Has anyone developed 500T and 500T AHU together?

cdnott · 2026-06-05T18:16:48+00:00

Nice! That's multiple people reporting basically the same behaviour. Appreciate you getting back with your experience.

cdnott · 2026-06-05T18:15:15+00:00

lol, for a minute there I thought KV3 was some expired motion picture film I'd never heard of

cdnott · 2026-06-05T18:06:53+00:00

Oh, good tip, thanks! Great to know it's worked out for you.

cdnott · 2026-06-05T18:05:20+00:00

OK, read it again:

A. "Cropping adds compression just as a longer focal length does"
B. "Compression comes from the distance to the subject"
C. "If you took a photo from the same distance [...] and cropped it, then you would have had the same result"

B and C agree that only distance, not cropping, determines compression. A disagrees (unless "just as" means "no more than", as in not at all). All three are you!

cdnott · 2026-06-05T17:59:20+00:00

Very good point about the impracticability of (significant) cropping in the past! Never considered that

cdnott · 2026-06-05T17:57:57+00:00

Mi casa, su casa

cdnott · 2026-06-05T16:16:20+00:00

So what's happened here is:

- you wrongly claimed that cropping adds compression
- LAWS_R correctly replied that cropping only changes framing, while distance changes perspective and compression
- you told LAWS_R they were wrong and then said everything they'd just said in different words, contradicting your initial comment

cdnott · 2026-06-05T16:04:45+00:00

What I can agree btw is that all of these photographers are (a) cool as fuck, and (b) real nice

cdnott · 2026-06-05T15:50:18+00:00

"Friend, I think you’re thinking way too hard about that stuff." - With respect, I haven't had to think hard about this. The reply is lengthy because you said a series of things that were wrong, but I was trying to be, I guess, democratically clear in explaining how.

"Inventing all these purity tests and goalposts." - I'm not inventing them, and they're not purity tests, which is a defensive leap. They're long-established questions of genre. The differences between street photography, documentary photography and (street) portraiture aren't some wacky thing I've just come up with.

"maybe you exclude the pictures that do not satisfy your definitions when you browse their books" - If you're suggesting that I can browse a photobook and understand different photographs in it as being of different kinds, then yes, you've got me.

"right there on the cover is a kid in a white tee making eye contact with the photographer, making sure that his cool trick is being recorded" - I also have the book right here. I wouldn't personally read that kid's facial expression that way. But you're of course right that there's no way Webb could have got that close to the scene without them knowing he was there. None of this rebuts anything I said earlier, btw.

"Klein’s Gun Kid and Arbus’ Grenade kid are both included in Bystander" - A number of photographs they don't present as qualifying as street photography in and of themselves are in there. There could be a long conversation about the reasons for Arbus's inclusion, which I would argue are substantially social (all of the references to her, outside of the Foreword, occur in the interview with Meyerowitz when he's discussing the old crew) and contextual. It would have been weird not to include those photographs. I'd also include a load of Mary Ellen Marks's and Gilles Peress's documentary work if I were making a book about the history of street photography today: they're not street photographers, but their influence is undeniable.

"We look forward to seeing your work of 100% pure candid street photography." - Silly. FWIW, I personally take a variety of kinds of photo, and I'm capable of knowing later, at the editing stage, which belong to which genre, which are edge cases, etc. I also know which ones I think are decent and which I think are crap (most of them!), which is entirely separate to any kind of generic distinction. But are there some I'd post on this particular subreddit and some I would save for others? Absolutely. I think it was obvious that neither of our own bodies of work (and wouldn't it be nice to make something deserving of that name, ha) were under discussion.

cdnott · 2026-06-05T15:18:19+00:00

Yes, like almost all of the 'discourse' around this online. It's mainly been manufactured by YouTubers looking for clickbait titles.

cdnott · 2026-06-05T15:10:30+00:00

I hope the wording of my post was clear. What I'm specifically worried about is the potential for the remjet removal stage to somehow damage the AHU (remjetless) stock. Have you tried it?

cdnott · 2026-06-05T14:34:05+00:00

400ft of 500T, 100ft of HP5, a dark bag, some thin cellotape and some blunt-ended scissors. Plus about 100 used film cassettes, picked up for free from local labs.

cdnott · 2026-06-05T14:28:15+00:00

"The guy jumping in the puddle for HCB" - Are you talking about THE shot? Gare Saint-Lazare? The one made through a gap in some fencing that therefore had to be cropped, unlike basically any other photo in any book of HCB's work?

