Developing your film at home is both rewarding and frustrating at the same time and to add on an extra layer of complexity there is a lot of developers out there that you can use, especially in the black & white field. While certainly not as much as there used to be, there is still an excellent selection of developers to suit almost every person’s need, without having to dive deep into building your developers from base chemicals. Ultimately every photographer has a different taste but if you’re starting out with home development the choices may seem a little overwhelming so I’ll be breaking downRead More →

There is a tonne of iconic film stocks that have been released and are no longer with us; I’m thinking Kodak Plus-X, Kodak Panatomic-X, almost the entire line of Polaroid Film. And among those Polaroid films, the one that probably hurt the hardest when it saw cancellation in 2008 is Type 55. Type 55 is a unique film even among Polaroid instant films in that it produces a usable print (obviously) but also a usable negative. And it is a legend that the negative used in Type 55 is based on Kodak Panatomic-X. It is also among those films that I wish I got toRead More →

One of the more interesting aspects of working with old Polaroid stock is that sometimes you get duds. While this past Saturday I wanted to get some cameras shot for the next three camera review blogs so that I can have them up before heading to Europe in three weeks, I also decided to take the rest of my 1997 expired Polaroid Type 55 4×5 stock along to shoot while on the road. Despite having a lot left, the stock being nearly twenty years out of date, there were a lot of duds, not enough chemistry spread, or none at all. But when all wasRead More →