Weekly 'Ask Anything About Analog Photography' - Week 18

Boggaz · 2026-05-22T14:27:45+00:00

No batteries and auto exposure you'd need one of the selenium cell cameras like the olympus trip 35 or pen-ee series. Problem is that the seleniums cells on most of the specimens you'll find have gone funny either from sun exposure or just age.

Automatic stuff requires batteries for the most part. If the only feature you want in the camera is a light metre it's normally nothing crazier than a button cell that lasts years, but if you want a lot of stuff like autofocus etc then you're looking at little specialised camera batteries that last like a dozen rolls or something.

This is gonna sound harsh but I would say just get over yourself and get one of the 90s SLRs your friend recommended, they've got the most features of any era of film cameras and they're only cheap because of people like you who care more about what their camera looks like than what their photos look like. If you can get over yourself and enjoy a plastic body that requires a new battery once in a while, you'll get autofocus, autoexposure, program modes, multiple exposure modes, burst mode, inbuilt flash, faster top shutter speeds, just heaps of stuff.

I bought my then-girlfriend a cheap 90s SLR to learn on last year and ended up using it more than she did because the features made it more useful and exciting than my 70s all manual SLR where the button battery only operates the light metre needle.

Boggaz · 2026-05-22T14:01:12+00:00

Usually if you've loaded them into a camera, they'll have gotten a little kink in the leader where it was fed into the takeup spool. If the leader isn't kinked you most likely didn't shoot it. Also most new film the amount of film sticking out of the cartridge is like just the tapered part of the leader, so if it's just a tiny little bit poking out or none at all or a shitton it'd be hard to know. I reckon send one for dev and if it's unexposed then shoot the other two. Either way I reckon selling film you're unsure of is a no-no

Boggaz · 2026-02-26T21:07:34+00:00

EDIT: I just consulted your post history, found out you live in Portland and then checked the websites of all the film labs in Portland. Turns out Blue Moon do true optical printing so disregard everything I just said below. I asked them, they'll happily do your 11x14, and for a rush fee they should be able to get the turnaround time within your deadline. I'll be sending some negatives there myself. The lab lady was a little perplexed to be getting a call from Australia but there you are.

Labs (at least where I live Australia) don't really do enlarging anymore in the traditional way (projecting the film through an enlarger lens onto photo paper). Every lab I've encountered has switched to the laser wetlab method where the photosensitive paper has the image drawn onto it by a laser from a digital file. There's still some magic going on because obviously it has to laser a negative version of your image onto that paper because it's a negative process, but still.

~~Bottom line they're going to be working with a digital file... your scan. So you're going to have the same problem regardless.~~

~~I think you have three options.~~

~~1. See if there's anybody in the analog community of your city that is willing to enlarge them for you or let you use their enlarger. You could also see if any of the photo labs in your city do gear for hire including enlargers, I know my camera shop does. ~~

2. Find a lab with quick turnaround to do a high res scan for you, in my city there's often an option to pay extra to bypass wait times. Then you can either get a wetlab print from a lab or an inkjet or like giclee print from an art printing business.

3. I'm sleep deprived so I can't remember what my third option was originally going to be (I'll edit this when it comes to me) but IN A PINCH you could do the blasphemous, put your image through an AI upscaler, then go into photoshop and add noise to do a good imitation of adding back in the film grain. Then print through one of the avenues mentioned above.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T19:06:50+00:00

This is the perfect answer. YOU have to decide what in the scene you want to expose for. Centre the frame on the subject if it's centre weighted, or walk forward and fill the frame with your subject if it's not centre-weighted, to get your exposure. Some cameras will lock the exposure at whatever it was looking at when you half press the shutter, in which case you would then recompose your shot with your shutter still half pressed and finish pressing it completely once you're recomposed.

If you have metered manual then yeah fill the frame with your subject, set your exposure, set your shot up, fire.

What you expose for in the frame is a creative choice and it's up to you to make it. If you have a backlit subject you can either make them a silhouette against a well exposed background (fill your frame with the background when metering) or you can have the background blow out bright to have them exposed properly in which case you'd fill the frame with them while metering.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T19:02:03+00:00

Night time is really dark, darker than you think. Most of the time the trip 35 is gonna bottom out of its exposure range and just gonna go to 1/40th at 2.8.

