A Touch of Grey

I really never intended this to become a discontinued and expired film blog. They just keep finding me. First, it was a bulk roll of Tri-X and a box of 4x5 Plus-X I rescued when we got rid of the freezer in my department. Then Almon Benton gave me a twenty-year-old roll of super fine-grained Agfapan APX 25. Last year, Jonathon Gutow gave me some common Fuji 400 that was really old and poorly stored, which made horrible negatives, but I was surprised that they yielded reasonable pictures, although of course with Photoshop providing intense arbitration. I had good luck with an old roll of Ilford XP2 this spring, and got good results with some 220 format Kodak Portra NC 400 last month. When I saw four 120 rolls of Fujicolor NPS in the $5.00 bargain basket at Camera Casino, it seemed worth the chance.

It's a professional color negative film. The things I remember about the category of professional medium format films are that they cost more and were refrigerated in the store because their precisely calibrated color became intolerably less professional outside the correct conditions.

I remembered to ask how they were stored. They had no idea. Most of the rolls in that bin were given to them. It's a good bet, with the likely original buyer of this film being a pro, it was refrigerated until it got to the store. These rolls are pretty darn old, expired in 2001. 

Somewhat at random, I picked the AirPods Pro Box Camera for the trial.

I measured exposures at ISO 64, based on a four-year-old discussion on Photrio. The negatives look normal. The film does show its age. It is as slow as predicted, with noticeably low contrast. The color balance is somewhat muted but otherwise normal, if it's correctly exposed. When overexposed, it rapidly shifts toward cyan and underexposed toward magenta. With a wide angle like this camera provides (77 degrees), vignetting in the distant corners is a common issue. The centers are likely to be overexposed directly under the pinhole with my casual approach to timing exposures. That makes for some interesting negatives, but my friend Adobe and I could bring them around without extreme measures. I wouldn't call the color natural, but come on, it's pinhole photography, I'm not trying to be natural. My goal is to make the color not distractingly wrong, and I'm fine with some painterly freedom to the palette.

A good bit of the motivation was that it was a beautiful day and I was ready quite early in the morning. Trying out some old film would be a great excuse to go out and play pinhole. As I neared the railroad I passed the long plain back of a self-storage facility completely clad in dark grey siding. That reminded me of a project I had been considering. I've noticed that greyscale building exteriors have recently become the fashionable rage in architecture. That would be a funny test of the color rendition of the film. And you thought the blog title referred to the age of the film, or mine.

There is only one opening on that long stretch of aluminized clapboard, covered with perfectly matched steel siding.

Just across the railroad, another self-storage facility - white doors and gutters, but otherwise a medium grey.

 

Some colors show up at the YMCA, but it's mostly great slabs of grey.

It's not just the utilitarians and the modernists. The Corbett House, being publicly restored by a pair of realtors on Facebook, is covered in this dark monotone.

The brand new Day By Day Shelter is more noticeably grey on the other side, but they might not appreciate me photographing the front door. Here in the back, a staff member came out and waved when she drove out.

I documented the construction of Mackson Corners Apartments when it was just an elevator shaft, and shortly after it was finished.

The docks next to it on the river are also devoid of color.

A little lower contrast distribution of shades in the Annex Building across the road with matching utilities for my foreground.

From the river, Anthem Luxury Living looks like red brick with colored panels, but the street side is this monochrome facade.

The Brio Building strikes me as a disjointed stack of flat boxes

The Miles Kimball building, another I've covered since it was a windowless wall.

Anybody notice that, without a rising pinhole, this became an exercise in managing converging verticals? I had never noticed one-story Houge’s Bar was all grey until I was looking for something to finish the roll.

The AirPod Pro Box Camera has a .28mm pinhole 40mm from a 6x6cm frame.  The vintage Fuji was developed in a Cinestill liter powder C41 kit.

Forms of memory and vegetation

The deadline for submission to the Pavlovka Pinhole Festival in Kyiv is soon. The first year I knew about it was the fateful 2022, when the call for photographs had already gone out with the theme I, Bridge-Builder. There was nothing I could think of that I had done that fit, and didn't want to trivialize the heroic statement that exhibit became. The next year was The Mirror. I sent three pictures that I thought were more than simple reflections. Last year, for Habitat, I took the cook's approach and submitted pictures of food and its preparation.

