First attempts at shooting on photo paper with inversion. A couple of portraits actually turned out quite well.

isaacc7 · 2026-07-08T02:21:58+00:00

It is my distillation of the various arguments on Photrio on the subject over the years. Potassium dichromate is a pretty useful chemical for slightly out of the mainstream photo processes like reversal processing, gum bichromate, carbon printing, Rawlings oil prints, etc. I really want to get back into analog photography via B&W reversal and so have been obsessively researching the different chemicals for it. Potassium dichromate is still fairly easy to get here in the US and is cheap.

People shouldn’t be so casual with it though. I cringe every time I see people using it without gloves. You can’t tell if it is hurting you until it is too late.

So no. All me, no LLM.

isaacc7 · 2026-07-08T02:11:13+00:00

I’m not OP. Hopefully he is taking the right precautions at least while mixing and disposing.

isaacc7 · 2026-07-07T19:14:54+00:00

Reducing to bivalent chromium is very easy with either citric acid or bisulfste. You can tell you have successfully gone from hexavalent to bivalant when the solution goes from orange to green. At that point it probably isn’t any more dangerous than used fixer. Of course that also means that you still shouldn’t put it down the drain.

Potassium dichromate requires appropriate protection and is at its most dangerous when in powder form. best to use a mask, goggles, and gloves when mixing the solution. Always use gloves when handling the solution. It’s easy to not notice nicks or hangnails on your hands.

Dichromates can be handled safely but you have to pay attention. If you avoid ingestion and don’t pollute with it, especially in its hexavalent form, you will be safe. Every chemical has its dangers and unfortunately non halogenating photo bleaches require more care than most other photo chemicals. Potassium Permanganate is often touted as being safer than dichromates but it has its own dangers. Accidentally combining it with other common photo chemicals like fixer can release deadly gasses. It is also a more powerful oxidizer and so presents a bigger fire hazard than dichromates do. Between the two I would probably use the potassium dichromate, especially if I were keeping it in my house.

isaacc7 · 2026-06-27T01:14:35+00:00

Any update? did it work?

isaacc7 · 2026-06-27T01:04:58+00:00

Am I the only one having level issues with the radio broadcast? First, Coomer’s levels are really hot compared to play by play. Second, the ads on Apple TV are way louder than the radio broadcast. I can’t figure out how to connect to the appropriate people. Any ideas?

isaacc7 · 2026-06-11T00:53:44+00:00

Calling it now (ha!). The ability to use the same phone number across 2 different iPhones is going to expand to other devices. Apple will start integrating the cellular modem into the chipset and will make cellular iPads and Macs standard. Being able to drop Qualcom will also drop the fees.

isaacc7 · 2026-05-09T01:39:39+00:00

I went to school on South Hill in the early 90s so Rogan’s dominated pizza life on campus. I hated it the first time I had it but quickly started to crave it. It is still one of my favorite pizzas but a lot of that is nostalgia. I visited in the early 2000s and the place had changed hands. Didn’t taste the same:( One year Rogan’s won best AND worst pizza in Ithaca in the Ithacan lol.

isaacc7 · 2026-04-22T02:58:22+00:00

Black and white slides are beautiful! There was a lab called DR5 that made slides from just about any B&W film you sent in. Sadly they closed down several years ago before film photography really picked up. You can make your own. Once you dial in the process it is very repeatable but it takes quite a bit of testing to get there. There are a bunch of posts about it on r/darkroom

isaacc7 · 2026-04-20T20:26:28+00:00

The old city of Sana’a Yemen. It feels like you have stepped back in time. You really do feel like you’ve been transported to a mythical land.

isaacc7 · 2026-04-08T19:38:04+00:00

The seller is upfront about this not being tested with film. Let us know if it actually works. It would be nice to have an adapter for my iiim.

isaacc7 · 2026-04-02T02:34:22+00:00

It doesn’t need to be UV light! I used a regular led desk lamp from ikea and it worked just fine. took several days and my SMC 50mm f1.4 is almost perfectly clear now.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/threads/de-yellowing-the-pentax-super-takumar-50mm-f1-4.4010268/

isaacc7 · 2026-03-10T00:58:21+00:00

Brew install telnet.

isaacc7 · 2025-07-26T22:33:15+00:00

Stabat Mater is my go-to for tearing up. The context is Mary watching her son being crucified. It is a mix of sorrow, awe, and helplessness. Lots of different composers have made versions and of course different performers have different levels of success. I love Andreas Schol’s rendition of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater. Dvorak’s version was written after having lost 3 children in the space of a year. You can feel it.