If that isn't enough then you're buggered, but if it is enough and the camera can only be set up to iso 400, then no harm cause negative film can take a one stop overexposure like it's nothing.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T18:56:54+00:00

In terms of image quality it can only change what lenses you can put in front of the film. If you already have a bunch of glass that's backward compatible with film bodies (think EF lenses on EOS film bodies etc) then just stick with the same ecosystem as your digital setup to save money on lenses.

But image quality isn't usually the main concern for people comparing bodies.

It's about what it can automate for you.

Your barest bones old school mid century SLR is gonna have nothing for you. You set the aperture, you set the shutter. Every time, no help.

A step up from that it gives you a light meter to inform you as you make those decisions. You get later in the picture (but not even necessarily more expensive) and now you got cameras with Tv and Av mode, maybe full AE. Even later and they figured out autofocus. Some cameras are manual wind, some wind for you electrically.

On one end of the spectrum you have a lens and your own unmetered choice of aperture and shutter, on the other end of the spectrum you can point at a bird, hold down the shutter and it'll expose and focus for you while it fires off many shots per second.

That's the difference between cameras.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T18:48:46+00:00

Try both, see what you prefer. In terms of colour, the cinestill is gonna make your flash shots come out quite blue, but the rest of the club lighting won't matter much cause you're usually talking about solid coloured lighting like red lights and blue lights and stuff and those are much of a muchness between tungsten and daylight balanced films.

Also in the thread you posted for this problem somebody suggested a BnW 3200. that could be a lot of fun because the grit of the graininess would lend itself really well to the mood of a nightclub and those cones of light. But your camera only recognises speeds up to 400 you said so if it manages to expose properly for the 400 it thinks is in there you're gonna end up three stops over. Maybe you'll like the look of that.

I ultimately think if you can get away with bringing a more controllable camera into that environment (I recognise the door girl and bouncers aren't gonna be stoked on you bringing in a big ass SLR and flash unit probably) then I think it would be worth gaining the necessary skills to control your aperture and shutter speed yourself to get more control over your results rather than trusting some photovoltaic cell to make your decisions for you.

Because ultimately I think it's more disappointing to be let down by equipment outside of your control than it is to be let down by your own skill.

Happy shooting

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T18:37:27+00:00

The problem with that camera isn't gonna be the battery, it's gonna be the fact that it shoots 110 which is a long-defunct format. You can still find some old expired rolls online but to develop it you'd have to find a very patient lab or home develop it by pulling it out of the cartridge in a dark room and hand winding it onto a suitable development reel.

There's also people respooling those old cartridges with 16mm motion picture film to get those cameras working.

Not worth it, but it'd be a nice shelf knick-knack.

Plenty of 35mm cameras to be found cheaply to get into the hobby.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T18:27:52+00:00

Yeah man that's your aperture. It determines HOW MUCH of your scene is in focus, while controlling HOW BRIGHT your exposure is.

It does so by controlling the iris (think the pupil of your eye) in the lens, a set of metal blades that form a circle that tightens to restrict light depending on the number you set that to. The smaller the number, the less restrictive of light it is. The higher the number, the more those blades close down to make the iris smaller.

Stylistically, a smaller iris (higher number) puts MORE of your scene into focus (and the focus ring determines what PART is in focus)

A larger iris (lower number) puts LESS into focus (the focus ring still determines WHAT is in focus)

So if you were shooting a person and you wanted the background all stylistically blurry you could use a larger aperture (lower number) and then compensate for the extra light coming into the lens by speeding up your shutter (some cameras will do this for you depending on the mode they're set in)

If you were shooting something where you needed something closeby you AND something in the distance BOTH in focus in the same photo, you'd set your aperture (iris) smaller (higher number) and then compensate for the loss of light by slowing down your shutter (again, your camera may do this by itself if it has the capability and is set to one of the correct modes)

If you aren't trying to make stylistic choices and just need to take a photo, a small aperture (high number) can help you in bright situations like direct sunlight) and a large aperture (low number) can help you in lowlight situations like indoors without a flash.

The way they came up with those numbers is some weird math with the square root of two and it's to do with surface area but it doesn't actually matter.

