These are the “you lose some” from a roll of Fomapan 200 exposed with a Nikon FM2.
What happened here is that I opened the camera back with the window of the Shirley Wellard film cassette still open. The winding lever was sticking every few frames, and so I rewound the film and opened the back of the camera to check what was wrong without first closing the window. A moment passed as I stared at the exposed film through the gap, wondering why I was seeing film when I wasn’t supposed to. It was unfortunate for these two frames, which were at the beginning of the roll and, therefore, most affected.
I don’t know what was wrong with the winding, and I have yet to test the Nikon FM2 with a normal factory cassette. Still, the rest of the roll was okay and these three pictures were the “you win some”.
My copy of the Shirley Wellard came with the original case and instructions leaflet.The screw at the bottom of the film cassette can be used to adjust its fit in the camera film chamber.The top cap of the film cassette can be removed by unscrewing.The window is opened after the film is fitted into the camera and the back closed in order for the film to advance freely.The top cap of the film cassette can be removed to access the spool.The film cassette is made up a metal case, with a revolving window, a spool, and the screwing top cap.After the film is loaded in darkness, the window of the cassette is closed (in darkness).Bottom view of the Shirley Wellard loaded with film. With the window closed, the cassette can be manipulated in daylight.During loading, the window of the Shirley Wellard is kept shut. Once the back of the camera is closed, the window can be rotated to the open position.The rewind handle sits proud when a Shirley Wellard cassette is loaded.
This year’s Farnborough International Airshow pictures were shot on film with a Nikon FM2 and a Nikon FE2. The lens was a Nikon AF-S 300mm f/4. Both colour film and black-and-white film were used, although only the colour pictures are shown here.
First, there were the fast and loud.
The F-15QA showed its maneuverability during the Farnborough International Airshow 2024.The Royal Danish Air Force flew one of their F-16 at FIA 2024. It was probably the loudest of all the jet fighters.
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Then came the fat and slow.
The demonstrations of the Airbus jetliners always impress me during the airshow. Their quick take-off, steep climb, and tight slow turn contradict my intuition about the maneuverability of such massive aircraft.
The first two pictures below make it seem like I am at the same height as the A321, but they are optical illusions created by the acute banking angle of the plane in its sharp turn above me.
The Airbus A321 flying demo was impressive.The photo makes it look like the airplane is horizontal, whereas it is flying at an acute angle in a very tight turn.The Airbus passenger jet airplanes have the most impressive demos at FIA 2024.
The Shirley Wellard Universal film cassette was too much attractive vintage photography equipment to pass on. I bought two of them on eBay and successfully used one today with my Nikon FM2.
The Shirley Wellard’s beautiful design and solid build are not my only reasons for buying them. In fact, having recently started shooting with black-and-white film and wanting to cut costs, I bought a bulk roll of Fomapan 200 film, and as I had run out of used factory cassettes on which to load it and the metal reloadable cassettes ordered from AliExpress will not arrive for a couple of weeks, I was interested in experimenting with the Shirley Wellard.
The Shirley Wellard Universal reloadable cassette is a well-constructed vintage piece from the 1950s.
The Shirley Wellard Universal cassette does not fit in a Minolta X300 camera, which makes it not so universal after all. But to be fair, the instructions leaflet bundled with it lists compatible cameras, all of which came out before the Minolta X300.
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Black-and-white film development is rather curious. Instead of a single process, like C-41 for print films, there are multitudes of processes with various developers (including coffee-based concoctions), chemistry dilution ratios, and development times. Many photographers rejoice in exploring all these possibilities. But I am not one of them—at least, not yet. For now, as long as I can get lost for an hour or two in taking pictures and developing film, I am a happy photographer.
Nikon D200 digital SLRItems of different colours used to test the tonality of Kentmere 400 filmTesting tonality of film with hourglasses filled with “sand” of different colours
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I also bought a new changing bag. The previous one, which I’ve had since 2009, was leaking light and causing films to fog as I loaded them onto development reels, because its inner rubber lining had broken down. The new bag is bigger and more spaceous, thus easing blind handling of equipment inside.
The improvement in quality of the developed negatives after using the new bag brought out the faults in older negatives, which had been cloudy and milky and produced scans with low contrast.
What to do with old solar garden lights and their chargers? Throw the lights into a corner of the garden and stake the chargers in the ground in a mishmash.This window has been broken for a few years now. Only now, I think of using perspex glass to replace it.
In March, I experimented with using a DSLR to digitise negatives and liked the results more than those obtained from my low-end Epson Perfection V200 scanner. However, this sentiment is now reversed because I can produce better images from the scanner.
Previously, I scanned a negative with VueScan (using Lock Exposure and Lock Base Color features to neutralise the colour of the film base), saving the frames as TIFF images, and refined colours with Curves in GIMP. That method relied on my ability to correctly judge neutral colours and was therefore subjective.
The Film Negative module in RawTherapee uses maths to balance colours from film negatives, which is more consistent than human judgment. But until recently, it worked only with RAW files produced by DSLRs. Now the added support for TIFF files in RawTherapee 5.10 enables me to process negatives with it.
My new workflow is to scan each frame of a negative as a RAW image and to save it as a TIFF file. A RAW image is the direct output of the scanner and does not contain any image processing. I can work with the TIFF image in RawTherapee in the same way as I do with a RAW image from a DSLR. But Film Negative does the heavy lifting. Most of the time, it automatically finds the correct colours, but it can also get a good outcome from two user-selected points of neutral colour from a frame.
So far, I am very pleased with the performance of Film Negative. The picture above, which was used in my previous comparison, is the output of Film Negative. It is true to life: The skin, black jacket, grey dashboard, and red car look much more natural than in previous images from both the scanner and the DSLR digitisation. The photos in my previous post were obtained in the same way.
Theoretically, Film Negative works similarly on both a TIFF image from VueScan and a RAW image from a DSLR. However, experimenting with the DSLR method today, I could not get satisfying results. I am now reconsidering the purchase of The Lobster Holder, which I’ve wanted since my DSLR digitisation experiment.
Those pictures mentioned in my post about playing with artificial light? They were a total loss. I messed up the development.
I was not very happy about this costly mistake and needed to know what went wrong. So, I loaded another roll of film into the Nikon FM2 and drove straight to the country park to get some test shots.
It turns out that a 24-frame roll is rather long when you haven’t planned what to photograph. It took me nearly two hours to get the shots, mostly of random nature things, before I could return home for Round Two of developing Kodak Ultramax with Bellini C-41. Now armed with a sous-vide heater, I was confident I could keep a stable temperature throughout the process. I was also going to do inversion agitation instead of twirling the small plastic rod.
The development was successful, but was it a fluke? The only way to be sure was to do Round Three of developing with Bellini C-41. To be doubly sure, this time I used a 20-year-old roll of Fujifilm Superia 400. Again, shooting the 24 frames took some time.
The pictures that came out were as good as can be for expired film. I knew I had nailed developing with Bellini C-41.
I think the most significant change in my process was the use of inversion agitation—which looks like shaking a cocktail drink, except with less vigour—instead of agitation with the plastic rod.
I bought a fresh roll of Kodak Ultramax 400 to test the film in daylight and under artificial light. I set up some LED lamps and flash lights and took pictures with the Nikon FM2. I also shot the same pictures with a Nikon D200 for later comparison. Here are the D200 pictures from the session.
P and I spent an amazing evening at a concert in Crawley where Blakkayo was performing. The concert tickets were my birthday gift from P. Besides the great atmosphere, it was nice to reconnect with our Chagossian friends.