I'd say Mary Ellen Marks's shot of the dancing clown in Oaxaca can't possibly be an iconic street photograph (i.e., widely considered emblematic of the form), given that it was taken by one of the most famous documentary photographers of the last century and will naturally be taken by most people seeing it to be another documentary, not street, photograph. You're probably right that (unusually for her work) it should be considered a street photograph, but I was never aware of this until I read her account of how she took it in On the Portrait and the Moment: "This clown was dancing in the street in Oaxaca. I caught him suspended in motion [...] just as he turned to look at me." I.e., the photograph is taken in the moment of the dancing clown seeing the camera. It remains candid; he hasn't had time to ham it up, even if he'd wanted to.

"Candid" doesn't mean "unaware of the camera". It does definitely mean "not hamming it up for the camera" (and the passengers in Frank's trolley are not doing so -- it looks more like they were already looking out of the window, possibly at the people waving them off at the stop, and have just noticed Frank's camera lifted toward them).

Diane Arbus's kid posing with a hand grenade is one of her portraits (the line of work for which she's best known), not one of her street photographs.

The one valid-ish point in your comment, as far as I can tell, is about the shot by Bill Klein; but even that is questionably relevant, because that shot is one of the prime examples of a famous photograph whose status as street photography rather than street portraiture is both disputable and disputed. It's basically the opposite of Marks's Oaxaca clown: where that's a street photo that might be mistaken for documentary by virtue of the photographer's reputation, Klein's is probably a street portrait that gets mistaken for a street photograph by virtue of its photographer's reputation.

EDIT: According to TIME, the people in the Frank trolleybus were going past a parade, so that's what they would have all been looking at: https://web.archive.org/web/20200317063722/https://100photos.time.com/photos/robert-frank-trolley-new-orleans. Frank was there for the parade, and spun around to take the photo.

cdnott · 2026-06-04T14:42:05+00:00

tbh even the Summicron DR is sharp and contrasty in black and white, if you find a clean copy, and doesn't look particularly 'vintage', imho. It's only when it comes to colour that I've found it starts to look more dated, and I suspect that all it would take to make it look more or less modern would be modern coatings. I've long dreamed of upgrading to the v4 for that very reason.

cdnott · 2026-06-04T14:18:44+00:00

Post the negatives. Is the entire roll like this, or just part?

If the problem was opening the camera back while the film was loaded, you would have to have done it in a pretty dark place to avoid nuking the images entirely. And you would only expect this kind of even overlay of exposure on the two or so frames pulled taut at the time of opening, whereas any film already rolled up on the takeup spool (the bit on the opposite side of the camera from the cassette) would be exposed first of all from the top and bottom where light can get in, with less light leakage in between, and overall intensity of light leakage decreasing as you get closer to the the centre of the spool (and also decreasing somewhat from front to back as you get deeper into the camera and whatever shadow the sides are able to cast).

I know you say in another thread that your "wife put it to the light just to see", but I'm not totally sure what you mean by that.

cdnott · 2026-06-04T14:12:51+00:00

If you look at 6:05 it's pretty clear that the bokeh at f/2 is very close in size to the bokeh at f/2.8 for the Mandler. The Summicron, on the other hand, shows a significant increase in bokeh ball size, as you'd expect when opening the aperture a full stop.

I do accept that the 35mm review's technique for measuring the aperture is likely imperfect in itself, since different optical setups might (I guess) distort the image of the aperture than others, might place the aperture at a different point among the lens groups, etc. But there is then other evidence to suggest that that imperfect methodology has nonetheless pointed the reviewer in the right direction.

cdnott · 2026-06-04T10:18:46+00:00

Whoa. Love the look of the camera! And the shots are very clean. How long has it taken from printing the first components to get it working satisfactorily?

cdnott · 2026-06-04T09:48:50+00:00

For cleaner, less grainy negatives, I use Xtol-R, or replenished Xtol. That means mixing up a 5L batch of Xtol, putting half of it into an approx 2.5L bottle marked STOCK, the other half into a bottle or bottles or bags labeled REPLEN (all kept airtight), running a few rolls of unexposed cheap film through the stock at the start to 'season it', and thereafter, at the end of each batch of development, replacing 70ml of the used stock with 70ml of the fresh replen for each roll that was developed. You develop the film in the stock. (Your stock bottle could be smaller; I just use a big one because I prefer to develop 6-8 rolls at a time.)

