Dear parents… It is Easter time. We had planned to go to the mountains to celebrate my mother’s birthday. The whole family would have reunited once again from France and Belgium at the Franco-Spanish border, like a seasonal migration. We would have gone on a hike, along a winding path, protected from the sun by […]
Four years ago, I drafted a post about PC-TEA, a pretty confidential developer created by Pat Gainier that I tried to reproduce from his website. Since then, I used it several times, mainly for contact sheets, and forgot about it. Lately, I have been once again researching a cheap, reliable, and more eco-friendly developer than […]
Back to reality After the other weekend, and the gratifying experience I described in the previous post of printing in a professional darkroom, I was quite done with spending hours on my knees in my bathroom. However, considering the terrible weather, I decided to still give it a try, at least for a few prints. The first […]
The great escape It has been a long time since my blog was updated. The reason? I had been living in India for six months and traveled to Nepal, Thailand and Malaysia. My camera was never too far away and the rolls of film have been piling up, waiting for me to develop them back […]
For an upcoming project — Do not worry, I will keep you informed —, I acquired a view camera for forty euros on eBay. No brand, no logo. It comes with 6 glass-plates holders. That is all the seller’s description contained. When I unpacked it, I expected to discover, under the protection paper, a stack of […]
A snowy adventure In 2015, I was explaining on this blog how I was always carrying my Minox 35 in my pocket, ready to capture the instant. In November, as the first snow was falling on the Pyrenees, I left Paris and went with my brother and a friend of mine to climb mount Valier. As […]
For over ten years, my father has been exclusively using one type of photographic developer: PMK (Pyrogallol-Metol-Kodalk). The only thing I knew about it was that it was highly toxic and volatile. Even its name sounded dangerous to me. That is probably why I unconsciently decided never to use it. And that is what I did… until now. […]
A few months ago, it was Anna Atkins’ 216th birthday. Do not pretend you know her, her name did not quite survive in notoriety all these years. She was a great scientist: at the London Botanic Society, as one of the first women ever admitted, she documented and illustrated biology research works and assembled herbariums that […]
Caffenol is an homemade film developer made out from everyday household products, and mostly regular coffee. It was invented by Dr. Williams from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Technical Photography 1995 Class had to create a “non traditional” developer as an assignment. It resulted in what would become Caffenol. That was it. Around 2000, the internet adopted the formula […]
Since 2012, I stopped printing pictures at home. Too complicated? Too time-consuming? I quite do not remember but the fact is I only developed films and scanned negatives. After all that time, I felt the need to be able to accomplish again the whole process, from the photo shoot to the final print. In 2015, one […]
