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.