This year, the theme is Forms of Memory. When I heard that, I thought of these four photographs. I didn't contemplate the theme and develop the scenes. They just popped into my head. Hopefully, they're not too obvious.

Sarah's diary and writer's supplies. The pen didn't want to sit on the open book with the nib up. Sarah tried several positions, and then once, when she removed her hand, like magic, it stayed there as I aimed the camera and made the several-minute exposure.

Cooking tools. The other end of the six-inch chef's knife at the top was in last year's festival.

My steel knees.

Analog wave forms and Digital bits. 

Now I have to pick three and come up with a few lines connecting them.

Another purpose for this roll of film was to prevent getting a reputation as an outdated film blog, although I did just buy four more rolls of film, expired just after the turn of the Millennium. This roll is fresh, always frozen, humble Kodak Gold 200. 

Fresh, and one expired, fruit by the window. A little infinite depth of field fun.

Several days later, as I was preparing a tomato for Marcella Hazan's Chicken Fricasee, I was inspired to photograph these two remaining Constiluto Genoveses. In the fading light before it rained, the exposure was ten minutes. I went back to cooking and forgot about it until I went to set the table after an hour and a half, when the weather had cleared. It is possible to overexpose color film. This is about the best that could be done with the very dense negative. It's interesting how the spot in deep shadow in the center is about the right color.

A bounty of peonies waits to blossom.

A still day presents tempting opportunities for the pinhole photographer. A daisy with dewdrops holds perfectly motionless for a close-up.

Even among such formidable competition as the ferns, the invasive snow-on-the-mountain sneaks into the center of interest.

The Virginia Waterleaf is another that dominates No-Mow May. In several weeks it will entirely disappear.

My luck with the wind runs out when seduced by a peony bud lit with its own sunbeam.

The rose vines that have covered the arbor for the last few years failed to revive this year. Their vigorous growth last year made it dangerous to walk under the arbor. I cleared the vines without losing any blood! Now we're in an escalating arms race with the bunnies to get some morning glories established.

The Little Mutant has a .27mm pinhole on the axis and 11mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Kodak Gold 200 was developed in a Cinestill liter powder C41 kit.

Venerable film still worth it's salt.

I always check the film shelf at Camera Casino to see if there might be any bargains. In a bit of a hurry to pick up a print and get it to the frame shop, I grabbed three rolls of Portra 400 NC for five bucks a roll, not noticing that it was 220 format. As the leader tells you in three separate places, it's intended only for special equipment designed to handle it, for two reasons. It's twice as long as a 120 roll - 24 6x6cm frames and, in order to stuff that extra film around the same reel, it has no backing paper.

My Morton camera is definitely not special. Without backing paper with numbers to tell me where to stop, how will I know where the film starts and then how to wind the film without overlapping images? The first was easy. I loaded the camera in the dark. I could feel where the film started. Practicing with old backing paper I roughly determined how many turns of the winder would get me from one frame to the next - about one and a half. (This is the way most manufactured 35mm pinhole cameras recommend.) It looks like that's safely sufficient at the start, but as expected, as the diameter of the film on that reel increased, I was losing over half a frame each time. I only got 18 pictures.

To compensate for no backing paper to protect exposure from the counter hole, and no need to see numbers, I covered the hole with three layers of black masking tape, which wouldn't damage the camera when peeled off. I knew one layer wasn't completely opaque. The shutter handle was also taped closed so I wouldn't accidentally try to check it.  As evident in three of the negatives above, when exposed to outside daylight, the double-layer shutter with the masking tape wasn't sufficient to block the light through it. That was sort of a surprise. The rest of the camera, which is made of particularly heavy card stock with four layers and a black template everywhere but the shutters, seems light-tight otherwise. 

The 220 roll of film is much longer than 120, but with Paterson developing reels, which are designed to hold six-foot-long 36-exposure 35mm film, it fits with no trouble.

