In the world of black & white developers, my exploration of different chemicals has been a lot of fun. And I’ve seen plenty of other odd developers, but one has always stood out as being one I’ve wanted to try, mainly because of its name. And that is R09 Spezial, which looks cool because of the ‘z’. While browsing, the Argentix website netted me a small bottle of this stuff. It took a while to trace precisely what this stuff is at the core because it has gone under many names and been produced by many companies. You can also find it as Rodinal Special,Read More →

When it comes to films that are not designed for normal pictorial use, I’m not one to shy away from them. That being especially after I went through three of the FilmWashi offerings, one of them being an Optical Audio Recording film. Even before I had loaded up Washi S into a camera, I had been approached by the Film Photography Project to beta test a new film they had acquired and were planned to release after collecting some developing times for the film. The name was FPP Super Sonic, and like Washi S, is an optical audio recording film. The idea of recording audioRead More →

When you think of all the developers out there, D-76, D-23, HC-110, DK-50, Rodinal, these are all designed specifically for developing standard black & white films, but there is another developer that often flew under the radar mainly because it proved so industry-specific that the home photography wouldn’t even think of using the developer in their own processing. That developer is D-96, originally created by Kodak for use to develop black & white motion picture film. But the average photographer cannot get small quantities of D-96 but that’s where Cinestill stepped in releasing their own version of D96 along with the Film Photography Project. IRead More →

When it comes to Film Washi, I remained initially unsure of hopping onto the wagon of the world’s littlest film company. While some of their initial offerings were paper-based, they began to expand into traditionally based film stocks. Film Washi Type “S” or Washi S as I’ll be calling the film from now on, is not designed for pictorial use at all, even titles or special effects. Washi S is designed for optical recording of sound. Which as you may have already through will produce a high-contrast image. But I will say one thing I am impressed that I got good photos out of theRead More →

When it comes to Canon cameras, you can count the number of times they’ve been featured on the one hand. I’ll admit that I am a Nikon guy, but I couldn’t say no when this beauty was offered up. The Canon EOS 650, while a fairly plain and no-nonsense camera, is a significant part of the history of photography. The EOS 650 is the first autofocus offering from Canon, and the lens mount it introduced changed the company’s direction. And while I was a little wary of the camera, it performed beautifully. It did take a bit of time to figure out some of theRead More →