8-24-22 - Moving

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I've been very busy with getting signed up for classes, work, and moving.

Getting everything boxed up, cleaning up old and new messes; it's a LOT of work. Almost done though, right now I'm actually drifting back and fourth between houses of people who are generous enough to let me stay. The place I'm staying at tonight has a killer basement, would be amazing as a kid, you could have the best sleepovers here.

After I move in fully, I plan on starting to develop my own film. Mainly E6 film. I haven't spoken about it much here, but I want to start developing film, as well as scanning it for myself as well. Why E6 slide film? Well, I want to start shooting Velvia 100, and because it's kinda banned in the US (thanks EPA), I'll have to develop it myself, as big labs won't do it anymore in order to avoid all of that red tape.

(Thank you Ken Rockwell for being cool and whatnot. Check him out if you have the time.)

Fuji was like It only has 0.0003% of that chemical you banned! and the EPA responded with a simple Get fucked lol. That won't stop me though.

Why shoot Velvia 100? Well, back in the day, there was this film called Kodachrome 64, and it was pretty epic for landscape and portrait photography. Fujifilm, Kodak's more famous competetor suddenly came out with Velvia 50 (not banned in the US btw), which had amazing saturation and sharpness, displacing Kodachrome's top spot for landscape photography (it didn't win for portraits and I'll get back to that later) and why is Velvia still around and not Kodachrome? Because Kodachrome used the expensive and difficult K-14 process, while Velvia used a standard E-6 process. So, its competetor is now dead, and Velvia 50 lives on. There's nothing else like it on the market now.

That brings us to Velvia 100 and why I want to shoot it instead of the non-banned Velvia 50. Well, why? It's not just because it's one stop more sensitive to light (that helps a lot though), but because of a crucial difference.

Velvia 50 has a famous defect as the engineers called it, where the yellow and orange ends of the spectrum slid further towards the red end, while the reds (very slighty) slid towards the yellow. This makes sunsets and landscapes look amazing, but it murders skin tones. So, I want to shoot with the awesome saturation, sharpness, and contrast of Velvia 50, but without the whole, destroying skin tones thing.

Yes, I want to shoot portraits with something that has colors reminicant of Kodachrome. And I will go through all of the trouble of developing film at home if it means I can shoot the Kodachrome killer.

Anways, I'm getting really tired, and my eyes are shutting on me, so I should try to get to bed. This is just to let you know where I'm going, what I'm doing, and why. It's a pleasure and as always...

Be cool, be wild, and be groovy!


Page last updated on: 8-28-22
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