I’m always on the lookout for deals on film, particularly with the recent troubles with Kodak. It’s amazing the deals you can find: I picked up a 100ft bulk roll of Portra 160 for $70 (around $3.50 per roll), a 100ft bulk roll of Ektachrome 64T for around $60 (around $3.00 per roll) and even a 400ft roll of Ektachrome slide duplication film which give some really neat results when cross-processed. Recently I came across some cheap Fujicolor Superia 200 rolls on eBay. I threw a minimum bid on them and forgot about it. A couple of weeks later I get an e-mail telling me I’d won the auction. Hooray!

I like my Superia just for walking around snapshooting or when I’m dicking around in development. It’s pretty forgiving, even in my old cameras that aren’t quite shooting at the right speeds and it’s cheap so I never feel too bad when things go bad. Fast forward about 3 weeks and I receive five of these:

Fair enough, right? It was cheap (only $2.50 a roll!) so I can look past beat up boxes. I’ve seen worse things spat out of the postal network. And these came out of Hong Kong, so it’s only to be expected that the boxes will be covered in what I’m pretty sure is Chinese. However, on opening the boxes I was greeted with something peculiar:

Strangely, the label on these new rolls are almost completely different to the rolls I already had, right down to the font on the label, the colour, everything. It’s a completely different design. This has never happened to me before, so I looked the eBay film a bit more and found that the labels on the eBay film were a different shape and appeared to have been stuck on pretty haphazardly. Then I noticed what appears to be a strip of yellow peeking out at the bottom:

Well that sure was odd, as the labels are almost always a perfect fit on the cannister. I sat down and peeled the label back and found a little surprise:

At this point I was quite confused. Were these guys just buying expired rolls of Kodak Gold, whacking a Superia sticker over the top and then selling them again at a higher price, or were they loading random cannisters with the cheapest colour film they could find and selling it as Superia or was it actually Fujicolor Superia wearing a Kodak Gold jumper? I loaded up one of my cameras and headed out to shoot on of them to see what came out.

Opening the cannisters in the darkroom to load them for development showed that, instead of being either taped to the film spool or hooked through the centre of the spool like Kodak and Fuji normally do, the film was taped to the protuding piece of film left hanging from a cannister when it is loaded for processing by a film house, and then wound back into the cannister.

This blows my mind.

Someone, somewhere, is somehow getting unexposed strips of Superia 200 without canisters; they’re getting discarded canisters from film developers; they are going into the darkroom and taping their Superia strips to the protruding film from these canisters and winding the film in, then they are printing their own labels and sticking them onto these Kodak Gold Superia canisters and then they’re boxing the lot up and flogging it on eBay for peanuts. I can’t see why they would go to all the trouble, especially with such a cheap film. Why not Velvia, Provia, Pro 400H or Reala?

After developing, the edge markings identified the film as Fujicolor Superia 200 (FUJI S-200 CA23). Instead of 36 exposures advertised I got only 33, and the frame numbers were severely misaligned in relation to the frames themselves. The film is also covered in light scratches, likely from excessive handling during it’s strange journey. But hey, if nothing else this film gave me a few laughs, and for the price I’m not behind at all.

This film was purchased from Delight Digital Silk Road, and as of writing I see two more auctions at the same price I paid that are currently active.

Finally, some shots from the roll I developed:

Recently I’ve done what seems to many to be unthinkable: I have deactivated my Facebook account.

This will be the third time I’ve done it and the third time I’ve vowed to walk away, and instead spend my time doing something more productive. I don’t know how successful I will be, but time will tell. So far I’ve been away from it for two weeks and everything is going well.

I’ve been on the Facebook bandwagon since 2005 or so, and up until recently I’ve never taken it very seriously. It was a convenient way to keep in touch with my friends when we left school and scattered across the east coast to attend university or pursue careers, and it was very good at doing that. I can confidently say it’s one of the main reasons I’ve kept in touch with many of the people I went to school with, as they infrequently come back to our home town and I rarely leave to visit them thanks to work and family obligations.

Sadly though, in the last few months I find myself getting obsessed, browsing through profiles of people I’ve known, people I’ve met and people I don’t even like. Tonight I had the realisation that in the end I am getting nothing out of Facebook anymore: I can contact my close friends by phone or by e-mail which is more private and much more personal. For the rest of the people I networked with on Facebook, I rarely actually contributed anything beyond interesting youtube videos and the occasional photo. Both of which I can continue to serve up here, and hopefully generate more regular posts.

