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darkroom Tag

23 Apr

Posted at 07:30h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

And for those who follow Game Of Darkrooms, you'll know what this means; cold bathrooms, cold laundries, and cold darkrooms. Harder to keep processing solutions to recommended temperatures - slower processing times. Cold, stiff fingers. Family members banging on the bathroom/darkroom door demanding to use the facilities for something other than photography. Well, you'll have to sort out your family yourself - a Port-A-Loo in the back yard is a possibility - but Adox have a solution that will help in the darkroom; Neutol ECO paper developer. Adox have turned the corner of the analog revival and are making new premises for themselves while pumping out their versions aof classic films and solutions. They make the Adonol that replaces the old Agfa Rodinol and now there is Neutool ECO back on the Camera Electronic shelf. Neutol and Neutol WA were always very good matches for many varied monochrome papers when they came out of Leverkusen. Now the Neutol ECO promises to be even more useful due to several factors: a. It is hydroquinone-free. It has no HAZMAT label problems and can be used by students...

19 Apr

Posted at 09:59h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

How you do anything has a great deal to do with the supplies you have available. Analog photography is no exception - and these days unfortunately the machinery and raw materials are getting scarcer. At this point I'd like to point out that at one time there was no such thing as analog photography - prior to 1826. Between that and 1975 there was only photography. Subsequently there has been digital as well. Which gives you pause...

10 Jul

Posted at 08:24h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

We're lucky at Camera Electronic - we still have ties to the chemical side of photography. Unlike so many stores that have embraced digiatalisation, we find that it pays to remember the older analog processes. There are a steady stream of clients who also remember this and pursue their art in that way. Thank goodness they are also supported here in Perth by good professional laboratories like Fitzgerald Photo Imaging. The delights of a good film camera are not debarred from us. And sometimes we discover some interesting things on the shelves: A. The Ilford company...

27 Apr

Posted at 09:49h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

You need three ingredients to do correct processing of black and white film; tomatoes, onions, and capsicums. No, wait. That was the next page of the recipe book. That one is for Italian sauce. What you really need for film processing is developer, stop bath, and fixer. Mind you, if you've already started and poured the first mixture into the tank you may want to boil some spaghetti and take a break for a while. The standard developer used to be whatever was your standard. In the film era there were literally dozens of choices of chemical for the first step - Kodak, Agfa, Ilford, Adox, Gevaert, and co, and all the rest made powdered and liquid solutions for all sorts of films. You could deal with slow films, panchromatic films, orthochromatic films, fast films, films in the arctic, films in the tropics, portrait films, x-ray films, microfilms, etc. And there were books of formulae that each devotee just knew held the secret to success. Not a few darkrooms had a set of chemist's scales for weighing out the exotic components. Photographers sometimes suffered for...

25 Apr

Posted at 08:01h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

I hesitated to use the term " Old School " in the header as it is overused these days - everything from hot rods to casserole recipes is referred to in these terms. The most frustrating thing about it is the fact that often the items  presented have very little to do with previous designs. It's like seeing " retro " used in the electronics section of the department store on modern internet music players. Some of us who went to the old schools...

24 Apr

Posted at 16:26h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

As a dental student in the late 60's I had to buy loads of expensive gear that the University Of WA Dental School refused to provide. I initially thought that was mean of them, but came to realise that it was just their weary experience of dental students making off with things. My own instruments were marked with a registered number at the start of the year but could be found in everyone else's cabinets within two weeks...

06 Oct

Posted at 18:02h in Dick's Rant by

I was idly standing around in the Camera Electronic Murray Street Shop when my eye beheld a very old sight. No, it was not Domenic. He is actually quite young, despite his appearance. Nor was it a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It was the oldest product in the place - Rodinal developer. Oh, it isn't called Rodinal any more - after Agfa went bust they sold off a lot of their patents and formulae and the Adox people got this prize - the right to make Rodinal. They have renamed it Adonal, but the colouration and shape of the container, plus the chemical information on the label assure us that it's the good old stuff. It was first made in 1891, and is a compound of 4-aminophenol. It's not a fine-grain developer - best used with Pan For FP4 on medium and large-format films. It makes for very sharp silver grains and a very high edge sharpness. See the neg that I've scanned from my Linhof days. You dilute it dramatically  - 1+25, 1+50, or 1+1-00 are common dilutions and some have even...

16 Oct

Posted at 02:54h in News by

Go to the magazine rack of any newsagency and look at the car magazines. Bypass the 4WD and luxury European sedans and look for the hot rod and street car magazines*.Somewhere in there will be one that refers to Old Skool cars. The definition is a little fuzzy - they're talking about vehicles that are prior to 1966...

30 Sep

Posted at 00:32h in News by

It's an old photographic joke - the collapsible bottles look like concertinas. No end of darkroom workers have squeezed them while dancing around in the dark whistling Lady Of Spain.  Their wives and children wince but there is nothing that can be done about it.We discovered a mother lode of them in the back shelves of the storage area recently. Buy a set to put your darkroom chemistry in - If you've mixed up a big batch of developer and want to use it in small increments you can squeeze the bottle down to reduce the amount of trapped air and thus retard oxidation of the mix.They're only $ 7.50 so there must be a lot more things you can think to do with them. Hornpipes...