Recent content by Alan Townsend

I find that a home made meter, calibration using my phone with a luxmeter app to be helpful in making enlarged positives and negatives for alt process printing. This reduces time and material waste for me. The meter gives a starting point for the iterations needed for a final result, but...

These cameras are not as attractive to the market due to all those things. Very cheap prices on Ebay for these. Very likely to fail after fixing, I would think. Some love these models, some hate them, too. I personally do not care for them and prefer the opposite genre of all mechanical with...

Of course. Art and technology contribute to the greater good in many ways. I would think most photographers on Photrio are trying to achieve this. Examples of photography harming people would be harder to find and uncommon here.

I know carbon printing glop generally uses sucrose which is table sugar as a plastisizer, along with a dab of glycerol. Sucrose is a mixture of glucose and fructose. I recently read that fructose gives the best elasticity for gelatin from non photo use, so am thinking about trying it if...

This brings back memories. Lippmann plates are reflection holograms made by incoherent light by placing a mercury mirror directly in contact with the emulsion and taking a photograph using a lens in front of the film in the normal way. This explained why early Daguerreotypists saw colors on...

In my example of GOMC, the lighting was very flat in early spring with no leaves on the trees and the sun almost directly behind me, so this is a somewhat unfair comparison. The D23 13 example was in late summer with full leaves on all trees, hence the holes in foliage highlights, and the...

Thanks for asking. I don't have any final print comparisons ready, but have some negative scans that show the differences fairly well. These images were taken at different times of the year with different lighting, and different scan settings but with the same film using the two developers...

This thread is interesting to me because it touches on several issues that have been on my mind. Developer preference is a complicated thing and based on many ideas. What is being photographed and how do we want that to look, how are we printing our negatives and what process do we use for...

The OP was asking in theory WHY some and not others, but for them rolling green ds Xray film, they only need to use the one that works, Ilford. I would think possible to load some roll film cameras using a red safelight without backing paper provided film advance is automatic and no little red...

I bought a universal L bracket on Amazone a couple of years ago for my 35mm film cameras and it works great with ball head tripod directly. Much better balance on vertical compositions. These are a digital camera thing that works really well on old 35mm film cameras.

I like this image. Abstraction is not my forte, but in this case, I like it. Very firey or very relaxing depending on state of mind.

I believe this is common with most "fine grain" developers today including Xtol, MicrodolX, d76 and d23 using stock solution. Also common in antiquity, the Daguerreotype where boiling mercury is used to develop silver halides on a silver coated plate of metal, or during wet collodian era where...

I would suggest using a 4x5 enlarging lens that is optimized for 8x10 enlargements as a macro lens at around that magnification. Finding a shutter for that is another problem but you can always use a speed graphic or other camera with focal plane shutter. Otherwise use slow film and stop down...

I remember a travel tripod I bought about 30 years ago that was heavily advertised in Peterson's that looked really cool and all the legs rotated around to make it a flat pack for storage. I forgot the name of it, but it was expensive at around $80 at the time but was the most flimsey wobbly...

Yes, very nice prints. How did you apply the oil? Does it make the paper fragil? Did you dry it out before printing or did you use it wet and if printed wet does it make an oily surface on the print that needs to be cleaned off before processing? Sorry for all the questions.