Some Random Rambling and Photos by Wouter Willemse
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.
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.
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?
This will just be a short post, without photos, to update on some of the earlier posts on ‘recipes‘. So far, there have been four of those and for all intents and purposes, that should be enough. But at some point, you run out of stock, to find prices that aren’t quite what they were last time….
For various reasons, I haven’t found time to post something fresh lately. It’s not that I ran out of ideas, or topics I care about. But some of those ideas need a bit more time to mature. Some need me to spend some time actually making photos. Others need me to straighten my thoughts a bit more.
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.
In previous posts, I rambled about the combinations of film and developer I like: one for all-round bomb-proof performance, one for plenty light and plenty sharpness and one for plenty light and a more old-fashioned look.
The next recipe is one I use a lot less, frankly very very rare. Yet, it’s a tool I like to have in the shed.
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.
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?
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.