Daniel Ridings
Bräckavägen 17 SE-437 42 Lindome, SwedenThere is nothing exceptional about the technical side of these pictures. My background is working in the darkroom with chemicals. This put restraints on what I do because until recently, I did not have a darkroom, nor did I have access to one. That is the explanation for color turning up in a couple of pictures; I could just turn the rolls in for processing. Not many do black-and-white anymore. It is coming back, but at a premium; not anything for someone who only gets a good picture about four times a year, on a good year.
A little while back I bought a film scanner, Hewlett Packard PhotoSmart S 20. Processing film can be done almost anywhere; it is the making of copies that gets more involved. With a film scanner I could go back to black and white without the darkroom. That is what I thought, anyway. It turns out to be pretty difficult to get a good image off of a black and white negative with a film scanner.
All the images here have been scanned from negatives, not from prints. I scan them in without letting the scanner software do any automatic adjustments. I scan the negatives as a color negative. I then take away the hue 100%. I do not let the software (Paintshop Pro) convert to greyscale. I tried that, but don't get the results I like. I then create an adjustment layer for "levels" and play around with the highlights and shadows, more or less imitating grades of paper.
Some of the early pictures used Ilford HP4. I remember that as a very nice film. Because of that I tried to standardize on Ilford HP5+. That, however, is a film I just cannot get to work for me. It is a nice film, but I cannot get any contrast out of it. So it is back to Tri-X. D-76 or ID-11 (Ilford's) in either case.
Picked up a Leitz Focomat V35 Autofocus at Voxon AB at a very good price, about 260 USD. Now I am back in business.
