I've noticed that I suddenly have a lot of AA battery powered photo gear. There's the A95 which serves as my light/flash meter and photographic sketchpad that takes 4 AA batteries. There's 2 Sunpak 383 Supers and a 1 Sunpak 144PC, and each one takes 4 AA batteries. There's the kinda cruddy Sunpak Digital Flash that is now just used to trigger slaves off of my RB67 that takes 2 AA batteries. Finally, there's the Quantaray QS-1 that takes 2 AAA batteries

One thing I've noticed that happens when you approach photography from an engineering background is that you tend to loathe black and white photography. I know that, starting out, I did. I was talking to another photographer and she said that one of her friends was an engineer like me and he also had a similar problem with black and white photography, always preferring color. It's throwing information out and we just don't like that.

After I started shooting black and white film and then developing it myself, what was left but to print it myself, too?

I've been spending a lot of time in the past year or so on finding ways to continue to shoot film, but doing it more economically. The first step was getting my own scanner so I didn't need to pay somebody to print or scan my photos. Lately, I decided that my cost of B&W developing was too high, so I set up my own darkroom

I've tried to research black and white developing as much as possible before starting in on it, ranging from the writings of Ansel Adams to modern notes from other folks. It turns out that there's a fairly small number of absolute, un-arguable facts, so I decided to just post my personal opinions.

Despite my film-shooting bent, I do like to keep up with the digital scene as well. This is all rampant speculation based on the available facts, given that nobody's dropping any expensive loaner hardware on my doorstop anytime soon.

And here I thought I was a little oddball for wandering around with my G7 and my RB67... but apparently everybody else does that too.

There's a certain amount of standard advice for shooting night photography. One of them is to shoot either Fujichrome 64T or Kodak Ektachrome 160T for film. Both films are well-behaved and well-characterized tungsten balanced slide film. With slide film, you don't need to worry about automatic machine corrections like you do with print films, so that's easy to understand. Both films have about as reasonable figures for long-exposure reciprocity as you'll find in a manufacturer datasheet.
But, tungsten color balance? Why do most night photographers shoot using tungsten color balanced film, or the tungsten setting on their digital SLRs?

Around September of 2005, I started thinking that, even though I'm not actively drawn to looking at what others have shot on cross processed film, while there's still film and developing chemicals at ready access, I should try shooting it.

There are two basic kinds of film developing machines. The "Cine" machine and the "dip and dunk" machine.

A set of pointers on how to get a good long-exposure night shot using film cameras without wasting tons of film.

I was talking with some other photographers lately and the subject of lighting came up. The studio we were at had 6,000 watt seconds of power, including several power packs and some Alien Bees monolights. One of the other photographers asked me how I felt about the religious question of Packs vs. Monolights

Some pictures of the 2/20/2008 eclipse

The problem with film reviews is that they get stale over time as things change and don't get updated.

It's been two years since I last wrote a comprehensive roundup of different types of film. I've shot a lot more film and I have a lot more to say this time around, so this article is going to be correspondingly longer. Several parts, in fact...