So what to do with all of my spare time I have now? My intention is to get out there and start taking more photos. I recently bought a Yashica-C TLR fairly cheap on eBay, and beyond shooting a roll of film to make sure it worked I haven’t taken it out too much despite having 14 rolls of Kodak Tmax 100 to put through it. I also bought a Canon EOS 3 recently that I’ve only run a few rolls of Fomapan 100 through that I plan on shooting some portraits and landscapes with, a Yashica Electro 35 that I want to take into a larger town nearby and shoot some street with and my trusty Spotmatic, that I’ve recently adjusted and need to test to see that it is working OK.

I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time recently hanging out at the used bookshop here in town, so I will hopefully have a few new old books to read.

Finally, today marks the first day of my leave from work. Six weeks of it. I applied for this leave about 12 months ago, as a friend and I were planning to do an epic motorcycle ride across Australia from East to West coast and back again over 4-5 weeks. Sadly, he had some things come up and had to pull out of the trip. I considered my options for a week or so before deciding not to do the trip without him, partly because we each have some of the essential gear for the trip that I would have trouble carrying by myself, partly beause the Nullarbor is not a stretch of road I feel comfortable riding by myself with a heavily loaded motorcycle, and partly because this whole trip has been his idea and I wouldn’t feel right going myself while he could not. I do have another ride in mind, that I will go on either by myself or with my mate depending on his availability, planned for a week or two towards the end of my leave.

So there it is, some past, some current and some future news. Depending on my availability tomorrow I hope to shoot a few rolls in the Yashica C and have them developed tomorrow night, fingers crossed.

Finally, here’s a shot from the test roll I ran through my Yashica C:

For quite a while now, almost since I first took up photography, I have been shooting film along side my digital. None of my cameras are particularly amazing, nor are any of the old manual lenses on my film cameras any better than the modern lenses I have paired with my EOS 500D. But the whole process of loading a roll of film and knowing that every single shot has a cost associated with it, the cost of the film, the cost of chemicals to develop it and the significant investment of time at every stage of the process from blank film to processed negative gives film a sort of romance that can be intoxicating.

For two years I’ve been shooting black and white, and more recently colour film, saving those rolls up and storing them in my freezer thinking I’d find somewhere that does bulk discounts on film processing. After weighing up the costs and having a lot of gear donated to me I ended up buying the chemicals to develop my own. This does involve an initial investment in some equipment, but in the long term means I can process my colour film for as little as $2.50 per roll, and my black and white film for even less than that compared to $5 per roll for colour film at a “local” minilab.

So over the last month I have been working my way through a freezer full of film that has been waiting for development for quite some time but in all my wisdom I neglected to seriously consider what I would do with those negatives. I have an enlarger, but without a dedicated darkroom I have nowhere to process paper prints, so I had to look at digitising my film.

My first choice was also the cheapest, and in retrospect not the best choice at all: An Optex Digiscan 1 negative and slide scanner. Boasting a 5 megapixel CMOS sensor and a $20 pricetag I was almost giddy when I took it home at the opportunity of finally blowing up my negatives to a decent size and seeing what I had taken. Sadly when I got it home I found out that support for the scanner under Windows 7 was not the best, and spent several hours fiddling before the scanner would appear in my imaging software. But driver issues I can look past. It’s not fair to judge older peripherals based solely on driver support 3 or 4 years after they were released, particularly if they are a small market item as this was.

After getting it working I loaded my film into the provided negative carrier and slotted them into the scanner, fired up Irfanview and started scanning. The first thing that hit me was the speed, or rather the lack of it. The scanner would sit there, and you could slowly watch your image resolve on the screen at a low resolution and eventually stabilising, at which point you can save your image. Basically, it’s a webcam in a little tower with a backlight shining through your film. Imagine my dismay then when my results were this amazing:

Note the giant black dot towards the right of the frame. That is a relatively large chunk of dust stuck to the sensor, in a scanner that had never been used before. I was not impressed.