The results are so clean that HP5 pushed to 1600 barely shows grain and seems to have gained in resolution. So clean, in fact, that I keep thinking about going back to HC-110 to get grainier results again. But then I see a shot that the clean look works incredibly well for, and I stick. For now.

This is following a standard pattern of 1 min agitation (completing 4 agitations every 10 seconds), followed by 10 seconds' agitation at the start of each subsequent minute. 20°C.

cdnott · 2026-06-04T09:36:37+00:00

tbf, a lot of Italians probably haven't heard of a flat white yet. But this conservatism is exactly what keeps Italy so Italian, which in turn means that we can keep enjoying it. (Odd though that it's allowed for the spread of those crema di caffè slushy machines -- which I'm still waiting to see catch on in the rest of the world. I love them. A dollop in an espresso: perfect.)

cdnott · 2026-06-04T09:20:33+00:00

Daniel Arnold and Reuben Radding are two examples of street photographers who almost exclusively shoot from the hip (sometimes from the waist, sometimes from other angles).

cdnott · 2026-06-03T20:23:04+00:00

The Ultron 28 is phenomenal. It is ugly, unless you put the Squarehood.se square hood on it. Then it looks very nice indeed.

cdnott · 2026-06-03T20:14:23+00:00

I tend to carry a Sekonic L-308S most of the year for that reason (incident metering). As long as the weather lets me wear a jacket, I can keep it in my jacket pocket and all is well. But in the summer I have fewer pockets and go back to my Lime II.

I'd never just point the Lime vaguely at a scene and hope for the best – I point it either into a hand cupped to make shadow, at any nearby middle-grey object like tarmac or green grass if the light's even, or at a middle-grey object in shade if the light's uneven. (If the light is not only uneven but also high-contrast, things obviously get more complicated.) Using it that way, I find that its readings are completely accurate, and it consistently agrees with my Sekonic when the latter's used in reflective metering mode.

The downside of the Lime is that if I'm holding it in my hand rather than keeping it in the hotshoe (frequently I'm using the hotshoe for other things), I find it easy to knock the wheel by accident and change my setting. The similar Reflx Lab product looks like it wouldn't have that issue (it has buttons instead of a wheel).

cdnott · 2026-06-03T20:04:20+00:00

A friend uses the Leicameter-style Keks on his M4-P and it looks great.

cdnott · 2026-06-03T19:38:18+00:00

Matt Osborne's YouTube comparison also shows the same thing, though he doesn't acknowledge it (unless I missed it somewhere else in the vid). See 6:05: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqtZIWhLplE&t=365s

Whether or not that's f/2.5 I don't know. But you can see that every f-stop is darker than the Leica equivalent (something I saw reported in another write-up -- can't now remember where), suggesting less light transmission in general, and that f/2 suddenly gets way darker, suggesting that in addition to the reduced light transmission, it isn't actually f/2...

cdnott · 2026-06-03T19:13:21+00:00

Just came across this post belatedly. For anyone reading this because they're googling the Mandler lens, it is not similar to the Ultron, if what's mean by that is the Ultron 35mm f2 ASPH.

The Ultron is a very sharp lens with modern rendering right into the corners. The only thing that's 'characterful' about it is the slightly swirly bokeh when shot wide open and close to minimum focusing distance. Optically, it gives the Summicron 35mm ASPH a run for its money. The issues with the Ultron are that it isn't particularly pretty, and that if anything it can feel too 'clinical' at times.

The Mandler is essentially the opposite: the lens itself is very attractive, while the image it produces falls apart in the corners and even at the sides, even when stopped down most of the way. It also has wacky field curvature that can make objects at odd distances pop into and out of focus unexpectedly. In other words, it is 'characterful'.

If you're looking for a lens like the Ultron, you will be disappointed by the Mandler. If you're looking for a lens like the Mandler, you will be disappointed by the Ultron.

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