Kodak's Finest

A work in progress.

Acros in the Foth Derby produced only a couple images at the end of the roll I thought to be of acceptable quality. Most of the others were kind of fuzzy and low contrast, and four in the middle featured a broad, blank stripe. I haven't fully sorted out the issues, but I suspect I did a poor job of rolling up the film in the backing paper. I think the film buckled and interfered with the travel of the focal plane shutter curtains.

Albuquerque and New Mexico are still struggling to get beyond of the 2008 financial collapse.  The Intel plant which gave the local economy a boost in the beginning of the century is down to a skeleton crew.  The city's main industry at this point seems to be tattoo parlours.

Rude Boy offers a varied menu.  I'm going to take a pass on Tuesdays, which appear to feature a dead cockroach.  The coffee shops and restaurants around UNM which cater to the local student crowd seem to be surviving the disruption of the rapid transit construction on Central Ave., but many of the other businesses are on shaky ground.

erasing the past

Few days go by without some major data destruction being reported in the press.  One such exploit that has not gained much notice was recently perpetrated by the photo sharing site, Photobucket.  With no prior warning to long-time users of the service, the company suddenly invalidated off-site links to any images stored on Photobucket.  Overnight, web links to thousands -- perhaps millions -- of images were broken.  The images which had been linked to on forums, web sites and blogs were all replaced with a notice, "Please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting".  Visiting the link at the bottom of the notice reveals that the cost of enabling 3rd party hosting will be $399.99. 

Simultaneously with the link breakage, Photobucket also disabled users' ability to download full album collections, hindering recovery of images from the site.  Images can still be downloaded individually, but it is a laborious process and downloading linked images requires additional steps which are not immediately apparent.  It is highly likely that a very small percentage of the users affected will submit to this extortionary gambit by the company.  The inevitable outcome will be the permanent erasure from the web of massive amounts of visual data.

Other companies have closed their doors on the web and data losses have often been the result.  What stands out in the case of Photobucket is the deliberate and highly organized manner in which the company attacked the integrity of the web to shore up the bottom line of a failing company.  The self-promotional material on the site still makes big claims about being a premier destination for photo sharing, but the reality is that the company has been a poor choice for such services for a decade.  It has probably remained viable only because of the extraordinary gains in efficiency and economy produced by general technological advances in the same period.

I started using Photobucket in 2006 around the time that digital photography and the sharing of imagery on line was really taking off.  The company at that time, like many others, was offering free on line photo storage and image linking.  That was  an attractive option for bringing digital images into text-based forum sites that did not usually have the capacity for storing and handling large quantities of data.  The business model which made the process viable was on line advertising.  People clicked on ads embedded in the web sites and a trickle of income was generated.

By the time I moved to Albuquerque in 2008 the links to photos stored on Photobucket were performing so poorly that a decision to stop storing photos there was a no-brainer.  Google's Blogger site had made image storage available to bloggers and there were other free photo sharing sites like Flickr that were bigger and faster than Photobucket.  So, I did move on, but a lot of image links from my previous two years of blogging remained attached to Photobucket.

Since Photobucket cut links to my images I have gone through my albums there to download some of the photos that I particularly valued and stored them in a folder on my own hard drive.  I have subsequently uploaded a few of those images to my blog to repair broken links.  However, I likely won't find the time or energy to repair all the damage to my first two years of blogging.
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Update 9/13/17:
I went to the Photobucket site today to retrieve an image file to repair a broken link.  The site is littered with malware including pop-ups that will take control of your browser to attempt to extort money from visitors to the site.  Not worth the risk in my opinion.