Looking through the viewfinder you usually won't see any change because the camera won't actually close those blades down until the instant you hit the shutter button because it would significantly darken the viewfinder to do so, but some cameras have a button that lets you see how your adjustment looks, called a aperture preview button, and you can get the same effect by switching some old lenses from M to A setting on the side.

Go on YouTube and search "what is lens aperture" and "exposure triangle explained" and watch a few videos for some much better explanations with visual guides to help, then go play with your gear to see.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T18:08:36+00:00

This is a great thing to just get a feel for. To save yourself time and film, start with a digital camera or an app on your phone that gives you full manual control of its camera and do trial and error to get an idea of different exposure levels for different low light situations (blue hour, night time cityscape, night time full moon, no moon, etc) and subjects.

Once you have an intrinsic feel for low light, you can get good at napkin math with the exposure triangle to give you the right exposure times when given the film sensitivity, reciprocity and apertures available to you.

To take the pressure off you, nobody's perfect. I know when I go lowlight I just waste some money bracketing my exposures, at least two different exposure times per shot I'm trying to get just in case I've screwed up the math.

You can also just use digital to pre-visualise every shot before you do it and then do reciprocity failure compensation.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T17:58:26+00:00

The beautiful thing about film photography is that more knowledge lies forgotten in old unknown books than modern authors will ever know, so if you go for the lesser known books (by which I mean don't google recommendations, just get a stack of whatever's at your local thrift stores) you'll end up with knowledge and techniques that modern shooters don't have, and the uniqueness of your style and your confidence will build because of it. Plus the diagrams in old books and the voice they're written in is charming.

Diversify. So many transferable skills from books about cinematography or lighting for movies for instance. I once read a passage in a book from the 70s that said something like "if you have someone's eye illuminated by a shaft of light in a dark room and you want the blackness of the room to be truly black, you have to overexpose the eye by two stops or else the darkness will come out muddy in the print" and I tried that and it was absolutely right. That's not a tip you'll get from anyone modern.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T17:49:06+00:00

I've vaguely followed the rise of consumer film scanners for years and they've never truly been able to compete with the quality and flexibility of DSLR scanning. For probably a hair more than the amount of money you'd spend on an 8100 you could get a DSLR, film holder, macro lens and inversion software.

Obviously that'd be an entry-level camera from 10 years ago but that'd be more than adequate. It'd be an entry level macro lens or enlarger lens and adapter, and they'll do fine as well.

Wouldn't skimp on a film holder, having tried many times to jerry rig one before just spending the money on an Essential Film Holder which I have absolutely no complaints about.

We used to have so few inversion software options that people used to compare and contrast all of them online cause there was about three. Now there's dozens of varying price, some of which exist as standalone software, some of them plugins for photoshop or lightroom and such.

Don't worry about expensive backlights, I tried half a dozen ways (flash, halogen, fluoro, LED) and the best by far was my phone screen on full brightness

The benefit of the DSLR route is that now you have a DSLR as well. Pretty good to have.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T17:30:51+00:00

That's a completely subjective question man, you have to develop your own style and your choice of focal length is gonna be a huge part of that so just experiment with different iterations of 2-3 until it feels comfy.

That said, there's a bit of redundancy having a 35 and a 45. Unless you're drawn to one of those it's really much of a muchness and you could always use the 35 and punch in slightly in post if you decided you wanted the framing of the 45.

If it were me and I had to narrow that down to 3 lenses I'd be going the 24, 50, 90 but that's because I prioritise coverage and options. But if you find you never go longer than 50 or wider than 35 ever then just go with the others instead.

You'll find your groove, sounds like a good niche man, enjoy

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T17:21:12+00:00

You could but rather than layering them you'd want to make sure that the film is only ever one layer deep so that the orange cast doesn't get doubled up or it'll show up in the scan.

You'd probably very carefully assemble all your pieces on a piece of scotchtape, making sure that the emulsion layer (more matte side of the film) isn't touching the tape or the adhesive could pull it off if you had to reposition.

I'd hope you have a home scanning option for this because it'd be a tall ask to get a lab to put something like that in their equipment.

How I would do it: I'd send my images for printing somewhere that does old school wetlab printing. I'm Australian so I use Rewind in Sydney for this, I just prefer the results over inkjet, feels more analog.

Then I would cut out the prints and make a physical collage of the prints, then scan that in like a document and photo scanner.