Portra 400 existed in two versions prior to 2011, Natural Color (NC), which these rolls are, and Vibrant Color (VC), so they are at least that old. I didn't ask at Camera Casino, but they were probably refrigerated if not frozen. Spoiler alert: it's old color film and it looks like it. It's at least a stop slow, particularly in dim light, and maybe fogged a little at the edges, but that could be the lack of backing paper again. The color balance isn't that far off, and the contrast mask isn't particularly dark. My favorite part, which just may be the spring humidity, is that the negatives dried perfectly flat.

As the C41 data sheets tell you after a lecture on capacity and shelf life, "if you accept the role as final arbiter of acceptable results," you can exceed the limitations noted. That goes for outdated film as well. Let's see what arbitration I can do with these negatives. (n.b. my C41 kit is well within the recommended limits.)

We had an eventful week and I didn't get to it for a while after I loaded the camera. It even rode around town on my bike rack without getting used. It's not surprising that the translucence of the counter hole was evident on the first frame.

Serendipitously, most of the rest of the roll was indoors. That .011-inch high E string is about the same size as the pinhole.

We installed a new bar in the pantry so the egg basket and the mugs hang straight and don't lean against the wall.

The shelf above the stove.

The analog coffee maker. You can see the film's reciprocity failing in the shadows.

Aware that there was an extra-long leader at the end, I needed a way to determine when to stop. For the first time ever, I kept a list of what photographs I'd done. I put an analog kitchen timer to use to avoid having to jump right up and silence a digital alarm.

The silent scream of the through-the-door icemaker and filtered water dispenser. Replaced twice while it was under warranty, it failed again soon after, and the water dispenser as well. It groans occasionally, trying to make ice, just to taunt me.

Shiny titles featured on top the piano.

I have always used Julia Child's "Seventeen-Minute Sit-in" method for hard-boiled eggs. You put them in a boiling pot, then cover it, turn off the flame and let it sit there. Kind of like semi-stand developing. I never see it in those science-lite articles about the best way to boil an egg.

The rest of the salad. This is a pretty tight crop so you can get a good look at the grain.

One of my photographs was accepted into a juried Photography show at the Center for Visual Arts in Wausau, Wisconsin, in the middle of the state. When I drove it up there, as is my wont, I took the opportunity to make some photographs in a new environment. Links: Madtown Monday  ·  All Day Long

The Curator invited me to look around the whole building. They're in a former bank.

Metal.

The chairs were behind a white screen, which nicely reflected the light back onto them. With a ninety-degree angle of view, Morton had no trouble getting back there.

My photograph in the show is of the stairwell in the Overture Center in Madison. Here is another in the series I never intended to start, but just keep happening on them. I opened the shutter for the five-minute exposure and went back into the gallery. There were two people in the adjacent classroom whom I asked if I could look in. They turned out to be the Executive Director and the Accountant. We talked about what a cool room it would be for teaching Pinhole Photography with its huge windows. When I got back to the stairwell, the automatic lights had gone off, for how long I did not know. I stood next to the camera, checking submissions to Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day and waited for another five minutes, which turned out to be about how long the lights stayed on. 

The gallery where the exhibit probably will be.

I then went out on the street. It's not too surprising in the first picture above that the counter hole appeared since it spent hours in the sun, but this day was cloudy and rainy. Within minutes in the brighter light, the counter hole was there. Despite keeping a meticulous record of the photographs, I managed to forget to advance the film and double exposed two of these. 

My plan for the other two rolls is to rate it at ISO 200 and completely line the interior of the camera with backing paper plus some 3M #235 Opaque Photographic Tape over that counter shutter for good measure. I'll start with one and three-eighths turns for the first eight, one and a quarter for the next eight, and just one for the last six. The last roll I quit at 22. If not for the double exposures, 6 of those would have been exposed onto the leader. Still not a bad deal for five bucks.

Morton has two hand-drilled .25mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Portra NC was developed in a Cinestill liter powder C41 kit.

Brand new hybrid, very old Super XP2.

