Rally / Protest regarding Muslim Refugees in Valdosta, GA

Some friends let me know about a rally happening protesting the "Muslim invasion" of the USA in downtown Valdosta. A lot of my friends at the college did a counter-protest at this rally. I documented the event, which happened at the Lowndes County Courthouse:

 

 

 

 

 

 

All images made with my Pentax 67 or 67ii with 35mm/105mm/400mm lenses, on Tri-X, Plus-X, and Ektachrome Plus films.

Experiments with Black and White Reversal Process

Years ago I discovered an article about doing black and white reversal imaging. This process uses normal color film but substitutes one step in the developing process to "tone" the image, creating a reversal image (positive).

I finally got the materials some weeks ago and did some experimenting. It worked, but I had to calibrate the process for my EI (which is much lower than the rated film speed generally).

Anyway, the first test shot I did was of my girlfriend, using 4x5 Fuji CDU II duplicating film (E-6 process), which is a really slow film that is tungsten balanced. I figured it would be a good starting test film. Here is the result:

She isn't smiling because it was a long exposure by the way!

I also tried shooting some normal black and white film, but on most films I tried the emulsion would get destroyed, except T-Max 100. This was HP5+:

So after thinking more about it, I decided to try some old C-41 negative film, which actually works quite well and has huge dynamic range, but I've discovered it's best to overexpose it 2-3 stops from the normal ISO rating...in fact I couldn't really "overexpose" it no matter how I shot it. Here are a variety of shots I took while experimenting:

 

 

A lot of people may ask, what's the point? Well, for all of the above shots, I was using Kodak Gold 200 35mm film, which is old and expired. The colors are kind of messed up and it's really grainy when used normally. I was given about 20 rolls of this stuff and I hate to throw it away. But when processed like this, it's almost grain-free and of course has no color problems. I really like the results after dialing in the process, so it's an easy way to shoot this and other old films I find. I also have several hundred sheets of very old 4x5 E-6 film that I will use like this most likely. So this is really helpful for someone using older film, especially me since I shoot a lot just for fun. I might not use it for "serious" photos but it works so well, maybe so.

More Pentax 67ii Fun

Last week I spent a sunny afternoon at Langdale Park (again) shooting with my new Pentax 67ii. I wanted to try a few things - first I tried out a set of 35mm film adapters that I have, and they worked fine. I was using some old junky Portra 160NC film, so the colors were a bit wonky but here are some shots:

 

Next, I had a really old roll of Shanghai GP3 film. This stuff is terrible and apparently they use some kind of bad ink that gets onto the film from the backing paper. I figured I might as well shoot it anyway since I was just enjoying the day - but yeah the ink has transferred to the film and you can see the numbers and circles from the paper on the photos. Also this film just generally sucks in my opinion - terrible tones with any developer and very curly and hard to work with. Here's a few shots to show the results:

Around this time I found myself in a more sunlit area with nice colors so I thought I'd put a roll of old E100G into the camera to see how it exposes E-6 film, since I hadn't shot any of that with it yet. I did set the meter at 80 and used an 81C filter, as I've found that expired E100G does better that way. I was pretty happy with the results:

Overall the exposures were beautiful and I am very happy with the AE abilities of this camera!