Technique Category

Works on all Spectra cameras, no self-timer required!

Check out Katie Cooke’s funny ambrotype crash course/primer: 20 steps to ambrotype victory… Or: How not to make ambrotypes at Photocritic.

Check out this PDF excerpt of Fuji’s Cable Release newsletter on how to do image transfers with Fuji’s Polaroid-compatible pack films. (Hosted by Freestyle.)

Here are some tips for getting more/larger grain in your pictures:

Push ISO3200 film as far as it’ll go in your developer. As a rule, pushing increases grain.
Use a high-actuance developer like Rodinal and…
Agitate the hell out of it.
Shoot as small a frame size as possible (the smaller the negative, the greater the enlargement factor, and [...]

Matt Callow made this print with a truly convoluted paper negative/internegative printing process, which you can read about here. Looks like a pain in the ass, but the result speaks for itself.

The excellent lighting site Strobist have released their Lighting 101 guide as a free PDF. Check it out!
What’s Strobist? “Teaching you how to use your small flashes, off camera, to get professional results. Your flash photography will never be the same again.”

Brass lens madman enthusiast Jim Galli offered this incredibly useful piece of advice on the Large Format Photography Forum:

Since I almost never use my antiques [lenses] at infinity, (they are usually approaching 1:1 for a portrait) I make my waterhouse stops to “known’s” like 1 inch or 30mm. Then I measure the distance from stop [...]

Solarization is overexposure to the point of tonal reversal, where areas on the film that would be totally black (the sun, for example) start to get lighter again. You can achieve the same thing printing in the darkroom by turning on the lights during developing. (Technically doing it in camera is called soliarization and in [...]

Heat fogs film and creates other "interestingness", which is why most people store it in the fridge or freezer (but don’t freeze Polaroid!). It’s impossible to predict exactly what will happen to any given roll of film, so don’t mistake this as a "this is what you’ll get if you take this emulsion and expose [...]

Ever wonder what happens when you line a Holga with aluminum foil? Me too!
I crinkled the crap out of it to hopefully get lots of light bouncing around in different directions, and lined the camera, shiny side out. The irregular vignette is because I wasn’t very careful about leaving the edges of the light path [...]