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...

This came up the other day on the photo discussion list at work, where one of the guys pointed out one of the many millions of flame wars on the subject and stated that there had to be one correct answer to the question of how the 1 over focal length rule (meaning if you have a 50mm lens, you need to have your shutter at least at 1/50) applies to digital SLRs with crop-factor.

After Christmas, I spent a bunch of time getting used to my new setup and building a lot of little bits to get my lighting where I want it to be. I also took a step back and decided I didn't like where my whiteground photos were going at that point; I wanted to do something else...

I'd also like to remind folks to keep backups. See, I'm in the midst of data hell and I only lost one night of sleep over it... and some pictures I took lately.

When I started out doing portraiture, I did only outdoor portraits during the golden hour. If you don't have much gear, it's great. My first portrait shoot was taken on my Canon A95 and came out quite well. And I did my art indoors with lightpainting...