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 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.

***

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.

***

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.

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 film shots mentioned in my last post about playing with artificial light? They were a total loss after being developed.

I was so pissed by the waste of a rather dear roll of film that I immediately grabbed the Nikon FM2 and drove to the local country park to shoot another roll of the same film. I had to know where I messed up.

It turns out that making twenty-four photos is not a quick affair. I walked for two hours, now and then stopping to take a picture of some random nature thing, before I could return home for Round Two of developing Kodak Ultramax with Bellini C-41 kit at 38 degrees Celcius. But now I was armed with a sous-vide heater to keep the chemicals at a constant temperature. And I was going to agitate the chemicals by inversion instead of rotating the small plastic stick/rod.

It paid off. The development, that is—the photography, meh.

Was this success a fluke? The only way to be sure was to go for Round Three of developing Kodak Ultramax with Bellini C-41 kit at 38 degrees Celcius. To up the challenge, I used a twenty-year-old roll of Fujifilm Superia 400, rated at ISO 200, to photograph stuff from around the house. Again, finishing the twenty-four frames took a while. But the subsequent development process was done slowly and carefully.

The pictures that came out were as good as they could be from expired film. I had nailed developing Kodak Ultramax with Bellini C-41 kit at 38 degrees Celcius.

I believe the most significant change I made was the use of inversion agitation—which looks like shaking a cocktail drink, except with less vigour—instead of agitation with the stick/rod.

Even P was impressed.

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.

Our road-trip cut short by downpours, we stopped at Albion Public Beach to buy rotis. After eating, we drove to another beach, hoping that the clouds would clear. I got lucky and snapped this picture of the lighthouse just before it rained again.

We then went to Pointe-aux-Sables where the weather was nicer and people were actually celebrating Easter on the beach—not the usual large crowd, but the mood was there. I walked onto the jetty and took some more pictures of ships and of the port.

I tried a long exposure of the Container Terminal and realised that 30 seconds with a 10-stop filter was overkill for rendering smooth waters.

Managing a house renovation project is hard work. We keep rushing from place to place, making phone calls to and meeting tradesmen for cost estimates, and pleading–if not begging–for our work to be started in priority. This back-and-forth has been our bane for the last three months. Yet, I am told that we have made good progress, relatively to others’ experiences.

Perhaps, having the masonry done, and doors and windows installed within a month give that impression. But out of fourteen big items in our project plan, we’ve marked only four as green. A couple of them (CWA water supply and CEB electricity suppl)are marked amber, given the dependence on other tasks to be completed first. And, we have yet to choose light fixtures and sanitary ware to be able to advance work on electrics and plumbing (the reds).

My brother is convinced that we can complete the renovation within our three-week stay in Mauritius. I am not, given how much remains to be done and the slow pace at which things move.

***

Since “I am not working” on this trip, I thought I would spend my afternoons doing more photography. But the activities related to our renovation project are more tiring than I expected, especially combined with the heat, and my motivation remains low. With some encouragement from P, I looked for and found a picture without having to drive anywhere.

Today, someone from an online tool store with which I had placed a rather large order called to verify that I was not a fraudster. They thought my email address, which has the same domain name as this blog, was odd and wanted to check if it was genuine. I said that it had been my personal domain since around 2003 and that it pointed to my personal blog.

“So what do you write about?”

“I write about photography and programming.”

“Oh, you are one of the Mauritian bloggers…”

Obviously, they had searched for the domain and had been redirected to mauritiusblogtracker.com but still wanted to be certain that I was the rightful owner.

They were reassured by our conversation and promised that my order would be processed.

***

After work, I rigged a 35mm film holder and an LED panel so that I could try DSLR film-scanning. It took a few attempts to get an adequate set-up that fits within the tiny space on my desk.

Until now I have avoided this method of converting negative images to digital, for no reason other than wanting to remain a scanner purist and to justify my purchase of VueScan.

Well, I must admit that I am impressed by the results. Even when “scanned” with an ancient Nikon D200, the photos from this process are much better than those from my flatbed film scanner.

Here are some images for comparison.