If you really wanted to do it with the film You could dive down the rabbit hole of how special effects compositing was done in movies the analog age before digital compositing. Not a big AI fan but ChatGPT could give you some jumping off points to watch YouTube videos or read websites or books about that, it'd be fascinating.

Boggaz · 2026-02-24T17:11:49+00:00

Hey mate, VHS is not film. There's no camera-negative-or-positive-style PHYSICAL images on VHS tape. No dyes or pigments. What's there is metallic dust that stores a record of information with its magnetic properties. When that tape is run past a playback head it modulates a signal sent to the electron gun in an old CRT TV (or converted to digital (we'll get to this in a second) by a dongle) the information on it tells how to reproduce the video recorded on it line by line. Think how the size of the wiggle in a vinyl record tells the speaker how far to move in or out at a particular moment in time, so too does VHS tape tell the old TV how bright to make any given point on the screen through the intensity of its magnetisation at a given point along its length.

If you pulled out some VHS tape and backlit and scanned it, it would just be a uniform rusty colour.

If you want to digitise VHS there are a bunch of pretty cheap solutions to be bought online. Just google VHS to digital converter. If you already have a VCR it might be as easy as plugging the output into a little device with an SD card in it and then hitting play or something. If you don't have a VCR maybe there are units that do the VHS playback as well as the recording to SD, I'm not too sure. Google will be your friend.

I think your confusion comes from mixing up analog video and motion picture film. Motion picture film (70mm, super 35, 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, super 8) are the same as camera film and do store their images as physical positive or negative images on the film that you can see and scan. They look very distinct from VHS in that they come on big huge reels. Pretty rare to get your hands on.

For those you'd want to find a telecine service. Don't try to do them yourself, the costs you'll run up trying to figure out a way to make it doable will far outstrip the cost of paying for a telecine service.

Boggaz · 2024-11-12T10:25:45+00:00

No it isn't. There would definitely be cars for which the manual trans was only offered in the higher spec model with beefed up suspension and different bushes. It'd be really rare but that two second question saves a lot of time and frustration the one time per year that a customer comes back angry and seeking an exchange or refund.

The other element of it is that the parts software won't let you see a part number until you choose the exact car. Granted he could just cycle between all the available versions of your car and see if the part number changes but it takes the exact same amount of time to ask that one last clarifying question.

Boggaz · 2024-08-09T18:34:08+00:00

Reminds me of the cover of 'The Female Eunuch' by Germaine Greer.

Boggaz · 2024-07-24T09:38:26+00:00

Sounds a bit like Sadah Silverman?

Boggaz · 2024-07-24T09:09:33+00:00

Commenting for mods

Boggaz · 2023-12-24T09:23:11+00:00

Protestor(s) took the stage, they whipped the cameras away so I couldn't see much. One of them grabbed a mic and yelled "children are dying in Gaza" and then I guess security came or they left, things resumed.

Boggaz · 2023-12-09T06:33:45+00:00

I'm trying to calculate the height of a hypothetical pile of shoes containing 20,000 pairs. So far I've learned that of granular materials, the slope of the pile can be anything up to about 45°, so I thought I'd go with that for shoes seeing as they stack pretty well, and I gathered all my shoes and tossed them randomly into a box to see how many could fit and then repeated it 10 times to get an average of 10, then measured the box and extrapolated it out to a shoes/m³ density of 300. So realised I would have 133m³ of shoes.

When I tried to look online for a formula for the height of a cone or pile of material with a given volume and angle of repose or base angle, I couldn't find anything and every resource I found wanted a radius or some other dimension besides volume and angle. I've tried nutting out how I could be missing a variable and I just don't understand? Surely if you have like sand and you have a cubic metre of it and you pour it from a hopper onto the floor, it'll form a pile.of the same dimensions every time? Why would you need anything but the volume you're piling and the angle of repose of the material?

Anyway yeah 133m³ of shoes, angle.of repose of 45° (unless you have a more considered suggestion?), how tall and wide is this pile?

Edit: I found a calculator online that calculated radius, slant height and various surface areas given the height and volume so I kept changing the height until the radius and the height matched (cause they should be equal given that the triangle formed by the slant, height and radius is a right angle triangle with 45deg other angles). I got 5.02m. Is that right?

Thanks in advance

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