 

When it was my turn to choose material for the demonstration camera for the Pre-Pinhole Day workshop at Photo Opp, I picked the generally black carton with high-contrast elements from yet another of Lakefront Brewery's offerings, Riverwest Stein Amber Lager.

Prototype of a Compact 30mm · A modification of the film transport in the Evil Cube and Compact 45 · A Hazy Rabbit and the Bars on North Main Street

The first step is laying out the template on the cardboard to be sure you have enough for every part, and if possible, using specific parts of the design that will be visible on the finished camera. I repeatedly mentioned that the template will be adhered to the other side.

Despite the area covered by the front and back, the most noticeable parts of the exterior are the two shutters and the WinderMinder. Since they're smaller, you have more options for what to use. I demonstrated rough techniques for placing the template where you wanted it on the other side, after turning the cardboard over.

Then I peeled the release paper off the front and back and publicly adhered them to the side with the printing on it. Sigh. 

I don't remember what I did with the pinhole I drilled in the workshop, and installed one from my stash the next day.

Until the day before Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, it was uncertain that we would even be having an event since no one had signed up yet. I didn't know if anybody had bought any film, but I had stocked up for the workshops, so I wasn't concerned. When we started on Sunday, Char Brandis and I discussed whether to use my film or the only ISO 400 Black and White film in the refrigerator, Ilford XP2 Super 400. It had expired over two decades ago, but had probably been frozen since then in some professional's studio. No one had tried it. I shot one roll of XP2 in 1981 when it hadn't existed long enough to be expired. We went with the fresh film, but I couldn't leave 20 rolls of unknown film go untried.

On Pinhole Day, I used color film, but loaded this up in the hybrid-design camera when I got home.

It's designed to run through a professional one-hour C41 lab that used to be on every other street corner instead of getting out messy regular black and white chemistry. I've known for years that you could develop C41 films as black and white negatives with standard developers. The almost universal recommendation for development of outdated or unknown film is stand development in Rodinal 1:100. I do have a C41 kit mixed, but I recently experienced extreme background fogging with outdated film in C41, so I went with the Rodinal. The negatives are, after all, the metallic silver before it gets bleached out and replaced with dyes in C41. There's a lilac cast to the film, but otherwise they look normal

Let's get the nagging question out of the way, what happens if the camera is under the kitchen table and the shutter falls off which you don't notice for a couple of hours, and then point the camera in the other direction while you stretch around the table legs to pick up the shutter and stick it back on the camera?

Can it handle the shutter coming open when you pull it out of your pocket?

The theme for the Fox Valley Photography group this month is Close Up Encounters/Macro. We did this one only a few years ago, but I think it bears revisiting. Until the automatically focused digital prestidigitation of tiny lenses we're used to today, close-up photography was a complex affair involving special or extra equipment and often exposure equations, since your meter might no longer be coupled. With pinhole, of course, you just get closer.

Our friend Gene Leisz's Toad Witch has an incredible peaceful yet majestic expression. Extreme wide angle portraiture is often discouraged, mostly because the expansion of depth gives a fun house extension to one's nose. That's not so noticeable if you don't have much of a proboscis but, in addition to the slightly down angle I needed to use to include her conical hat, it seems to add a touch of melancholy.

The detailed contents of her basket.

Some shiny elements on the bookcase.

A heroic little bunny holding up a candle.

Sunbeams just keep falling on bouquets around here.

Regal expressions in the curio cabinet. The evening sunbeam was illuminating this shelf, but mostly had moved away from the Queen. I left the shutter open to try to get some fill after the very short-lived sunbeam had left. I forgot about it until sometime the next afternoon.

Better go out into the sunshine for some of my human-hand overexposures. A nice selection of shades of grey behind the Barley & Hops pub.

I keep expecting to find a coded message in the seemingly random cement-filled blocks in this window.

There's probably a symbolic message in this labyrinth adjacent to the downtown Mosque.

Oh, yeah, the Shapes theme was last month.

This film seems absolutely brand new to me. I vaguely remember back in the 80's thinking that the highlights blocked up, but I don't see any of that here. Maybe I'll try some more of it and use the C41.

Rive Iber Lage has a .22mm pinhole 30mm from a 6x6cm frame.