Photrio postcard exchange PCX#60

I’ve participated in the postcard exchange on Photrio a couple of times now. Great fun; you get to receive prints from people across the globe, and it’s a good stimulus to focus on some printing yourself, too. Here are the cards I sent round this time.

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Who’s afraid of cyan, yellow and magenta? Using color C41 and RA4 chemistry at home

I regularly speak to people who would like to start doing color development (film or prints) at home. Often, they’re shunned by the prospect of having to deal with color chemistry in a home darkroom setting. Please don’t let it stop you, though. Doing color work in a home darkroom is really pretty easy. And it doesn’t have to be very expensive, either.

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Rem-oval: getting rid of the remjet on Vision3 ECN2 film

Kodak Vision3 film is not really intended for still photography, but that doesn’t stop many photographers from using it. Companies like CineStill offer this film without the remjet layer, but I personally prefer the remjet-backed original. That of course does leave the challenge of dealing with the remjet when processing this film. Fortunately, this is pretty easy and it does not require any specialized chemistry or equipment.

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Ciao from Sicily – Some postcards

I’ve participated in the postcard exchange on Photrio recently, and I thought I might share some of the cards I’ve sent out. The month prior to the exchange, we spent a few days on Sicily, so I decided to use some frames from that trip for the cards.

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Knowing what’s right, but getting it wrong – Some silly color problems

Learning involves making mistakes and if there’s one thing I’ve learned by now, it’s how to make excellent mistakes – all the time. Most of them are silly ones, too: I know better, and then I do it wrong anyway. Recently I goofed hilariously badly when working with a batch of ECN2 films. Here’s to show that I’m by no means perfect. Far, very far from it…

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Peaks or plateaus – Light sources for DSLR scanning color negatives

Many people like to shoot film, but enjoy their images in the digital domain and the possibilities it warrants for post-processing, printing, etc. This means that the film images need to be scanned, and using a DSLR to do this has become very popular in recent years. But it does bring up some questions – mainly: what’s the best way to do this? And in particular, if you photograph a backlit negative, what kind of backlight would be preferable? I’m going to reflect on this for a bit on a theoretical basis.

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Balancing act – A brief look at ECN2 vs. C41 colors

When ‘Cinestill’ film came around, I just had to try it – although I have mostly used the original Kodak Vision3 stock instead of the remjet-less Cinestill variants. Frankly, I didn’t get along with it, and I’ve been quite vocal about it on the forums, too. But a couple of years after my initial bout of experimentation, I felt it was time for a re-assessment. Here’s a brief reflection on color balance of Kodak Vision3 250D film. After all, color balance is perhaps the most pressing matter when it comes to using Vision3 films for still photography.

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Color me purple – Some color developer formulas including C41 and RA4

Despite the modest resurgence of interest in film photography, supply issues remain a concern. This is nothing new; a few years ago, I already worried about this and figured that I wanted to expand my options when it came to in particular color chemistry for C41 negative development and RA4 printing. I started collecting formulas I found online, purchased the necessary chemistry and mixed quite a bit of (mostly) developers myself. Now seems a good time to share my findings with you. If anything, it might be convenient to have some key formulas in one place.

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