I shot (another) roll of Phoenix II

I first shot a roll of Phoenix II in my folding medium format camera. I stuffed up changing the roll outside when I didn’t realise the film hadn’t rolled onto the take up spool cleanly 😒

Despite my mistakes with focus and the light leaks, I liked the colours and thought I should give it another go.

I loaded a roll of Phoenix II in 35mm into my Olympus OM-10, and set the meter to 125 - with the expectation of developing the roll in ECN-2 chemicals. If nothing else, that part of the last roll worked out fine.

Foreshadowing - what could I stuff up this time?

Well, to cut to the end real quick, I think my ECN-2 chemicals have been exhausted. When I pulled the negatives out they were very thin. It is somewhat expected with ECN-2 development, but not that thin. Some frames were clearer than others, and there was definitely images on each of them.

Yellow

I decided a little while back to start collecting photos of yellow cars. Why? NIF. Take one photo of yellow car, and you have one photo that is probably not very interesting. But take a collection of photos of yellow cars and you might have something? I can’t remember where I read or heard this, but the idea of a focus for some images seems like a good idea.

I’ll add these images to the collection of others I have (both film and digital), and workout what I do with them later.

Side quest: It was at this point that I had put a number of the artefacts on the images down to uneven development and exhausted chemicals. But as I was flicking through all the images in quick succession I noticed they were all the same on all the images. Ha. OK, so maybe the extremely secondhand lenses I used on the OM-10 are just extremely secondhand. But, the artefacts were uniform between frames taken with different lenses 🤔

Housemate: “Could it be the scanning rig?”

It could be … goes and looks at the micro 4/3 camera I use for scanning

Yeap. Could be. Could very well be.

To be clear, there are definitely some artefacts on the frames from the development process, but also some stuff from the scanning process.

Part of the inspiration of this roll was to not make careful notes of each frame. Usually I note the aperture, shutter speed, lens used for each frame in an app on my phone, which then helpfully makes a note of the time and place. Will I go back and re-scan this roll?

Nah.

Side quest the second: Did I actually re-scan the film? Yeah. Did it improve it? Yes? No? I got rid of some of the artefacts, but editing the images I couldn’t get the colours right.

First scan was Olympus OM-D EM-1 Mark II using the high resolution / pixel shift mode. The second scan was using the Pentax K-1. The K-1 has a pixel shift mode too, but it doesn’t increase the resolution, it does increase the colour information in the image - resulting in 250+MB RAW files 😱

Going through the images after, I just can’t get the colours right on the K-1 files. Maybe I could spend a whole day going through them, but that is not the point of this roll. Also, the original scans, I don’t hate them.

Colour Correction with Phoenix II

Negative Lab Pro was really struggled getting some of the colours right on this roll - which isn’t a surprise, it is know that the scans of Phoenix II can be a bit harder to work with (though better than the original Phoenix), but this was nuts. I have been enjoying the green leaves against the blue sky now the trees have leaves on them again - and the sky has been very blue. NLP, nope.

Default conversion on the left, corrected image on the right.

These scans were from K-1 (the Olympus scans had the same thing, dark purple grey sky), did the greens turn too green in the second? Maybe a tad. But only a tad. Things are green at the moment.

Side Quest Complete! Achievement unlocked, read too many of Tim’s boring words.

Going for a walk (again)

I took the OM-10 out with me on a few walks with just the 50mm lens.

I even managed to see some bees! Though, this lens does not have anything that anyone would call ‘close focus.’

I like the pinks in the flowers and the green leaves.

A handful of people around here do take Halloween very seriously. I keep thinking about loading some 500T into a camera and going for a walk at blue hour. But I’d probably need a tripod or something and then I am taking photos of people’s houses with a tripod and that is a little uncomfortable.

Backyard Birdies

Sometimes, I firmly believe that I don’t need any camera other than the Ricoh GR IIIx, except when I do. Birds is one of those times, the 40mm equivalent lens isn’t great for birds. But how is a 50mm on a manual camera?

Well, if the birds are outside the kitchen window and don’t move too much, you can get some photos of them with a 50mm lens, though they are still a little far away 😅

Over the last week this pigeon has been spoiling bath time for everyone by either sitting menacingly on the fence, taking all the water out of the bath, or just scaring off the little silvereyes that have started visiting.

Blues and greens

As I mentioned above, I’ve been enjoying the greens of the new leaves on the trees against the blue skies. I ended up shooting a bunch of photos, some with and some without a polarizer, do I know which ones are which? Not really, didn’t take notes for this roll. I think this was without though.

I then finished the last two shots on a short walk to a Pokestop at the end of the street, and failed to get a clear shot of grey cat running away. It was quite dark at this point 😅

What did I learn?

My ECN-2 chemicals have been exhausted. Glad I learnt this now with a roll of Phoenix II that I specifically wanted to shoot without taking careful notes of every frame - the last roll I processed was a nice roll of 250D from adventures in the Riverina - I need to get around to writing that up too - and if I had ruined that I would have not been happy.

I enjoy shooting with the OM-10, and maybe I need to stop putting only experimental film through it, or B&W while trying to learn how to use filters.

Side Quest the third, I have now loaded a role of reliable Kodak UltraMax in the OM-10, and I am taking notes of the exposures. Actually, it’s been a while since I shot UltraMax. Hope this roll goes well.