe, one a specialised recipe aiming for specific results.

This post covers another combination I’ve grown to like a lot. Compared to the previous two, I have a bit less experience with this one, so perhaps it’s better to consider it a half-time report. Even so, it’s one I will continue to use as it gets a lot right.

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