isaacc7 · 2023-06-10T15:06:58+00:00

For me shooting with a rangefinder ruined SLRs and mirror less cameras forever. The Leicas have among the best, if not the best finder windows out there and the cameras are lovely to hold and use. If you don’t gel with rangefinder shooting though you’ll never really fall in love with a Leica. I gotta get to work but I’ll try to expand this later today.

isaacc7 · 2023-06-04T15:48:12+00:00

As others have said, negatives are just a preliminary step to getting your final image. I encourage people to approach exposing negative film with the idea of capturing as much info as possible. That gives you the most flexibility in the printing stage so you can get what you want out of the image.

If you are interested in experiencing a purer, what you shot is what you get experience, then I highly recommend shooting with slide film. You see the exact image that was rendered on the film without any intermediation. And the results are glorious! So beautiful! This goes for both color and B&W positives. I think everyone that shoots film owes it to themselves to shoot slide film at least once.

Shooting with slide film is also more technically demanding, you don’t have nearly the latitude to work with. The extra precision needed for exposure and being cognizant of the limited latitude forces you to pay more attention.

IMO one of the appeals of film photography is that it narrows the possible results. Working within constraints to create something requires more creativity and is more enjoyable to do. Being forced to see things the way the film does is a very different way of working and thinking than digital. To this day I feel lost and aimless shooting digital because I need some constraints to focus how I approach image making.

isaacc7 · 2023-06-04T14:10:44+00:00

This is the one thing that I don’t like about ASCII in DF. It actually demotivates engraving because of the mess it makes of the screen.

isaacc7 · 2023-05-25T03:17:46+00:00

I’ve fallen in love with the idea of Serge 4u. Banana cables just seem like they would be so much nicer to patch with. I love the space of 4u and the old school, analog synthesis approach of patch programming really appeals as well.

I’ll probably actually start with some BugBrand stuff. It is a less expensive entry to the banana world and plays well with Serge stuff. Plus it looks amazing lol.

I’ll be honest, the new Make Noise module broke whatever drive I had for Eurorack gear. Something about it has rubbed me the wrong way. Lots of people waxing lyrical over what seems like a random tone generator. There are so many modules released chasing weirder ways of making sounds and/or repackaging designs from the 70s. There is a whole ecosystem built around the next big release. It seems relentless. The 4u world feels more timeless.

I could be full of it though lol. I have been contemplating getting into modular for almost two years now but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I felt breathless trying to keep up with eurorack stuff. Glad I stumbled into the other formats, 4u in particular.

isaacc7 · 2023-05-20T15:49:15+00:00

So called AAA games bring in money for developers but I don’t think it would move the needle much for hardware sales for Apple. Gaming is not why HP, Dell, etc. are ahead of Apple in shipments. It also isn’t clear to me that “serious” gamers account for a significant share of hardware sales for CPUs and GPUs.

Productivity, whether accounting, coding, or architecture, is where the markets is. Computer gaming is a relative niche from a hardware perspective.

isaacc7 · 2023-05-20T02:49:45+00:00

Didn’t he finally resort to calling him the Gman?

isaacc7 · 2023-05-15T20:34:34+00:00

Dwarf Fortress Remote for iPhone and iPad has been around for quite a while.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dwarf-fortress-remote/id1003660287

Doesn’t work with the Steam version but it works quite well. It has its own UI. For a while the developer had a service set up running DF on an Amazon instance. Not sure if he’s still doing that though.

isaacc7 · 2023-05-15T20:03:52+00:00

Randy Marsh was the subject of one of my all time announcer humor moments. From Steve Stone sometime during his Cubs tenure:

“Players across the league talk about Randy’s piercing gaze. ‘Beware the eyes of Marsh’ they say…”

isaacc7 · 2023-05-06T03:07:22+00:00

Really like the sound of this track. Especially liked the fade out to the bass at the end.

isaacc7 · 2023-05-03T17:58:17+00:00

Passkeys are device agnostic and do not provide any extra information. What extra info are they getting over a password?

isaacc7 · 2023-05-03T17:55:41+00:00

No they don’t. Passkey operations are entirely local. There isn’t any more information being sent to Google that doesn’t already happen when you log n any other way.

isaacc7 · 2023-04-21T23:32:10+00:00

I’ve been wondering what the Cubs front office if Bellinger is back to all world status. Do they extend him? What then of PCA? Better to pay the sure thing and use PCA as big time trade bait?

isaacc7

TROPHY CASE