It was at this point I decided I wasn’t going to beat around the bush, and order a decent scanner. After some research (that is googling photo scanners and then looking at scanned photos from those scanners on Flickr) I decided on an Epson V330. Sadly, where I order all of my computer parts had the V330 on backorder, and it stayed like that for almost a month so after waiting and waiting I canceled my backorder and ordered a Canon CanoScan CS9000F. There are no other words to describe it: It’s bloody amazing. Not only does it have a questionable resolution of 9600dpi and film carriers for both 35mm and 120 size film, it’s only $350-$399. I couldn’t be happier. My only complaint is the amount of time it takes to scan film at 4800dpi: about 25 minutes for 12 images. That’s an hour and a half per 36 exposure roll of film. But the results are leaps and bounds ahead of the cheap ebay scanner:

So that’s it, I’m now slowly working my way through the pile of negatives I’ve had sitting here and it’s pretty much like christmas at the moment seeing all of these photos properly for the first time, some going right back to the first first photos I took with my first camera, a Canon EOS 1000F.

When I was young, I was introduced to a television show dealing with the supernatural, science fiction and the unknown. That late night introduction, sitting inches from the television, on the edge of my seat, keeping the volume as low as I could to avoid waking my parents, and being quite terrified; the whole experience shaped my taste in entertainment from that point on in my life. Even now I have a soft spot for that series despite growing up and becoming much more demanding when it comes to realism. That show was The X-Files, my first experience with the Unknown Monster-of-the-week formula.

Since then, many series have come by and I’ve been sucked into them for various reasons: Stargate SG-1 with its Egyptian science-fiction themes and great stories, Supernatural with the fantasy creatures in a modern setting, Fringe a great series closely following The X-Files example, Doctor Who with its wacky stories and general fun along with many others. You get my drift. I love these series where each week I tune in to watch the protagonists grapple with a creature or situation for one, maybe two episodes before defeating/resolving it and moving on. This is what I and many other people watch these series for.

Why is it then that the creators of these series feel the need to shoe-horn a half-baked, confusing and overall stupid ongoing storyline into these series. Looking back at the X-Files everything was excellent most of the time, but every now and then Mulders backstory would rear its ugly head and waste several perfectly good episodes of the series only to never go anywhere and never have any consistency. Mulder was a great character, the eccentric but brilliant agent with an open mind, frequently mocked but confident in himself enough to push through the ridicule and prove the haters wrong. It was great! We don’t need to find out what happened when his sister was abducted by aliens when he was a child. It’s NOT IMPORTANT. It’s nothing more than a plot device to give Mulder his motivation for the series.

In Doctor Who, each series has an ongoing story always culminating in the final two episodes, and as the series goes on these climaxes get more and more ridiculous. I mean, look at this crap:

Fringe is what set this whole post off in my mind. Previous series have centered around the conflict between Earth in this dimension and Earth in a parallel dimension. This was fine, up until now the writers have kept things classy with lots of little bits of plot development mixed in with the Monster Of The Week stories. In the latest series however, apparently having two dimensions isn’t enough, because now we have two dimensions in a seperate timeline.

Why? Why can’t you guys just give us our monsters? If I want to watch a series with excellent storytelling I’ll watch Dexter or Breaking Bad. I watch these shows each week for the monsters, not for the overall story. If you want to write an epic then please, find somewhere else to let off your creative steam, because these series just aren’t suited to big stories.

Anyway, this has been bouncing around in my head for a few days and driving me crazy so I had to write it down.

Well it’s been a long time without a post, and I finally feel motivated enough to write.. something.

I haven’t really been that busy, I just haven’t had anything interesting to write about. things have been happening though: I’ve been out taking photos, I’ve got a model shoot coming up in the next week along with a sunrise/sunset shoot if the rain clears off just enough to let the sunlight through. I am also getting into gear ordering equipment for my ride across the country in April, which I will probably write a while post about the organising, packing and gear we’re using.

Some big news I’ve been following intently over the last few weeks is the financial troubles of Eastman Kodak. It’s not really a big deal and won’t affect me a great deal, but as time goes on I become more and more worried about the future of their film business. Only yesterday I read about their sale of the Eastman Gelatine arm, and that along with all of the other businesses they’ve put to the chopping block I’m starting to get worried about the future of their film business. On one hand they could sell it off to new owners who will continue production, or they may sell it off only to have the business liquidated by new owners: the end of an era. So I find myself in a predicament, whether to hope for the best and buy the film I need as I need it, or play it safe and stock up on as much film as I can buy just in case. It’s a tough choice.