In 2016 i bought 4 cans of Agfa Gevaert type 561 film. Only one can is sealed while the other three where opened and contained bits and ends of (presumably) the same type of film. That year I did some tests with it but not a lot. The test shots where...well... not quite good. I didn't know the ISO of the film nor how long to develop for and with which developer to use. Google wasn't my friend as it turned out when I was searching for more info on this film. But since it stated on the cans that it was a copy film i figured the ISO would be low. Below photo's are my first tests. I tried different ISO's and developping it in HC110 for 9 minutes. That was not good enough. These test showed me that the ISO should be below 10.

Fast forward a couple of years. I wasn't disappointed in the film but i didn't know what to do with it so i left it. This year I decided to give it another try. One can of film contained heavily fogged film. Which i blamed mostly myself for it when the lid came of while not in a darkroom. One can was and is sealed so i know that most be good. I hope because i haven't tested that film. The other remaining cans contain film the has little to no fog. So that can be used in a camera to shoot photo's with. I would recommend shooting it in high summer. Iso 6 is a challenge in the winter. Below photo's were shot on ISO 8 and developped for 12 minutes in HC110 solution B. Next time I wil be shooting at ISO 6 and developping it for 16 minutes. That will give me negatives with decent density.

As you can see my results look better then those from 2016. It is promising to me. But what does the film and the negatives look like? On below photo's you can see the film has a white emulsion. Just like paper. Some folks thought it was just white leader film for cinema film. But it is not. The test film was ok, sort of ok and just plain sh*t. That is the roll you see me holding on broad....tl-light. In the middle photo you can see that the bottom strip of negatives look best in the sense of no fog. However exposure and development are both way off. The middle strip looks usable while the top strip....
The last photo show the good white strip of film. The yellow one is of no use. Next to it a strip of film partially developped and then completely fixed.

The only thing i haven't tried was the film true purpose: Copying film! That is what i did today. In complete darkness I made a contactprint of a strip of negatives. i put it under an enlarger in complete darkness to see what I would get. I was geussing slides and yes I got slides! next thing i have to do put it in a projector. But for now here are the results of today:

Last year I decided to make a panorama pinhole camera. It is sort of finished and i have shot two photos with it. The first one was exposed for 30 minutes at the waterside of the river Maas. It almost got washed away and after that some woman thought it was washed up and wanted to take it with her. She didn't bother to ask me if it was perhaps my wooden box. But i talked her out of it. 30 minutes had already passed so she didn't fuck up my photo. 

These are the spots the below photos are taken from. In the first spot the camera was washed away when a heavy loaded ship sailed by causing massive waves. But it turned out allright! Below the photos. Because the film plane is flat the middle of the photo was overexposed. Now i am going to make a curved plane so exposure will be more even. These photos have been adjusted in Photoshop.

So the print is all dried up and wrinkeled a bit. How do you straighten something like that? I don't have a press big enough to put it in. I once was told by my professor that he used to roll it up on a core and over the course of a couple of weeks would heat it up with a blowdryer.
So that is what i am going to do. Of course I had to go to a carpet company to get me one of those cardboard cores that carpets get rolled onto. I got one for free. Propably tomorrow (next year!) I will rol it on more tight and start warming it up with a blow dryer. But first I have to cut it to length. This is all done to get my workflow just right. If this isn't working i will learn a lot. If it is working I still learn a lot and have a nice straight print in the end :-)

For at least two weeks my Durst L184 was ready to go for another large format printing session. So i decided to do it this year. Because everything was already set up I only needed to expose the paper and to develop it. Stil took me a good 2 hours to finish. I am pretty pleased with the result. i am still working on expired paper to get the workflow just right before i buy myself brand new paper. And i still need a good way the rinse the print. And buy myself some hypoclear. No video this time. For that i will gladly direct you to my other blog on this subject:
​http://www.degro-fotografie.nl/blog/printing-large

Sometimes i pick up darkroom stuff. And every once in a while there is some nice homemade things in the lot. One of those things was a wooden nox with two lamps inside it and a slide frome in one of the sides. Sort of a light box. Nice but useless for me. So last weekend I decided to wreck it and create some room in my darkroom. When i opend it up and took out the lights I realized it is a ncie size for a panorama pinhole. A decision was made. I am trunig it into a pinhole. The inside was already paited black so i only had to cover up the holes in the sides and to make brackets to hold down the paper. Finished it today and saturday I am going to make the first pinhole with it.
Dimensions of the photo will be 48cm x 12cm.
Size of the pinhole; Haven't got a clue.
Focal length about 16 cm
Aperture: Clueless again. propably 256 or a bit smaller

A couple of years ago I went to the tattoo fair in Maastricht. I decided to take some photo's on Polypan F. Not quite sure what iso I put it on. Not 50 that is for sure otherwise I would have gotten anything at all...

In september Csilla came to my studio for another shoot. This time I used my digital camera as well as my film camera. Below photos are made on film. The digital photos will be posted in the galery.

Sometimes when I am scanning negatives the scanner makes deciscions I wouldn't have made. And those decisions sometimes work out really good. In this case You see a photo of the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal, Germany. For some reason the scnner decided to include the space between two negatives in the scan. The first photo is the result. And you know what? I kinda like it. Like the photo has been made 100 years ago.

Last year I made some large prints for my graduation at my art school. I really wanted to do that in my own darkroom as well. However it was not the right time. Then a month ago I went back to my school to do another large format print. That sparked my interest again. Since my personal situation changed I could start building my own setup in my darkroom to print large.
First I bought a gutter of 4 meters which I had cut in 3 aqual parts. They came with the appropriate endcaps. When I glued them on I poured water i them to make sure they were watertight. Next I bought some wood to make a stand on which I can hang the paper for the really big prints. I haven't finished the stand yet but I did make 3 prints to test the developing of a large sheet of paper in the gutters. My Durst enlarger can take a piece of paper of 90x125 cm. Big enough to give my gutters a serieus test run.

With this setup you don't need a lot of room to go bigger then big. I am fortunate enough to be given three rolls of expired paper that have some approx. 6 meters of paper left on them. Thanks Carlo! Now I can test and try out what works and what doesn't work in this setup without costing me an arm and a leg. 

Since I didn't find a lot of info about this way of printing large prints I made a little video that shows how the workflow is at my darkroom. Enjoy watching the video:
​

Last year I bought a very nice Sinar P2 camera. Included were 4 lenzes. One lens was a wide anlge lens. 65mm f/5.6. I figured I would use this one in the studio much and I won't be taken the P2 out very much so why not build my own fixed focus wide angle 4x5 camera. The first two tries failed miserably. the third try ended up being a very nice 4x5 pinhole camera. The fourth try resulted in a nice fixed focus 4x5 wide angle camera. Something like the Trevelwide but more awesome of course :-)

So here are some photos of the cameras themselves. Photos made with the pinhole can be seen in my previous blogpost. Today I went out to shoot some photos with the wide angle camera. I'll show them when I have developped them.

As you can see the wide angle camera is still work in progress but it is light tight. I am planning on painting it black have a strap on it for easy carrying and a tripod holder should be fixed to it as well.

Below some photos from the pinhole camera.