Color carbon and digital inkjet negatives: challenges

It’s been awfully quiet on the color carbon front, hasn’t it? Well, that’s partly accurate. I haven’t done as many test strips these past two weeks as I’d been doing before, and the reason is that I’m at a crossroads with this project now. Having learned lots, it’s also becoming clearer now what I’m dealing with. The question is – how to proceed? Let’s start with exploring some of the challenges I’m currently facing, which all happen to revolve around consistency and linearity.

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Potato, potato – Making an old Sigma lens work on every Canon EOS body

Right, the “potato, potato” thing probably doesn’t work that well in writing, but you get the point. Or at least, you soon will. I got my hands on an old Sigma ‘Super Wide’ 24/2.8 a couple of weeks ago. I came across it and just couldn’t resist; a wide-angle prime is a convenient thing to have, after all. Upon receiving it, I immediately tried it out and…it didn’t work properly. Drat. Well, it did on my old Canon EOS 50e, but it didn’t work on an EOS 7D or an EOS 30. Turns out it’s a well known-compatibility issue. Turns out also that, guess what? It can be fixed!

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Some images – Tractor tracks

No long story this time, just some images. By far the most photos I make are taken in the immediate vicinity of the house, within walking distance. The same is true for these two, which I took when exposing a test roll of Fomapan 100 to see how the Sigma 24/2.8 I received recently works.

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Easy way out – Inkjet on ‘DIY’ papers

No, I haven’t given up on color carbon yet. But as I was messing with the inkjet printer anyway, making hundreds of digital negatives and greyscale tests, at some point I got experimental in that direction as well. You see, the thing with inkjet is that I just don’t like most inkjet papers. They’re very high-tech and offer great gamut and dmax. But they don’t have much subtlety to them and the paper surface is always lifeless to me. The exception is the (rather pricey) inkjet baryta papers that indeed resemble fiber-based B&W papers. But couldn’t we expand our choices a bit, perhaps by trying something ourselves? Well, turns out, we can…read on!

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