MorseBlog

After a failed attempt to use old Russian 16mm film I decided to get new stock and after perusing ebay and reading up on B+W film the obvious choice was Kodak XX (Double X) 7222 16mm movie film. It  is a proper negative film and has a fan base that admires its speed (200 in Tungsten and 250 in daylight) even tones and low grain. 100 ft (a lifetime supply for my purposes, About 1300 photos.) set me back £42. The subclub  has tons of resources for these small cameras. The loading for Minolta cartridges is covered here . I loaded about 8 inches into one of my film cartridges and took some quick test photos with my Minolta 16PS. I shot the photos at ASA 200. I developed the film according to Massive Dev chart in my normal film developer Ilford LC29. The timing for this development was for ASA 250. For properly metered shots the negatives came out well balanced. Scanning 16mm is difficult as I don't have a proper holder and I could not locate the small glass plate I use for t...

To try out my  Minolta 16 camera (£5 on ebay). I bought some Russian (Soviet 1982) 16mm B+W film. The 65 number refers to the Soviet film speed which elsewhere on the box is translated to 80 ASA and 20 DIN. Russian 16mm film Loading the film onto old cartridges is simple enough in a changing bag after a little fumbling around. The first roll of film I exposed using a flash  on automatic mode with a speed of 100 (The Russian film is actually ASA 80). I also developed using semi-stand development with a solution of 1+100 Ilford LC29 developer. Stand for 30 Minutes, invert and stand for a another 30 minutes. Stop and fix per usual. The results were under exposed and grainy. The film had some fog as well. The scan below shows one result and this is after optimizing for levels in Photoshop. Stand Developed Russian 16mm scan. I thought the development was not good for this film and wanted to see where the film speed was best set for. I loaded and shot a new roll. This time...

My latest camera is a bit of a surprise being a medium format buff. You can see more info here at collection-appereils.fr  (requires translation). Minolta 16 PS It is a simple camera with 1/100s shutter speed (1/30th in flash setting) and variable aperture (f3.5 to f16) and fixed focus with a view finder. It takes 20 photos from a roll of 16mm (that's right movie) film. The small cartridges are reloadable. The one I bought did not include a film cartridge but happily I found a couple of rolls of film on ebay from Germany. One is color the other Kodak Plus-X. Both were from the 1980s. I took the roll of the black and white on a trip to London last weekend and developed it at home. These were quick snaps to burn through the film so I could reload some fresher film. I developed them as a wad of film using semi-stand development. My spiral reel cannot accept this small film so I wadded it up in the tank. (I have since found an old tank and reel that takes 16mm film.) This wor...