Two new step-by-step how-tos have been posted at Alternative Photography:
An introduction to Polaroid 600 and image film manipulations
Indirect Low Light Polaroid 600 Photograms
Both were written by Jenelle Norris, whose work you can see at her web site and her gallery at AlternativePhotography.com.
waking_dream made this masked double exposure in two stages: one was made with a round piece of tape blocking the center of the lens, while the other was made holding a card with a circle cut out in front of the lens. Expose the center and then everything except the center. Very cool!
For exposing the middle, you could cut a hole in your lens cap rather than using a card (obviously more appealing if you use a Holga as he did).
Check out his photos, too; the man’s got skills.
I think the camera toss phenomenon, started by Ryan Gallagher (also see his Flickr stream), is really cool. The idea is that you set your camera for a relatively long exposure in a dark place with a nifty arrangement of lights, and throw the camera in the air while the shutter is open. The results can be jaw-dropping.
I decided to give it a go while I was out shooting pinholes the other day. At f/235, I figured I’d better do it outdoors in bright sun to have any chance of getting anything on film. As it turns out, the sun was the only thing that actually turned up. This is on Fuji Astia 100F cross-processed in C-41, shot at about ISO 25, with multiple tosses in the air per exposure.
I may use this one for holiday cards this year (if I send any), as I think it looks a bit like a wrapped present:
Also check out the first known pinhole toss photos ever, by Alan Cooper aka alspix, using his famous matchbox pinhole camera: photo 1, photo 2.
See also: Ryan Gallagher’s blog post about these and alspix’ photos, Tarja Trygg’s pinhole solargraphy project (which I thought I posted about before but apparently didn’t… check it out, it’s really, really cool)
Luke Healey has posted another Diafine EI test (see his previous test of Tri-X), this time of Fomapan 100. Check it out in his photostream at Flickr (larger version available there).
If you’re not familiar with Diafine developer, it’s got several magical properties: it’s a split-bath compensating developer, so it’s difficult to get blocked shadows or blown highlights, one batch can last for well over a year, its temperature range is wide enough (21–30°C / 70–85°F) that you don’t need a thermometer, they recommend you not use a chemical stop bath (just water), film needs to spend at least 3 minutes in each bath (but can spend more), and since the development time is the same for every film, you can develop different emulsions in the same batch at one time. If you’re gentle with the agitation, it’s quite fine-grained. In short: AWESOME.
For more info, see the Diafine group on Flickr, Grant Heffernan, or Sherman Dunnam Photography.
You can buy it from Calumet Photographic, B&H, and Amazon.com in the US, among other places. For the UK, hit Retro Photographic.
Photographer Sean Rohde dug up and scanned a bunch of his darkroom experiments from the late 80s and early 90s. There are heaps of images along with explanations of how each was done. He writes:
Way back when, from 1988 to around 1992, I actually had a full darkroom. I currently just develop my own film and scan the negs onto my computer. That’s fine for straight "prints", and photoshop does have some nice controls that are difficult to duplicate with an enlarger. On the other hand, there are tons of things I can do in the darkroom that are impossible to replicate on the computer…
Continue reading and see lots of images at Rohdes’ blog, moominstuff. You can check out more of his excellent experimental and toy camera photography in his Flickr photostream.
Check out this comparison of the depth of field at f/2 on 50, 35, and 9mm lenses on different sensor sizes. Note that this is about coverage and sensor size, not depth of field as related to focal length with the same coverage. If the coverage is the same, the depth of field is the same regardless of focal length—see this explanation and examples at Luminous Lanscape.
Alex Tymków has just published an article on combining pyro film development with digital negs [1, 2] for alt process printing at AlternativePhotography.com. Check it out.
Check out this contact printing with blueprint (diazo) paper and Windex window cleaner tutorial by Mark Gutierrez. Cool results, no darkroom or enlarger required, dead easy!
Read instructions at Instructables
Thanks to Seth for the heads-up!
Photo by Mark Gutierrez, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license
Polaroid’s removal of Time-Zero film from the market left a huge gap in the hearts of many photographers—a gap has just been filled by f295 member Erik Wiklund, who has come up with a a new manipulation technique for available peel-apart Polaroid films!
See the instructions and sample images at Polaroid.com or check out the original thread at f295.
MAKE Blog write:
DIY:Happy has a good round up of ways to do solvent transfers… – "Doing a solvent transfer is probably the quickest, easiest way to get an image onto a T-Shirt, Moleskine, or other surface. Like screen printing, the image is applied directly the surface. Unlike screen printing, this can be done quickly, cheaply, and without an extra equipment."
Read roundup at DIY:Happy