Acros

I have used Fuji Acros film mostly with my medium format cameras with Rodinal for development.  That has been a favorite combination for a long time. The film's fine grain and tonal qualities always bring out the best of whatever equipment I have used.  I chose recently to try out the film with a good 35mm slr which facilitates exploring selective focus.  I also decided to try developing in HC-110, dilution B.
    I thought the results were pretty good; it is a little difficult to compare with previous medium format results.  I decided that I should probably have given the film another minute in the developer over the 5.5 minutes that The Massive Dev Chart recommends.  I'm going to try that, but I'll probably go back to Rodinal 1:50 for the next roll to provide an opportunity for comparison in small format.

redoing the past

Midway through the 1960s I was looking for a career change. I enrolled in a commercial photo course given by a school in New York's financial district.  Toward the end of the program, I bought a boxy case to hold the matted photos I had made during the course, and I took that on job interviews.  I did get a few job offers, but the ultimate outcome of the undertaking was that I decided I did not really have much of an aptitude for a career in photography.  I did learn some useful things about photography, however, and I liked the pictures I made from that time.The negatives from my photo school days were all lost over the years, but I did hold onto my portfolio case with some of the mounted prints I had kept.

I was nearly ready for retirement when I finally got back to doing some more photography.  I shared some of my early digital work on Photo.net and I decided to make some copies of my New York pictures to put on line as well.  At the time I did not want to cut up the big matte boards on which I had mounted several projects, so I just made digital pictures of the individual photos using a primitive Epson digital camera.  That seemed a good idea at the time, but looking at the pictures on Photo.net years later I saw that the images were very small and of rather poor quality.

I decided that I would like to have some better digital copies of my early work, so I set aside my nostalgic qualms about cutting up the mattes so that I could copy the individual prints on my Epson flatbed scanner.  The outcome would have been better had I held onto the original negatives, but the new digital copies are quite a bit better than the ones I made originally with the little digital camera.  The photos in this series were made with a Nikon S rangefinder camera.  The film was likely Tri-X.  The pictures were shot over a period of several weeks on the streets of New York's Chinese community.

DAY

NIGHT

Complications

My efforts at film splitting to produce 127 from 120 roll film have been complicated by poor results from the film I have been using in the project, Arista Edu Ultra 400.  While it seemed a good idea to use cheap film while sorting out my DIY film splitter, the results only made life more difficult.
   In the past, I've gotten perfectly fine images from Arista films, usually combined with my favorite all-purpose developer, HC-110, both with dilution "B" and as a stand developer.  This time, though, the first roll resulted in images with extreme grain.  The next roll had images that were barely discernible.
   An on line search turned up quite a few experiences similar to mine with Arista 400.  A lot of people showed perfectly fine images made with the film, while others like me reported a mixed bag with inconsistent, sometimes disastrous results.  So, when I put in an order this morning for some film, it won't be Arista.

film splitter update

I have learned a few things about my derevaun film splitter after putting a couple rolls through it.  I thought I would pass along the small modifications I have made for the benefit of anyone wanting to  try this rather elegant solution to producing discontinued film formats from 120 roll film.

The nut and screw assembly turned out to be a little short to easily span the width of the Falcon-Flex box camera.  I therefore inserted a couple of pieces of sheet foam on either side.  That allowed a much more firm fit for the cutter assembly.  It also meant that I could fully screw in the small screw on the left end of the connector nut, which in turn allowed the width adjustment to be easily made by just turning the connector nut.  With the cutter assembly held firmly in place the horizontal adjustment of the cutter became considerably easier as well.
   In the process of making my measurments with 120 film backing in place in the camera I noticed that the film rails in the camera are actually a bit wider than the film, so measuring for the position of the cutter starting at the side of the camera produced some inaccuracy.
   Inserting the film leader in the take-up spool and advancing the film centers the film strip, and in this camera that means that the edge of the film is actually 2mm inward from the side of the camera.  With the film backing in place, I dabbed a little white paint on the film rail along the border of the film backing; that gave me a starting point for measuring for the desired 46mm width needed for cutter placement.  Accuracy in this regard is desirable, both for allowing the film to travel properly through the camera in which it will be used and also to ensure that the film will properly seat in the film processing spool.
   I'm pleased with the outcome of my DIY splitter endeavor so far; it is going to give me a lot more choice in regard to film types in using my 127 cameras.  The splitter could also be adapted to other formats, and even the left-over strip on the right side could be used for some of the subminiature formats.  I am also currently discarding about seven inches of the 120 film strip which is not needed for the standard 127 film format.  That extra amount could be made use of for a few more exposures in cameras not having a too-tight film compartment.